Machinedrum's BL00MS is 13 years of label patience — and a clean break

Travis Stewart has been making dance music under the name Machinedrum for a quarter century. 1 BL00MS — six tracks, 26 minutes, released June 2 on his own relaunched IAMSIAM label — is his first fully independent record after 13 years and seven albums on Ninja Tune. 2 It's also his best argument yet that the label deal was never what made him interesting.

Stewart was born in 1982 in Eden, North Carolina, and issued his first release as Machinedrum — Now You Know on Merck Records — in 2001, at 19. 3 The early years were spent building credibility across a series of identities — aliases including Syndrone, tstewart, Neon Black, and Aden ran parallel to the main project. 3

The breakout came in 2011. Room(s), written mostly on a laptop during a touring stint, landed on Planet Mu and announced Stewart as something beyond a scene regular. 3 His collaborative project Sepalcure (with producer Praveen Sharma) placed in Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2011 the same year. 3 Ninja Tune signed him in 2013. What followed was an extended run of vocal-featured albums and high-profile co-signs — production work for Tinashe, Freddie Gibbs, Dawn Richard, A$AP Ferg, and Azealia Banks; a placement on the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack via FlyLo FM; a collaborative LP as JETS with Jimmy Edgar. 34

The Bandcamp bio calls Stewart "electronic music's true Renaissance man." 4 That may be accurate. It's also the kind of framing that can bury what someone is actually good at.

BL00MS runs across a 130–160 BPM range and is entirely instrumental. 5 Stewart stepped away from the vocal-feature model that shaped his Ninja Tune output — albums like A View of U (Freddie Gibbs) and 3FOR82 (Tinashe) — and returned to the stripped dance-floor constructions he was building two decades ago. 2

The genre tags read like a compressed history of UK club music: classic jungle, UK garage, house, dubstep. Bandcamp Daily editor Zoe Camp describes it as "melodic dance instrumentals that borrow from classic jungle, UK garage, house, and dubstep in the rawest, purest sense." 2 The key word is rawest. This isn't genre tourism — it's someone who grew up on this music working back through it without the safety net of a hook or a name-check verse.

German music outlet Groove.de gave the record one of its strongest write-ups, calling it a "grandioser Neubeginn" — a magnificent new beginning — and noting that across the six tracks, Stewart moves from UK bass to jungle-inspired pieces, R&B touches to loosely swinging garage, "weaving all influences into an organic bouquet of audiophile blossoms." 6 Groove also flagged a quality the tracklist itself suggests: each piece carries "a yearning, melancholic beauty — but also enough pressure to hold its own on a dancefloor." 6

The six tracks are: THE FROG SONG, NO 1 KNEW, WHEN UR GONE, FADE AWAY, BOUNCE N SLIDE, and BL0000M. 7 The closer, BL0000M, is the centrepiece — a straight bass drum under chopped vocals and spiralling melody sequences that Camp describes as inducing a trance state. Two singles were released in advance via Nina Protocol (a community-owned music platform closing in July 2026): NO 1 KNEW with a cap of 1,000 downloads, BL0000M limited to 200. 7 Both reportedly got close to their limits before the full album dropped.

For Clash Magazine, Robin Murray put it simply: BL00MS "dips into some classic UK sounds — dubstep and garage — while abstracting them, adding different ideas in the process." 5 That abstraction is what makes the record feel less like a revival and more like a continuation of something that was never quite finished.

The release strategy is as considered as the music. BL00MS is not on Spotify. 2 It's distributed by Too Lost and available on Bandcamp and other major platforms — but explicitly not Spotify. 7 The decision signals something about what Stewart thinks the streaming model does to music like this: flattens it into a recommendation queue, strips the context, hands it to an algorithm that will file it between things it superficially resembles.

The IAMSIAM relaunch — the label Stewart originally ran before his Ninja Tune tenure — gives the record a structural home that isn't just a distribution deal. 5 Physical copies come as floppy disc-style USB drives loaded with Easter eggs. 1 There is a digital companion — a collaborative garden at bl00ms.iamsiam.info that generates procedurally built ASCII flowers tied to unique audio variants. The album arrives with visuals Stewart made himself, shown across a six-date North American DJ tour (3+ hour sets, venues like Catch One in LA, Public Records in Brooklyn, and Sleeping Village in Chicago). 15

Camp's read at Bandcamp Daily is the sharpest framing of what Stewart actually gave up and what he got back: "Exclusively available on Bandcamp, BL00MS conveys a pronounced shift away from the festival-friendly futurism that made Travis Stewart a mover and shaker in alternative club and pop circles." 2 And then: "If artistic freedom is one of the main privileges of taking one's creative vehicle in-house, then Stewart is all too eager to capitalize — and he's damn good at it." 2

Four days after the release, Stewart posted on Instagram with a single caption: "A new beginning 🌸🌺🌸🌺🌸" 8 He didn't explain. He didn't need to.