Behind The Label: YUKU

YUKU is built for people who still want music to feel like a door they have not opened before.

The Prague-based label, record store, and arts platform moves with that sense of discovery at its core. Its world is unpredictable, unconventional, clever, beautiful, haunting, challenging, and often eye-opening, full of music that can make a room, or your mind, change shape.

Run by oolongbru and Kumquat Tang, YUKU started as a label in 2020, but the thread goes back further. In London in the mid-2000s, oolongbru met Djrum and helped start the club night Yardcore. Years later, after oolongbru and Kumquat Tang moved to Prague, that same digging instinct turned into something wider: a label, a shop, a community space, and a home for music that refuses to chase trends.

YUKU is DIY in the real sense, built through constant hands-on work. The care goes into everything: A&R, community building, club nights, physical records, expansive artwork, and the visual worlds that help give each artist’s wildest ideas a proper body. In just six years, YUKU has moved at a serious clip, building a catalog of more than 160 records across its main releases, sub-label branches, and digital-only experiments. 

Singular artists like COIDO, Nina, MUADEEP, Mystic State, Leese, A.Fruit, Hassan Abou Alam, DJ Fucci, Soreab, Maude Vôs, Le Motel and many more have all passed through YUKU’s orbit, bringing leftfield bass, experimental club, high-voltage rhythm work, warped electronica, and plenty of sounds that refuse a clean name. 

YUKU rewards attention. That same spirit carries into YUKURU, its selective listening community that listeners apply to join, built for people who want to dig deeper rather than skim the surface. Together, the label and its community ask you to slow down, speed up, lean in, and give sonic experimentation the reverence it deserves.

In our latest Behind The Label video below, YUKU founders oolongbru and Kumquat Tang introduce us to the label, the community around it, and the curious spirit that keeps it moving.

Artist and friend of the label, Djrum, has pulled together a Beatport chart highlighting his 'Top 10 YUKU Tracks' – listen below.