Distorise and the Power Banks Behind the Drum and Bass on Flow of Time
A Lviv Producer Finished His Drum and Bass and Jungle Hybrid Through Ukraine’s Blackout Winter
Distorise finished Flow of Time on battery power. In the winter of 2023, Ukraine’s power grid was under attack. So the Lviv producer ran his synth and his PC from power banks. That is how he completed a drum and bass track he had been reworking for years.
Distorise has Flow of Time in the playlist below, filed with this desk’s drum and bass and jungle selections, and the producer’s artist profile gathers the rest of the coverage. The single came to ElectronicMusic.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Give it a spin on a proper system, then read on.
The Drum and Bass Revival That Flow of Time Plugs Into
That detail sits inside a bigger story for the genre. Drum and bass has been growing again. In December 2024, Spotify reported that streams of the genre had risen by 94 per cent in three years. The revival leans on older architecture. Think of jungle’s chopped breaks, the engineered bass pressure of neurofunk and long arrangements that give a DJ room to mix.
Flow of Time draws on all three. It came out on 31 March 2023 as his first single of that year, according to Senocular Media. It also started a plan to release, one at a time, songs he had built over more than a decade. The run has kept going since, from Source four weeks later to System Insecurity, Tactical Upgrades and Sky On Fire.
Where Distorise Fits, From Lviv Blackouts to a Drum and Bass and Jungle Hybrid
Distorise started making drum and bass in 2009, he told Extravafrench. His first attempts came at school on eJay Dance 6. At university he moved to Fruity Loops after hearing Counterstrike, the Cape Town duo. A debut EP, Legend, followed in 2012. After that he took a regular job and kept writing without showing the songs to anyone.
Daft Punk was the first electronic music he remembers hearing, unless the sound of NES games counts. In the same interview he admitted that he does not count his synthesisers, only their weight in kilos. According to Sistra, he has not stopped making music in ten years, war included.
His method is built on sound design. Sistra described synth sounds made from scratch for each track, while other reviewers noted real recordings mixed with synthesis. He also runs a separate live project, Alan Distorise, played on a single analogue synth with no software at all. Space Sour filed him under drum and bass and neurofunk.
Flow of Time runs just over five minutes. KIMU heard a cerebral opening frequency, industrial percussion and a dimensional bassline. It also caught the energy of a drum and bass and jungle hybrid. Senocular Media picked out laser-like pulsing synths, punishing bass and punchy drums, building from jagged synths and ethereal choirs.
The structure is where the track earns its length. Midway through, the programming drops out and strings take over the frame, according to Artisti Online. The same review heard violins played in reverse as a figure for time itself. Then the beat returns, harder than before. KIMU also singled out breath ad-libs, high synth lines and a meditative finale.
Adjacent Acts for Distorise, From Noisia to Black Sun Empire and Current Value
He describes his music as a dark future of low living standards and high technology, war, endless rain and mud. Even so, he always leaves room for melody, and those melodies arrive distorted. Cyberpunk writer William Gibson shaped that outlook when he was younger. Now, he says, he only has to look out of the window.
Distorise names Current Value, Break, Noisia, Spor, Silent Witness and Black Sun Empire among his influences. Three of them map the lane Flow of Time sits in. Noisia, the Groningen trio of Nik Roos, Martijn van Sonderen and Thijs de Vlieger, is the obvious reference. They took heavily engineered drum and bass onto labels including Owsla and mau5trap. Black Sun Empire formed in Utrecht in 1997 and came to be called the kings of all things neuro. They also ran their own labels, including Blackout Music NL.
Current Value, the German drum and bass producer Tim Eliot, trained at the School of Audio Engineering. That background suits a track where sound design carries as much weight as the drums. The listener this suits likes drum and bass engineered rather than euphoric. They will not mind a track that stops halfway to let the strings speak.
Flow of Time was well covered on release. KIMU, Sinusoidal Music, Senocular Media, Artisti Online, Sistra and Indieoclock all wrote about it in April and May 2023. KIMU added it to its New Music Spotlight playlist, and Senocular Media placed it on its Gaming Beats list. Extravafrench added a review of its own to the interview.
Stream Flow of Time and Follow the Lviv Producer Across Platforms
ElectronicMusic.News’s curator team:
“We like how Flow of Time handles its reset at the midpoint. We like even more that its follow-up, Source, landed four weeks later. That is a producer releasing a decade of work at club pace.”
Flow of Time plays in the Spotify player at the top of this page. The single is also on Apple Music and Deezer. Follow Distorise on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. His official site and Linktree carry the rest of the catalogue.
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