Public Records’ 2024 Durations festival kicks off with a Peak Oil showcase in The Sound Room, featuring label co-founder Leech, dub-bient producer Strategy, bass-slinger Low End Activist, and local ambient boy band Purelink.

Co-founder of LA-based Peak Oil and manager of Chicago label Kranky, Leech [aka Brian Foote] has kept a profile as understated as his music. His 2019 release, Data Horde, is both a dissection and carefully-reassembled conglomerate of drum ‘n’ bass, glitch, IDM, jungle, and free jazz. What could be confused and overwhelmed is eerily spacious and exact.

Paul Dickow [Strategy], co-founder of the Community Library label, is based in Portland, Oregon. Dickow’s self-aware eye for the nontraditional is evident through his sound, which is near impossible to pin down, though could be considered digi-dub, with heavy reverb, golden hour ambiance, and smoked out space. Such an uncategorizable sound may have at first stood the way of record deals, but perhaps producing a large library of tracks that could only be Strategy was his strategy all along.

If unvarnished emotion and uncompromising ferocity were once opposite sides of a spectrum, Oxford-born and Berlin-based Low End Activist has forced them together and sprung outward a high-intensity, stirring sound defined by moody bass, tense ecstasy, and sweat-drenched basement anthems. Not falling far from its tree, his label Sneaker Social Club is a self-described “modernist hardcore” mix of smoggy UK bass and jungle, with releases from Appleblim, Mantra, Tim Reaper, Basic Rhythm, and more.

Purelink is the Chicago-born, NY-based project of Ben Paulson [kindtree], Tommy Paslaski [Concave Reflection] and Akeem Asani [Millia] which explores “the bioluminescent depths of downtempo, ambient and dub techno,” per DJ Mag. Their tempermental tracks are just as blissed out as they are introverted, with fuzzy, floating releases on leftfield labels naff recordings and UwU dust bath.