Bleep

Since being founded by Vegyn in 2014, PLZ Make It Ruins has championed esoteric electronic with a DIY mentality, endless creative twists and a certain inherent nerdiness - dance music for people who don’t feel like dancing. Melding elements and stimuli from a range of contemporary genres and scenes into colourful vignettes, PLZ feels like modern digital life in soft focus; a window into a fantastical alternate timeline through a cracked iPhone screen. Tracks are short and flit between focal points like a retina mid-scroll.

Vegyn is the pseudonym of Joe Thornalley, who began messing around with tunes while at university. After a chance meeting at Plastic People led to James Blake playing some of his music on BBC Radio, he opted to pursue it full time.

Another chance meeting at Plastic People would prove even more transformative. Meeting Frank Ocean at the seminal London spot led to being flown out to NY & LA to co-produce both Blonde and Endless in 2016, leading to further work with Travis Scott, JPEGMAFIA and Dean Blunt among others. This run of work elevated his profile by an untold amount, but Vegyn is keen to ensure that his own work is celebrated on its own terms, with PLZ Make It Ruins serving as its physical and spiritual home.

Citing a “very sharp wake up call to the realities of the recording industry” in his early career as a key motive for setting the label up in 2014, Vegyn set out with a strong emphasis on artist-friendly deal terms. Existing in a UK musical landscape he perceived to be often overtly serious, he set out to introduce colourful, melodic musical fauna. “I just wanted to make some really melodious, or at least just fun and interesting, dance music.”

Vegyn’s All Bad Things Have Ended - Your Lunch Included launched the label, with his knack for woozy melodies, spacious atmospheres and playful edits already in full bloom. The 4 track V/A Fourtune Cookie expanded the palette further with its computer-hum broken techno, video game melodies and Burial-esque ambient segues. While a re-issue of Lil Sko's 1998 debut U Kno Tha Sko, was a piece of rap history dug from the archives.

Following this was a run of Arthur releases, with his album 'Woof Woof' landing in late 2018, alongside a remix he did for UK synth pop singer Zoee. It sounds something like Ween or Pavement if they used Ableton. Live instrumentation sits amongst electronic and synthesised elements with a gleeful, spritely energy giving it life.

For a further indicator of PLZ’s quirky charm, just check the merch they’ve done over the years. Arthur’s Challenger came as an infinite looping cassette and Woof Woof came with the option of a custom dog bowl. Early supporters of Ersatz’s Motive, Still could nab it on a USB drive attached to some dog tags. The merch section on their webstore shows past runs of plushie toys, pillows, jellybean tins and signed 40’s of malt liquor.

That fun element is very much present in the artwork curation too. “U.K. dance music takes itself super seriously”, Vegyn says. “When I’m in Phonica, I always just see black sleeves, black vinyl.” Visual contributors include Bryan Rivera, Isha Dipika, Braulio Amado, Noah Baker, Greedy Goons, Happy99, Camille Soulat, JIM JOE, Tim Lindacher, as well as work by PLZ artist OTTO.

Following on from Janhui and Phone Phoneys on PLZ and his high profile production work stateside, Vegyn returned with 2019’s Only Diamonds Cut Diamonds. Dreamy synth waves, crystalline R&B beats, softly melancholic VST melodies and a scattered smattering of found sound, field recordings and strangely effective farm animal noises. Tracks like Debold have a sweetly melodic charm, there’s iced out trap on Nauseous with JPEGMAFIA and the superbly stoned pseudo-N64 soundtrack of Cowboy ALLSTAR. Features and contributions come from the likes of Owen Pallett, Freddie Gibbs, Duval Timothy, and Buddy Ross.

Prior to this, he also dropped the beat tape Text While Driving If You Want To Meet God - an expansive collection of 71 laptop sketches. It felt like one of the many ways in which the label sets out to reject music industry norms. No months of mixdowns, redrafting, social media campaigns - just pure moments of creative expression, captured and shared in their unabridged form. Vegyn himself called it “an exercise in letting go”, freeing the tracks from their hard drive purgatory.