Igloo Magazine :: [2View] Drift :: Manic EP / Radius Etc :: Alive & Thriving EP (The Consumers Research and Development Label)

Consumers finds its second wind

There’s a good story behind why this review exists at all. The Consumers Research and Development Label ran through the 2000s as an imprint of Someoddpilot Records, the Chicago label-turned-agency that also handled branding for Pitchfork back when that meant something specific in the industry, and later built brand identity work for clients like Drag City, Jagjaguwar, and Secretly Canadian. Geoffrey Wilson bought Consumers in 2023 with help from Chris Eichenseer, who founded Someoddpilot in 1999 and who Wilson had shared an office with from 2003 to 2008 before the label originally shut down. Somewhere in the years between closing and reopening, a flood destroyed the entire back stock. Whatever’s floating around on Discogs or eBay now is all that survived physically, the rest is gone. The label came back properly in November 2024 with a showcase at Public Works in Wicker Park, quiet after that, and this is its real reintroduction to a wider audience, two EPs, two very different sounds, one label figuring out what it wants to be the second time around.

Drift’s Manic comes first and it’s a strange kind of debut for someone who’s clearly not new to any of this. Sean Krainik has run Parotic Records, the Midwest techno label, for over two decades, putting out records from DJ Slip, Johannes Heil, Matt Paffel, Dave Olson, and Mr. Projectile among others. He never released his own music on vinyl until now. Manic pulls from more than twenty years of writing tracks in the background while other people’s records took priority, and that accumulated time shows in how confidently unshowy this record is. This leans techno and IDM more than anything experimental, dancefloor-facing and beat-heavy across the whole tracklist. The title track builds itself up layer by layer into a pulsating beat while TV dialogue keeps pulling focus sideways, a small disruption that never fully resolves. Nothing here is trying to be difficult, and nothing here needed to be.

“R$W” and “Osmosis” are the two that stick hardest. Different rhythms, same underlying intent—Krainik chasing something gritty and repetitive at once, loops that don’t evolve so much as they insist on themselves. Baby Ford‘s influence is audible in how minimal and slightly off-center the drum programming stays, that same stripped tension where less becomes the entire point rather than a limitation working against the track. “Murderer’s Row” leans into that same lineage even more directly, carrying an unintended tribute to Throbbing Gristle in its haze and darkness, deliberately murky where the rest of the EP stays brighter. It’s dance music built by someone who spent twenty years listening to other people make dance music, which sounds like it should produce something derivative and instead produces something oddly assured. He knows exactly which two or three elements a track actually needs and refuses to add a fourth just because he can.

Two EPs, two very different sounds ::

Radius Etc‘s Alive & Thriving sits nowhere near that world. This is instrumental hip-hop pushed somewhere stranger, call it hip-hop IDM for lack of a cleaner label, though the term undersells how much dub techno and straight experimental electronic music bleeds into the beats underneath. Norwood recorded this across a blur of hostels, planes, and temporary housing between 2021 and 2025, and the press notes frame it explicitly as documentation of moving from housing instability and food scarcity into something closer to self-actualization. A travel document, in his own words, proof of surviving into thriving. That context sits underneath the music without ever being spelled out inside the tracks themselves, which is the right call. The record doesn’t lecture you about where it came from. It just carries the weight of it.

“Goldenlocks” is the standout, and it’s also the most straightforwardly hip-hop beat on the record, except the tempo keeps breaking and the snares reverse and catch themselves mid-hit like the whole beat is tripping over its own feet on purpose. There’s a video for it, one of three the label produced for this release. Little vocal samples surface throughout, adding texture without ever becoming a hook. “Stuttering Spaces (PoplockJam)” goes fully electro, upbeat in a way nothing else on the record quite matches, the most purely fun three minutes here. “One 4 Larry Heard Pt. 1” is the only track running a straight 4/4 kick and it’s catchy specifically because it doesn’t try to be clever about it, same DNA as everything surrounding it just aimed squarely at a dancefloor instead of a headspace. The “Pt. 1” leaves you wondering if there’s a Pt. 2 coming or if the numbering is its own quiet joke about unfinished business. “Go Inside/Outside” is the most abstract piece on the record, a loop cycling endlessly through filters and phasers and pitch shifts like a revolving door that never fully closes, always mid-swing.

The Consumers Research and Development Label is clearly not trying to be one thing, and that’s the most encouraging part of this reintroduction. A techno veteran finally putting out his own record after twenty years of platforming everyone else, sitting right next to a hip-hop travelogue built out of literal years of instability and constant movement, that’s a genuinely odd pairing on paper, and it works precisely because neither release is compromising to fit next to the other. They just happen to share a home. If these two EPs are the tone-setters for what Consumers wants to be in its second life, the label picked back up somewhere considerably more interesting than where it left off two decades ago.

Drift‘s Manic and Radius Etc‘s Alive & Thriving are both available on The Consumers Research and Development Label.