Batu / Donato Dozzy: Exhale

In 2019, a typhoon grounded the lineup of Japan’s Labyrinth Festival in their hotel rooms for four hours. Among those stranded were Omar McCutcheon — Batu, the Bristol producer who had been steadily reshaping UK club music since the dubstep era gave way to something harder to name — and Donato Dozzy, the Roman minimal techno shaman whose influence on underground electronic music runs decades deep. They spent most of those four hours talking. The conversation, eventually, became a record.

Exhale is the product of a Roman studio session in early 2025, Batu arriving at Dozzy’s equipment-dense workspace and encountering a setup the older producer knows by feel and instinct. The visitor’s unfamiliarity proved useful — a fresh pair of hands on familiar machines has a way of shaking loose habits that have calcified over years. What emerged is described by Dozzy as “ping-pong production,” each man trading the controls back and forth, the album developing as a dialogue rather than a preset plan.

The generational and stylistic gap between the two is audible throughout, and that’s precisely the point. Dozzy’s genius has always been in texture and atmosphere — psychedelic, patient techno that owes as much to minimalist composition as it does to the dancefloor. Batu brings drums: percussive, sinewy, post-soundsystem rhythms rooted in a Bristol tradition that runs back through trip-hop and dubstep to soundsystem culture. On paper, it should be a collision. In practice, the record moves like a single organism learning to breathe.

Opener “Emergence” announces the tension immediately — eerie sustained tones pulling toward dark ambient on one side, a predatory bass sequence bristling on the other. “Spiral” builds a thudding acid groove from what sounds like pure Dozzy, before hand percussion rises and a dancehall cadence tilts the whole thing sideways toward the Bristol end of the spectrum. The title track is the album’s most concentrated eight and a half minutes — a relentless syncopated bludgeon that strips away everything decorative, the bass decay almost the full length of each bar, everything around it functioning as shrapnel.

The beatless bookends, “Emergence” and closer “Bloom,” frame the record as something more contemplative than its bruising midsection suggests. “Bloom” is luminous, patient and genuinely beautiful — two artists who’ve spent forty-seven minutes proving they can meet in adversity, finally choosing to walk out together. Dozzy has said the album’s title fits his life during this period in ways he hasn’t fully elaborated. You can hear that weight in the record, and the relief of setting it down.