823 Records is a new imprint started by Ta-ku, designed to highlight emerging artists, distributed by Jakarta Records. For their first release, they turn to a producer from Perth, Australia, to release his EP, Dawn Chorus. Dawn Chorus isn’t an EP that will blow you away on first listen, but it will definitely grow on you. The reason for this is that Kuzich doesn’t have a big sound, so this EP mainly works in subtleties.

Back in December of last year, we got an EP from a group called Anonymous Inc. as part of Fake Four’s Freecember series. The EP, Beta 1, was culled together from vaults of unreleased material that was recorded during the ‘00s. Now we get the next installment of the series, Beta 2. If you’re not familiar with Anonymous Inc., this was the group started by Ceschi and his brother, David Ramos back in the ‘90s.

Shrimpnose is a producer from Minneapolis who has been making some noise in the past year or so. We just heard from him last December, when he dropped the beautifully sad EP, Dawn. Now he follows that up with another EP, Sullen. Dawn was specifically written in tribute to a friend who had passed away, so it was expectedly sad and contemplative in nature. With Sullen, Shrimpnose takes a step back and looks at not just the lowest of lows in the past year-and-a-half of his life, but also looking at some pretty substantial highs.

One of the greatest things Fat Beats has done in recent years is to introduce the Baker’s Dozen series. For each volume, the label selects a different producer to compose an instrumental album, twelve tracks long, with one extra track to be pressed on an additional flexi-disc, to push the total to thirteen and make it a baker’s dozen. Past contributors to the series include Badumunk, Marco Polo, Daedelus, Ras G, Wun Two, Ohbliv, and Dibia$e.

Just last spring, Antipop Consortium co-founder Beans broke five years of silence with not one, not two, but three albums released simultaneously. And then he threw a novel in just for kicks. Now that that massive undertaking is out of the way, Beans was left to work like a normal human being, who now returns with a shorter project called Nights Without Smiles. If you’ve followed Beans’ career, you probably know that outside of his voice, you can’t predict the sound of each project he’s going to do.

Temporary Whatever is a record label started by Busdriver many years ago. Yes, he’s released his own music on the label, like his EP, Thumbs, from a couple of years ago. However, he’s also used the label here and there to release the music of other artists that he believes in, such as The Light Bearer by Jimetta Rose. Now, Busdriver has found someone he believed in so much, he’s not only putting out the album on Temporary Whatever, he’s produced the entire thing as well.

Ozay Moore, fka Othello, is an emcee who has been making music for the last twenty years, both as a solo artist and as part of groups like Lightheaded. The last time we heard form him was back in 2015, when he dropped The Between Time EP. Now he comes back with one of his most ambitious albums to date, In The Wake of O. Moore originally came up in Seattle, but he moved to Lansing, Michigan, about ten years ago.

Dr. Dundiff is a producer from Louisville who has been putting out music since 2010, best known for his collaborations with Otis Junior. Their last album together, Hemispheres, came out in March of last year. Now Dr. Dundiff comes back with an instrumental release, Muneybeats. Muneybeats is pretty straightforward with it’s expectations, laid out at the beginning with the now classic sample from The Office about money beets. This is a beat tape at it’s core, but these aren’t unformed demo beats.

Casagrown is better known as one half of the Chicago hip hop group Badwolff, whom we last heard from back in September when they released their EP Hongry Wolff. Now Casagrown steps out on his own to drop his solo EP, Mighty Casa. Casagrown’s father was an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, a businessman and traveler who passed away when Casa was only five. His father was also a music lover, and it was through discovering his dad’s collection of old vinyl, with plenty of calypso, reggae, and more, that he found this portal to grow closer to the man he didn’t get a chance to know.

Dabrye is a producer from Ann Arbor who has been putting out music since the early ‘00s. In fact, the first album he released was One/Three, which was put out by Ghostly International back in 2001. With some other releases in between, he finally followed that up in 2006 with Two/Three. Since that time, however, the artist known as Dabrye has largely been working under different names and exploring other genres of music.