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Ta-Ku VibeZ

A producer from Perth, Western Australia, who assembles records the way a director casts a film. Twenty-two tracks and roughly forty collaborators.

Ta-ku and the art of the guest list

Regan Mathews, who records as Ta-ku, is a Filipino-Australian producer from Perth — about as far from any music industry centre as it is possible to be. He built an audience through SoundCloud and Bandcamp in the early 2010s with beat tapes and a widely-shared tribute project to J Dilla, and has since become a genuine connector: a producer whose records function as introductions between artists who would otherwise never have met.

His own aesthetic is unmistakable — soft-edged, heavily textured, built on filtered samples and live-feeling drums, with a melancholy that never tips into gloom. He is also a designer and entrepreneur, and the visual identity around his projects is as considered as the music.

What to listen for

Read the credits, because they are the point. "WAY OUT" features ?uestlove of The Roots alongside Australian artists Milan Ring and matt mcwaters — a genuinely improbable combination that works.

"SMILE" brings together Xavier Omär, DAISY WORLD and ROMderful, and "CALL MY NAME" with JMSN is the smoothest thing on the list. "THE END" with rum.gold, Thrupence and Will Paquin is the most cinematic.

The Australian contingent deserves attention on its own terms: Milan Ring, Becca Hatch, RINI, Touch Sensitive and Thrupence are all worth following, and Ta-ku's platform has done a great deal to get them heard beyond Australia.

"TAKE ON ME" — the a-ha song, reworked with NOÉ — is the bonus cover and considerably better than that description suggests.

"THINKING OF YOU" is the one solo instrumental here, and it shows what the whole thing sounds like without a vocalist on top.

Go deeper

Songs to Make Up To and Songs to Break Up To are the early EPs that built his name, and his collaborative album Westside with Wafia is the most song-focused thing he has made.

For the beat-tape tradition he comes from: J Dilla's Donuts is the founding text, and Nujabes, Knxwledge and Kaytranada are the essential onward listening.

And for the Australian scene generally — Hiatus Kaiyote, Sampa the Great, Genesis Owusu — it is producing some of the most interesting soul-adjacent music anywhere, and getting a fraction of the attention.

One last thing worth noting about Ta-ku: he stepped back from releasing music for several years, largely to concentrate on design work and on building things outside the industry, before returning. That is unusual in a business that punishes absence, and it shows in the records — nothing here sounds like it was made to a release schedule. This is a producer who works at the pace the music requires, and a twenty-two-track collection assembled this carefully is the argument for doing it that way.

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