xin’s WASTED lands on Appendix.files with nine pieces that drag the club through a compost heap of trash(ed) recordings, corroded basslines and scraps of rave memory, forming a porous archive of dance music’s residues – transfigured. Composed of field recordings of waste, the album doesn’t recycle so much as ferment, mulching the detritus of dance culture into something gurgling, volatile, and eerily alive.

Alongside the music WASTED expands into print and website: a zine and wasted.reluctant.promo hold xin’s texts ‘hospicing dance music’ and ‘unsustainability’, extending the artists reflections on exhaustion, precarity and the cultural afterlife.

There’s a sonic depth and mood here that sits somewhere between Raime’s shadowed tension, Carrier’s electro-acoustic sleight and the spacious dub mutations of T++, while its textural apparitions feel as though they’ve been dubbed over a battered Jon Hassell cassette — the otherworldly nostalgia burned away, replaced with a hard-won momentum, like flooring it toward the next gas station before Immortan Joe’s war party closes in. WASTED reads as dance music after the fire: glamour gone, structures wrecked, a stubborn pulse still smouldering underneath.

opening drifts in on fizzing debris and low-end churn, like a bin bag caught on a breeze. trash dub assembles a crooked percussion grid; compost believes in life after death hovers between hymn and hiss before plunging into the jagged kicks of wasted anew. Mid-record, enough to exhaust and indoors in halftime stretch the remnants thin, teasing collapse. The last sweep — plastic legacy, no permanence, for now and apocalypse era (i dreamt i glimpsed eternity) — folds exhaustion and faint euphoria into a single long exhale.

Music written & produced by xin
Hospicing & Unsustainability written by xin
Lines edited by Geoff Mak
Design by Amos Turner
Mastered by Ike Zwanikken

Thanks to: queer-feminist teachers; Amos, Geoff &
Ike for helping realise WASTED; Angus for the
violin; Nono for early feedback; Fran & Jay for the
introduction to Hospicing; friends for laughing and
dancing; Aya for ears, support, laughter and very
much more.