The new project ex_libris quietly marks the return of a club music innovator: Dave Huismans, the Dutch artist also known as 2562 and A Made Up Sound. These two untitled EPs, released simultaneously, are his first new music in nearly a decade (save a 2023 ambient remix), after he quietly shuttered A Made Up Sound’s eponymous label in 2016. Huismans’ reasons for ending the project seem almost guilelessly simple: He had always seen it as a finite series and felt it had run its course.
A Made Up Sound’s eight-year run was a highlight of what we now look back on as the post-dubstep era—a time when dubstep artists outgrew the genre’s classic conventions and, when they didn’t lazily revert to house and disco (looking at you, Skream), dreamed up weird and wonderful new mutations of the sound. Huismans, a Dutch outsider to this UK-centric scene, made much of its best music, reliably supplying cutting-edge DJs with records that were twisted, otherworldly, and utterly party-rocking. “I’ve no idea how Dave does it,” Ben UFO said when A Made Up Sound wrapped up in 2016. “It’s experimental music that people have to move to.”
A Made Up Sound’s final 12″ was 2016’s Bygones / Peace Offering, a record that at the time Huismans said sounded “like what I wanted to make [in the beginning] but wasn’t yet entirely able to.” Listening to that EP now, it’s tempting to say that, with ex_libris, Huismans has picked up right where he left off. But in fact these new records show a far more skilled artist at work, venturing further than ever into the murky outskirts of club music. “Bygones” and “Peace Offering” are moody and atmospheric techno, luring the listener through a space as vivid as it is ethereal. The ex_libris project does something similar, but its soundworlds are vastly more elaborate and richly imagined. Stylistically, they are too unconventional to be called techno or anything else (though even more imperfect, the first word that sprang to mind for me was “illbient,” the short-lived genre tag applied to ambient hip-hop artists like DJ Spooky). That Ben UFO quote holds truer than ever: This is experimental music with an unusually physical charge.
Huismans has always been good at making electronic music feel loose—an almost quixotic task when you’re making music on software. That remains a defining feature of his music now, but in a new way. Most of Huismans’ old music had the sound of a machine on the brink of collapse, but in a funky way (see “Take The Plunge,” probably his biggest club hit). Where those tracks were clangy and glitched out, these are organic, earthy, and fluid, each one conjuring up a teeming ecosystem of flora and fauna, shot through with a damp thud of a kick drum.
