Different Circles Returns with 'Ping Volume One,' a New Chapter from Mumdance and Logos

In 2013, Different Circles emerged with Weightless Volume One, a release that mapped out new terrain in minimalist club music. Twelve years later, after a six-year hiatus, the label co-run by Mumdance and Logos is back with its tenth release: Ping Volume One.

Rather than a genre, “ping” is a way of thinking about rhythm and space. Tracks are built around a single percussive hit, sharp, dry, sometimes echoing through the mix, that acts as a temporal anchor. Around it, bass and texture are left free to drift, lurch or implode. What began as a running joke on Mumdance’s radio show and in the label’s Discord community has grown into a shared language. With contributions from figures like CORIN, Xen Chron, AMIT, Beton Brut and Lillia Betz, the compilation feels less like a manifesto and more like a collective instinct brought into focus.

For Mumdance and Logos, who have spent over a decade reshaping the UK club landscape through collaborations, radio and curation, this record isn’t just a comeback but a continuation. The aesthetic roots of Different Circles are still intact, reframed through a community that has carried the sound forward while the label paused. Ping Volume One marks both a return and a handover, a new chapter grounded in the same restless curiosity that has defined the project since the start.

With the release now out in the world, Beatportal sat down with Mumdance and Logos to talk about the summer that led here, the birth of ping, and the vision for Different Circles moving forward.

Hey Jack, hey James, thanks for joining us! How has the summer of 2025 been treating you?

Mumdance: It’s been a busy but rewarding summer getting the label back up and running. Musically, I’ve been working on The MD Series, a run of releases exploring a lighter, more euphoric tone. Getting my head around how to actually produce something “happy” has been a challenge, but the process taught me a lot. Much of it involved working with vocalists and live musicians to create my own “samples” from scratch, which I then reprocessed and reshaped into something more personal. For fun, I’ve been writing a free weekly newsletter called Reduced. It’s minimalist and built around concise curation: five tracks and two mixes, delivered to your inbox each week.

Logos: Not doing too badly here. I've not had a huge amount of time for solo music but what I do have is either working on my live Nord Modular set which is a long term project largely based around feedback patching, and working on a bunch of new tracks influenced mainly by 90s electro.

Ping Volume One marks Different Circles’ return after a six-year pause. What sparked the decision to relaunch the label now, and why with this compilation?

Mumdance: It happened quite naturally through the radio show and the Discord community. I’ve built a website that acts as an archive of my work from the past fifteen years. It also functions as a radio platform, where I broadcast a weekly show. The show is very interactive and we use Discord for the live chat. Over time a small but active creative community has formed. People began sending in music each week to play on the show and I was struck by the quality. It created a feedback loop and a sound began to emerge. There was so much good music being made that James & I felt really energised and wanted to platform it. Bringing back Different Circles felt like the natural next step.

The idea of “ping” emerged from your radio show and your Discord community. For people new to the term, how would you describe “ping” in your own words?

Mumdance: Essentially Instead of building a track around a kick drum, you begin with a single high-frequency sound, the ping, and let the track unfold around it. Because the ping sits high in the frequency spectrum, it leaves space for bass to move underneath while still holding the rhythm in place. Like weightless, ping isn’t a genre. It’s a framework, a way of thinking about structure and space. We think of the ping as a temporal anchor. It’s a simple idea, which is part of its strength. It’s opened up so many new directions for us.

Logos: I've always loved extremely dry sounds and as I've gotten more comfortable in my own taste I'm much more interested in how dry sounds utilise the natural reverberant qualities of the performance space into which they are amplified. Sometimes that doesn't really work with club music because you can't control the environment like you maybe can in a site specific live performance, but it's a worthwhile idea to explore anyway. The ping as a sonic event is great because it's like a sharp beacon searching out the shape of acoustic space.

You both have a long creative history, from Proto to label curation. How and when did you two first embark on this sonic saga together?

Mumdance: I first heard Blackdown play a track of James’s called Cloudbursting on Rinse FM. It sounded like something I might’ve made myself. The next day I messaged him on Twitter and about a week later he came round to my place. In that first session we wrote most of Legion and In Reverse, two tracks that became foundational to our sound. From there we started meeting every Monday night at James’s studio in Hackney Wick. Over time those sessions became the Proto LP. Our tastes and skillsets complement each other well. It always felt natural and more enjoyable than working alone.

Logos: I think our tastes are well matched / complementary both in terms of older music but also newer stuff. Jack encourages me not to be afraid of being direct, musically speaking. Take Time is a great example of that; it's a very sparse tune and very direct but that aesthetic makes it very abstract and experimental.

How did you approach A&R for Ping Volume One?

Mumdance: It mostly A&R’d itself. Around 95% of the artists on the compilation are active members of the Discord community and regular listeners to the shows. A lot of the early Different Circles tracks had ping sounds running through them. When I played them on the radio, the Discord chat would often react with a meme of Momotaros, a Japanese devil character. Over time, I started playing more pingy tracks just to trigger the meme. In 2023, I broadcast a moodboard show called The Ping Report. After that, producers began sending in purpose-made ping tracks. That eventually shaped what became Ping Volume One.

Logos: It was great to have a spread from very young, fresh artists, to experienced hands. It's impossible to pick one artist or track, but it was a particular pleasure for me to sign a Xen Chron track. Sileni was one of my favourite artists from the experimental heyday of 00s drum and bass.

You’ve described Ping Volume One as a “shared instinct.” Where do you see that instinct leading Different Circles next?

Mumdance: It’s been interesting to realise how many of the artists we’re now working with grew up on the Different Circles catalogue. What they’re making today feels alien and futuristic, but still grounded in the same ideas and aesthetic that have shaped the label from the start. We’ve got a number of EPs lined up with artists we really respect from the compilation, including 6amsunset, Lillia Betz and unearth.

Logos: I think having some distance from the immediate waves of dance music we came up in has been good. I think we both feel much more self confident about the aesthetic of the label, which looking back is extremely coherent even though perhaps at the time we didn't understand that. The new artists around the label have a completely fresh mentality but it's still tied to the history.

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