Truancy Volume 356: Mr Assister

London-based artist Mr Assister has been a steady force in the city’s underground for the past decade. Whereas he’s known to some as the drummer in James Blake’s touring live band, his own output as a DJ and producer has seen him carve out a lane on the deeper, more hypnotic edges of prog, tech house, and minimal psy. Since founding his label BEAM in 2016, what began as a home for his own productions has evolved into a small but trusted platform for his wider scene of extended friends, releasing music from Al Dente, Peter Rocket, and Rudefood, and most recently, an eleven-artist compilation that captures the current wave of modern prog-tech haus and off-kilter groove with a finely tuned sense of curation. In terms of his own productions, he took some time away in 2017 to focus on his studies, but has since returned with a renewed sense of production purpose, releasing his Communing EP earlier this year with a four-tracker that moved between rolling grooves, tripped-out textures, and introspective atmospheres. He’s also recently finished a new EP that will be the 9th release on BEAM under a possibly one-off new alias.

For his Truancy Volume, he keeps that same sense of flow and restraint