Who better to unleash the first full-length from UK drum anarchist Ship Sket than the country’s most consistently feral electronic imprint, Planet Mu? Founded in 1995 by Mike Paradinas (aka μ-Ziq), the label has spent three decades championing chaos with purpose: giving Aphex Twin’s manic mirror a home, binding Luke Vibert’s acid-spattered sermon notes, and setting Venetian Snares loose on breakbeats like a symphony in meltdown. Planet Mu’s catalog reads like a chronicle of the UK’s most inspired noise pollution—music that’s always one decibel away from combustion.
Earlier this year, the label marked its 30th anniversary with a sprawling compilation—a time capsule that nodded to jungle, footwork, house, and IDM. But for all its reverence, much of it felt embalmed by nostalgia, its veterans recycling the ghosts of old ideas. Then came track eight: “Dysentery,” a shock of voltage from 26-year-old Dorset-born DJ and producer Josh Griffiths, better known as Ship Sket. His contribution didn’t just stand out—it ruptured the flow. A maelstrom of serialist cello, pagan glossolalia, crushed 808s, and grime MC fragments, it sounded less like a club track and more like the death throes of a dying planet broadcast in 7.1 surround.
That instinct—to detonate genre from within—thrums through InitiatriX, his debut album and Planet Mu’s most vital statement in years. Griffiths doesn’t just flirt with experimentalism; he ravages it, rebuilding dancefloor language from broken syntax. Opener “Frost Cake” barrels forward like a video game engine overheating, all pixelated percussion and splintered distortion. The title track welds gamelan rhythms to a text-to-speech monologue, pulling you into its warped mechanical trance. On “Casting Call,” with the enigmatic S280F, he finds something eerie and luminous between Mica Levi’s haunted minimalism and Morton Feldman’s sense of negative space. Every track threatens collapse yet never loses its pulse—his sense of tension feels instinctive, as if he’s DJing for the void.
This is music that remembers the body even as it dissolves the mind. Ship Sket’s world isn’t built for Overmono-style euphoria or chart-ready hooks. It’s more Drukqs than dancefloor—structured chaos that rewards surrender. The album recalls a lost era when British electronic music dared to be feral, philosophical, and fun at once, before the industry filed its rough edges away into Spotify playlists. Griffiths makes you feel the old voltage again, the thrill of risk in rhythm.
Raised in Dorset and now based in Manchester, Griffiths threads his regional ghosts through his circuitry. Like his 2024 EP England as a Succubus, InitiatriX interrogates the idea of Englishness—the way it corrodes and mutates across generations. Even his noisiest moments hum with cultural residue: the decayed grime synths of “Locked In”, the militarized hardstyle of “Supermodel Mansion”, or the ritual chants of Charlie Osborne on “Vendetta,” which sound like an unearthed language from some forgotten Albion.
In a time when jungle and house are being polished into pop product, InitiatriX feels like a reclamation. It digs through the soil of UK dance history and finds bones—remnants of rebellion, of DIY futurism, of working-class transcendence. Griffiths doesn’t mourn that history; he electrifies it. Listening to InitiatriX is like watching an old rave flyer ignite in ultraviolet light—the outlines of the past reappearing, bright and furious, refusing to fade.
About the Author
