When Donato Scaramuzzi and Omar McCutcheon stepped into the DJ booth together at the Netherlands’ Draaimolen festival in 2023, their back-to-back set represented a meeting of two different generations, and two distinct sensibilities. Rome’s Scaramuzzi, better known as Donato Dozzy, made his name in the early 2000s, when he began developing a psychedelic strain of techno that owed as much to the minimalism of Terry Riley as to Robert Hood or Plastikman, and since then he has continued—particularly in the duo Voices From the Lake—to push into the deepest recesses of techno’s collective unconscious. McCutcheon came up a decade later, as the UK’s dubstep scene was giving way to an anything-goes landscape of broken rhythms and punishing bass weight. Recording as Batu, he has forged a stern, pummeling style out of bruising percussive volleys and brittle syncopations. Dozzy glide while Batu jabs. One’s a trepanning drill, the other a hammer.
But at Draaimolen, their energy proved so complementary that it spurred them into the studio together. Batu visited Dozzy’s studio in early 2025 and the pair got to work on the Roman producer’s battery of machines—a setup Dozzy knows inside and out, but which Batu was discovering for the first time. The visitor’s fresh perspective shook up the studio owner’s old habits. The resulting album, Exhale, sounds like a musical conversation, an attempt to find the overlap in their interests—and also, perhaps, to make sparks fly where their instincts clash.
Opener “Emergence” neatly encapsulates the duality at the heart of the record: It begins with eerie streaks of tone that would be equally at home in dark ambient or dystopian drum’n’bass. Atop this unexpected patch of common ground, shared by two very different traditions, they seem almost to be tugging in opposite directions. Dozzy’s fingerprints are legible on the track’s glassy, flickering repetitions; you sense Batu’s hand shaping the shark-like bass sequence threatening to bite at any moment. The result is a tension stretched nearly to the snapping point, then resolved in an uneasy detente.
The artists’ respective styles are just as unambiguous on “Spiral,” a highlight. The plodding kicks and gnarled acid bassline are classic Dozzy, and for a while it sounds like his handiwork alone. Gradually, though, dubby hand percussion rises up from the deep, and soon a truculent, alien-sounding riff and loping dancehall cadence spin the compass point back toward Batu’s Bristol. But elsewhere, their signatures dissolve into one another. “Off Axis,” “Swarm,” and “Flicker” are all relentless in their forward drive, syncopated percussion and spirals of dub delay wrapped like ribbons around punishing four-on-the-floor pulses. If there’s one thing they can agree on, it’s that techno’s most invigorating when it’s a little bit evil.
The artists’ compatibility particularly reveals itself in how naturally these tracks develop. “Exhale,” a kind of techno/dubstep/drum’n’bass hybrid, is the album’s most intense track; it barrels ahead at 160 beats per minute, proudly abstaining from anything as garish as a melody or even a recognizable motif; most of its emphasis is placed on a bruise-colored bass tone, essentially an 808 kick whose decay lasts almost the length of the full bar. Around it, everything is shrapnel. After three and a half minutes, the beat falls away, and it seems like everything is winding down—until, with no warning, the drums come surging back, and the groove gets its second wind.
They do something similar on closer “Bloom,” a beatific terraform dome reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, building to a false ending and then returning for a final blissful encore. This time, their rhythms aren’t so coiled; instead of knotty one-bar loops, they draw out the bass melody over a four-bar span, so that everything breathes. It’s a gorgeous track, a standout of their respective catalogs, and a sign of the depth of their connection: Having proven their mettle going head to head, they lead us out arm in arm.
