Some dance records try to be perfect. UGI & Jaan would rather let the scraps talk. “Neerpelt Nightlife” is the first look at their EP Quaternity II, due 9 October on WIC Recordings, and it arrives sounding like a late-night transmission pieced together from things other people threw away.
The Dutch duo is Erik Harbers (UGI), a soundscapist and producer, and Gerhardt Heusinkveld (Jaan), a collage artist, musician and producer. After years working in separate artistic worlds, they started sending tracks back and forth across the Netherlands with almost no discussion. Trust first. Explanation later, if at all. They call the result eclectric collage boogie: hypnotic grooves, post-punk tension, cinematic sound design, and cultural debris that mutates into strangely emotional dance music.
That is the world “Neerpelt Nightlife” lives in. Found sounds, old commercials, cheap rhythm boxes, bootleg percussion, dusty voice memos and fragments pulled from the corners of the internet sit next to late-night basslines. Nothing is treated as sacred. Everything can become rhythm. The pitch for the track calls it a hypnotic collage-boogie transmission, fun, weird, freaky and unlike a standard indie dance single. That checks out with how they describe the whole Quaternity idea: each piece carries its own weather, its own direction, held together by instinct rather than a committee.
Indie dance in 2026 still rewards records that feel human and a little off-centre rather than algorithm-smooth. Leftfield club music has room again for outsider disco, early Mo Wax atmosphere, Arthur Russell looseness and post-punk bite. UGI & Jaan sit in that lane without copying any one of those names. Reviews of their earlier double A-side Deep Hours / Whitey On The Moon already pointed at the same mix: aesthetically intriguing, hypnotic post-punk with 90s flavour, Nick Cave vibes, experimental production with real drive. They have also remixed Mark Lotterman and The Jordan, which suggests other artists hear a fingerprint in the chaos.
WIC Recordings, the independent label founded by Ludowic, is a natural home for this. The imprint likes artists who refuse tidy genre boxes. Quaternity II continues a project that is less about a polished album cycle and more about a living landscape of groove, collage and atmosphere. They work with dancers, poets, vocalists and fellow outsiders from Finland, Germany, Nairobi, the UK and beyond. The music stays open on purpose. Overexplaining, they say, kills the spirit.
If you like your indie dance with grit, humour and a slightly haunted aftertaste, this is a first single worth sitting with before the full EP lands in October. What do you hear in the collage — club night, art piece, or both? Drop it in the comments.
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