Adventures in machine music built to make subs rattle and feet wiggle; a convoluted mess of elektrology and teknology, 3-step, bass-core, post windmill, proto-minimal wankstep, gondola, shithouse, acid wonk, ambient gabber, no more, no less.

Leisure Muffin’s modern take on kosmische music is not easy to pin down. Influences and reference points are extraordinarily wide-ranged, but include early Warp (Seefeel, Autechre, and Aphex), Drexciya, Skinny Puppy, Meat Beat Manifesto, Coil, and Perrey and Kingsley. He was also deeply influenced by the sound of The Bunker (and other) dancefloors. A former audio engineering educator, Hopkins has a mastery of both Ableton Live and modular synthesizers. After drooling over, and even borrowing some key pieces of gear from Sarah Lawrence College and Charles Cohen’s studio over the years, the recent advent of more affordable modular equipment meant that he finally has a dream setup of his own.

“The fact that modular synths have become affordable now has really helped,” he says. “I always wanted to be writing using that stuff and after waiting for a really long time, I finally have the kind of setup I always dreamed of.”

It makes sense that someone with Leisure Muffin’s broad tastes makes music that is hard to classify. When most people tell you that they love all forms of music, further examination of their claim usually leads to disappointment. This isn't the case for Leisure Muffin. If you join him for tea, you could end up listening to an accordion record as easily as you might hear electronic music. He spent most of his life working in some of the best and worst record stores in the USA, for the pure joy of being able to hear new sounds every day (before the internet put all music at everyone’s fingertips). If you talk to him you might hear about the pleasures of attending the symphony after eating a pot brownie or how you should listen to African Juju records from the 1930s. .

"I don't know what to call it--I really just make the kind of stuff that I want to hear,” he says. “And honestly, if I didn't love dancing and playing at dance parties so much, I'd probably just be locked in a room somewhere torturing synthesizers or playing boring whale sound guitar solos for hours. Actually, I suppose I do a fair amount of that anyway. Maybe that's why it's taken me almost 20 years to actually release something that anybody is interested in putting out."

In the mid-90's, he was playing shows in clubs in the Lower East Side (Den of Thieves, Unity Gain, Tonic) when he was too young to drink. He pulled off a lot of great sets over the following years and built a reputation as a live electronic performer during an era when that was far less common. Live recordings of both his solo sets and his duos with Charles Cohen made the rounds among good friends (including The Bunker New York bossman Bryan Kasenic), but finishing a studio record had, until now, eluded him.

With the encouragement of Kasenic and The Bunker New York family, Leisure Muffin finally managed to finish an EP in the studio, and we couldn’t be happier with the results.

The composer and sculptor Aaron Taylor Kuffner is well known for co-creating the Gamelatron project in 2008, the world’s first fully robotic gamelan orchestra. His one-of-a-kind creation has been shown in major venues and festivals worldwide, ranging from the Smithsonian to Fuji Rock, and at galleries and festivals across Asia, Europe, Russia and North America.

Zemi17 is an musical project created by Kuffner in 1997. Zemi in Japanese means cicada. The 17 references the 17-year lifecycle of the periodical cicadas found in the northeast of the United States. The success of the Gamelatron Project put Zemi 17 on indefinite hiatus until The Bunker dug out one of Kuffer’s last surround sound live sets from Unsound New York in 2012 and asked him for a 12” of that material.

The Bunker is proud to release “Impressions” and “Rangda,” two long and seductive tracks made entirely of sounds of insects, birds, motors and urban noises spliced together with treated samples of gongs and metallophones to create lush techno compositions. It is hard to tell if this release is going to be a new beginning for Zemi17 or an homage to a wildly interesting music character who has been a part of The Bunker community from its early days at subTonic. Either way, these tracks are as beautiful as they are original.

Kuffner has been a a prolific producer of underground and outlaw events in New York since the 90's: as a cofounder of the Ransom Corp, a member of the Blackkat Sound System, Havoc Soundsystem, and Amoeba Technology, he also frequently worked with Complacent Nation. In 2002, he moved to Berlin to produce a multimedia art festival and compose for an experimental theater group, before moving even further afield to Indonesia and immersing himself in the study of gamelan.

Kuffner returned to New York in 2007, joining influential outlaw event crew The Danger as a resident DJ. He began producing music made entirely of samples he had gathered in Indonesia, re-imagined into hypnotic techno masterpieces. Alongside Dok Gregory, he amassed a large sound system that they set up in the front room of The Bunker at Public Assembly for years. Taylor also collaborated with Kevin Balktick to produce the ambient music series “Auditorium,” taught Ableton Live at DubSpot and performed on MIDI breath controllers with the trio Zero Gravity Thinkers.

Bryan Kasenic (pka Spinoza) is known in the electronic music world for throwing The Bunker, playing adventurous DJ sets, and starting Beyond, his own booking agency. The past few years have seen Bryan take his infamous Brooklyn-based party, The Bunker, to Panorama Bar in Berlin, Corsica Studios in London, Unsound Festival in Krakow, Communikey Festival in Boulder, Decibel Festival in Seattle, Smartbar in Chicago, GAFFTA in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and of course Detroit. In January 2014, The Bunker celebrated it's 11th Anniversary and launched a record label.