Listen

Anfisa Letyago is one of those producers whose records you’ve almost certainly heard even if the name hasn’t quite registered yet — a constant presence in the sets of Carl Cox, Adam Beyer and Charlotte de Witte, who have all championed her work over the past couple of years. With Listen, the Naples-born, Berlin-based producer launches N:S:DA, her own label, in the most underground way imaginable: a numbered vinyl pressing of just 25 copies, snapped up within hours of going on sale. It’s a classic label-launch story, and the record backing it up is precisely why the sell-out made sense.

Title track Listen is the mission statement — a single looped vocal fragment, chopped and treated until it reads as texture rather than voice, floating over a rolling four-to-the-floor kick and a bassline that never once overplays its hand. Everything is precision-placed, and the effect is properly hypnotic: six and a half minutes that pass in a blink. Orizzonte stretches the same idea towards the horizon its name suggests, the vocals dissolving into long delay tails as a stabbing synth line pushes things into more urgent territory. Deep Water lives up to its name, submerging the groove beneath layers of reverb until bass and drums do the talking, and closer Gravity lands with genuine weight — a heavy, head-down finale that resolves into one last bloom of pads before the silence.

The EP arrives with real underground momentum. Those 25 numbered copies disappearing in a matter of hours is the kind of story that travels — no billboards, no streaming playlists, just word of mouth moving from DJ booth to DJ booth ahead of the record’s wider digital release. After years of quietly supplying the scene’s biggest selectors, it’s the sound of Letyago finally taking control of her own trajectory.

As launch releases go, Listen is a confident statement of intent. It’s minimal techno in the truest sense — precise, hypnotic and completely without filler — and the four tracks hang together as one continuous, after-hours arc built for heads-down dancing. If this is the standard N:S:DA has set for itself, it’s a label well worth watching closely through 2021.

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