Hallucinator’s ‘Landlocked’ Is Finally Pressed to Vinyl

Chain Reaction’s catalogue is full of records that breathe through negative space, but Landlocked was always the one that crowded the room. Originally released in 1999 and only available on CD, the debut by Hallucinator — Anna Piva, Edward George, and Trevor Mathison — ran against the grain of the label’s weightless dub techno. It’s dense, restless, and charged with a texture that’s harder to place. Numbers is now pressing it to double vinyl for the first time, remastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk.

The album’s twelve tracks pull from the Chain Reaction vocabulary while sounding like nobody else on the roster. “Black Angel” builds from weaving rhythmic layers into a steady, accumulating pressure. “Red Angel” keeps the structure uneasy with melodic pauses that break against the beat. Where the record leans deepest into dubwise bass — “Sethos,” “Moonshot” — it still refuses to settle. The back half shifts into abstraction with “Wipeout I” and “Recall” before “Rocket” closes on a raw bassline against lush, unresolved soundscapes.

Dedicated to the memory of Stephen Lawrence, Landlocked carries its context without stating it outright. The music does the work, feeling affirming or unsettling depending on what you bring to it. That unresolved quality has kept the record in quiet circulation for two decades — a word-of-mouth title that never quite fit the CD era’s constraints. The edition itself is understated: debossed cover, matt black on black, clear archive bag, download card. It lands September 18, and it’s long overdue.