Since 2017, Brighton based label Hive Mind has released a diverse selection of sounds from the global underground. Founded and singlehandedly curated by Marc Teare, it presents music and sound art from around the world, offering up surprising discoveries that, at first glance, have little in common save for a wayward insistence on avoiding the obvious. The label’s website explains its mission with succinct accuracy: “Reflecting a deep antipathy towards both national lines and traditional ideas of musical genres, our releases don’t fit neatly into existing categories and are here to celebrate the timeless human drive towards creativity.”

Maalem Mahmoud Gania
“Sadati Houma El Bouhala”
From Colours Of The Night (2017)

The album that started it all off. Teare has been visiting Morocco since 2003, developing a deep love and understanding of various strains of North African trance folk music. Colours Of The Night presented the last recordings made by the late Maalem – an honorific simply meaning ‘Master’ – Mahmoud Gania, one of Morocco’s most revered players of Gnawa. Sticking close to the source of this ancient musical and spiritual tradition, the urgent chattering of iron qraqab castanets drives forward Gania’s hypnotic guembri vamps and languid vocal lines answered by a call and response choir. This music could be centuries old.

Idjah Hadidjah & Jugala Jaipongan
“Hiji Catecan”
From Jaipongan Music Of West Java (2020)

Jaipongan music was invented by Indonesian composer and choreographer Gugum Gumbira in the early 1970s in response to the government’s 1961 ban on rock and roll and call for a revival of indigenous arts. Jaipongan melded elements of the ketuk-tilu tradition – complex hand drum patterns and plaintive melodies played on the bowed rebab – with the melodious chimes of gamelan. Recorded in the famed Jugala studios in Bandung, West Java in 2007, this album features bewitching and timeless vocals by Idjah Hadijah, one of the original voices to define the genre.

Yara Asmar
“sleeping in church – tape 1 – on a warm day I turned to tell you something but there was nothing there”
From Home Recordings 2018-2021 (2022)

Yara Asmar’s first of three albums for Hive Mind invited the listener into the strange and beguiling inner world of the 25 year old Beirut based multi-instrumentalist, video artist and puppeteer. Recorded at home using cassettes and a mobile phone, Asmar’s dream-like missives are performed on piano, metallophone, synth, a Hohner Marchesa accordion discovered in her grandmother’s attic and various music boxes and toy pianos. They’re mixed with field recordings of hymns sung in churches around Lebanon, reassembled into waltzes. It’s a disarmingly melancholy and poignant universe in which to immerse oneself.

Herandu
“Ocher Red”
From Ocher Red (2024)

Every now and then Hive Mind unleashes an album almost designed to encourage puzzlement. Ocher Red, the debut from Herandu, is just such a release. Herandu is the duo of Evgeny and Mikhail Gavrilov from Novosibirsk, Siberia. They’ve played together and separately since childhood, but this 2022 session recorded in St Petersburg birthed a new sound, brewing up lush textures using keyboards, guitars, basses, flutes – plus pal Vladimir Luchansky on sax – all underpinned by satisfyingly propulsive funk and jungle rhythms. Teare’s blurb says “Metalheadz meets Weather Report out on the Siberian steppes”, and he’s not wrong.

Wolfgang Perez
“Tristeza”
From Só Ouço (2025)

In 2022, German-Spanish singer/guitarist Wolfgang Perez began a creative residency in Rio de Janeiro. What began as a university exchange to study composition turned into a deep 18 month immersion in the city’s vibrant pulsations. Só Ouço is the result of that experience, an album that brilliantly taps into the subversive spirit of classic 1970s Música Popular Brasileira by the likes of Tom Zé and Gilberto Gil, but with a contemporary experimental edge that stops it from falling into mere pastiche. “Tristeza”, recorded with a 12-piece Brazilian ensemble including sumptuous brass and woodwinds, is a woozy delight.

F. Ampism
“Lunar Mansions”
From The Vertical Luminous (2025)

F. Ampism is the mysterious nom de guerre of Brighton based sonic and visual artist Paul Wilson. He’s played with gonzo free jazz/noise outfit Bolide (which, full disclosure, I’ve played in too) and has forged strong links with like-minded Finnish experimentalists Jan Anderzén and Jani Hirvonen. His latest solo release, The Vertical Luminous, consolidates his meticulous approach to electroacoustic collage, folding in synth experiments, fleeting flutes and whistles, found sounds and other less identifiable ingredients. The results are gloriously psychedelic, with tracks like “Lunar Mansions” sounding like a lava lamp gradually overheating and achieving sentience in the process.

Carol Maia & Jeremy Gustin
“it’s nice to see a lake in your eyes”
From it’s nice to see a lake in your eyes (2026)

Another suis generis headscratcher to find a natural home at Hive Mind is the intercontinental file-swapping collaboration between Brooklyn based percussionist Jeremy Gustin and Rio-based singer Carol Maia. With help from key players in their respective hometown scenes, they’ve crafted a suite of gently luminous experimental pop songs that sound like they’ve been beamed in from a distant planet where the local musicians were trying to emulate earth music but came up with their own wonkily off-kilter version instead. Tantalising in its just out of reach near-familiarity, it suggests a welcoming alternate reality.