Today, I woke up with music that felt like its own universe. Music that evokes goosebumps and this special, rare kind of energy, I love to discover.

One of the most exciting bands to have come out of Bulgaria in recent years, WOOMB, celebrates a brand re-imagination of their haunting single "Powerless", crafted by British producer Daniel Avery. We first covered Daniel's music back in 2020 and have kept close tabs on him ever since. His new version flips the original into a darker, more distorted sonic universe. It still preserves the core haunting energy of Gueorgui Linev’s instrumental while letting Hristo Yordanov’s vocals cut through with a raw, unmistakable intensity.

Listening to this feels like the discovery of a new source of limitless energy, driven by a blend of electronic psychedelia and the artists’ fearless willingness to expose something intimate. Today is a good day to fall in love with music again.

Originally shaped by producer/composer Gueorgui Linev (Kan Wakan) alongside WOOMB’s frontman Hristo Yordanov, “Powerless” emerged as a slow-burning meditation on vulnerability, built on Linev’s textural minimalism, suspended synthesizer work, and anchored by an unrepeatable performance from legendary drummer Joey Waronker (Oasis, Beck, Atoms for Peace). The track lived in the liminal terrain between trip hop and shoegaze, but carried a sense of psychic unease that felt uniquely its own.

Avery recognized that inner tension immediately. His rework operates like an act of artistic kinship. A collision point between two producers who build worlds rather than merely arrange them. Known for dissolving the borders between club asceticism and ambient introspection, Avery approaches “Powerless” with the sculptural precision that defines his most celebrated records. He distills the original down to its volatile emotional core, then exhumes something colder, more hypnotic, and almost spiritual from within it.

Against this backdrop, Linev offers a rare window into the song’s origins, "Powerless began in a very private space for me. In my studio on a Prophet 6 with its oscillators pushed slightly out of tune until they produced this unstable, almost ceremonial pulse I couldn’t shake. I was trying to find a pulse that didn’t feel like a rhythm so much as a procession… something half ritual, half memory. That pattern felt like some kind of broken march, something ancient but falling apart in real time. I layered Mellotron flutes over it and sent them through an old tape delay that wobbled unpredictably, so the whole thing moved like two ghosts circling each other. And woven through that early pulse was Hristo’s voice as a kind of emotional filament, thin as light but quietly steering the piece from beneath its surface.

What I found remarkable is that Daniel intuitively gravitated back to those exact elements at the end of his rework. The way he lets those original textures surface at the end of the remix feels almost uncanny, as if he had intuited where the piece was first born."

Linev (also known as his alias Kan Wakan) is also the founder of Bulgarian indie collective SAMODIVA - home of many talented young underground local bands. Something that makes me excited about the alternative scene here. For Linev, the collaboration marks a rare meeting of minds, a natural fit for a producer who has spent the past decade shaping a cinematic, architecturally rich corner of alternative music, working with some of my favourite artists ranging from Moses Sumney and Baby Keem to Thundercat, whose rigor-first, curiosity-driven approach finds a clear parallel in Avery, an artist who treats atmosphere not as decoration, but as ideology.

Visualization created by Grigor Dyankov / filmed on the set of "Powerless" by Grigor Dyankov, Yan Stoyanov

Stream the remix on all major platforms here.

posted by Ivo
8 h ago