Ten years ago in a plane somewhere between Toronto and the U.K., David Psutka’s thoughts plunged beneath the Atlantic.
“I would always look out the window and think about how peaceful it would be 20 metres beneath the surface of the water in the Atlantic Ocean,” Psutka tells The Grind. He was thinking about a phenomenon called a halocline, a hazy layer in the ocean separating fresher water from saltier water below.
Psutka was making regular commutes between Pearson and Heathrow at the time. Under the moniker Egyptrixx, he was touring in support of his early albums Bible Eyes and A/B Til Infinity on Last Gang Records and the U.K.’s Warp-distributed Night Slugs label. The rigid, hectic promotional schedule was wearing on him.
“I had some really cool people offering to put out my music and work with me and that was great, but most of them had this constrained vision of how the project would work — an album every 18 months, touring to support, and just focusing on that one sole project.”
Psutka had other flows he wanted to follow. Indulging fantasies about the way water continuously mixes and is held apart below the surface of the ocean, he wanted to make an ecosystem of his own.
“I wanted to work [on] different projects, with different people, different idioms of music,” Psutka says. “I realized early on that the only way to do that would probably be if I had my own label to release the music.”
That’s how Halocline Trance was born.
Still working under the Egyptrixx moniker, in 2015 Psutka launched the label by releasing his own album, Transfer of Energy [Feelings of Power].
Then a surge of records released under new project titles followed.
LIMIT — a 2016 collaboration between Psutka and Night Slugs’ co-founder James Connoly — courted more functional dance floor energies.
Ceramic TL, an ongoing collab between Psutka and the Turkish neoclassical composer and sound artist Ipek Gorgun, blends intricate electronic textures with minimalist classical motifs.
Meanwhile, Psutka’s primary solo project switched from Egyptrixx to ACT! While the former embraced complex melodies and experimental soundscapes, ACT! was more esoteric, pushing abstract elements in more obscure directions better suited to private listening than the dance floor.
For Psutka, each of these projects was a foray into new sounds, but all of them were united by a hypermodern aesthetic and a belief in creative experimentation.
That was also true of ANAMAI, Psutka’s folk band partnership with Anna Mayberry. Founded in 2013, the duo has released their records on Halocline Trance since 2017. Warped and woozy under Psutka’s synth throbs, the band’s compositions conjure older eras of music in future-haunted environments. Mayberry’s voice comforts listeners like a time traveller’s riding cloak.
In 2019, Psutka released a collection of improvised performances from Toronto-based artist and software designer Xuan Ye. Centring free improvisations, computational randomness, noise from the field, and the hybrid chaos of gestures and mediated bio-electrical currents, the release marked the label’s first release of a project Psutka hadn’t performed in.
“I love the ideas that came out of working on that project. I feel like it gave birth to subsequent ideas,” Psutka says. “I think that record really prompted the next phase of the label.”
When the pandemic cast a chill on artists gathering to collaborate, Psutka doubled down and shifted the label’s focus to the community.
“[That’s when] I kind of imagined [the label] as something bigger,” Psutka recalls.
The label’s roster has mushroomed to include a community of local peers like Germaine Liu, Colin Fisher, myst milano., Kat Duma, Casey MQ, Ben Gunning, and Stefana Fratila, as well as further flung acts like Eldritch Priest (Vancouver), Vibrant Matter (Brooklyn), A. Hutchie (Hamilton), and Montreal’s L CON, Mue, and NPNP.
Unlike a lot of other labels, Halocline Trance doesn’t really have one defined “sound.” But that’s what makes it especially interesting.
Some of its offerings are experimental, with one album documenting a multi-channel sound and light installation. Others are more familiar, showing off hip-hop and pop songcraft.
Working with artists who resisted creative stasis has helped Psutka realize his vision for the label.
“We’re all a little older, a little more experienced,” Psutka says. “People are more comfortable with themselves and more open to really kind of get into these deep collaborative projects, and that’s really exciting.”
It’s also helped Halocline Trance establish itself as a label that helps its artists manifest their visions from an inkling of an idea to a song on a record.
“Most things now are entirely produced within the label. We’re not getting finished projects,” Psutka says. “We’re making it all within the label. Which is how I want it to work going forward.”
As Halocline Trance turns 10 this year, selections from the label’s history are newly presented on the compilation, How far would you take it?
The 20-track collection out March 28 includes previously unreleased work from artists like Anuja Panditrao and Nick Storring. And it has an updated version of an old Egyptrixx single, “Chrysalis Records.”
While Egyptrixx never went away, Psutka stopped focusing on the project fulltime in 2015. He says there’s a substantial cache of material that hasn’t been released — but fans can expect to hear more of that soon.
“Later this year, I’ll be putting out some kind of Egyptrixx sketchbook zip drop album which’ll just be a bunch of older things, unfinished things, unreleased things,” he says.
The label will also release a new album from Montreal musician Jeremy Young on April 5, and Psutka says releases from Brandon Valdivia and Colin Fisher’s Not the Wind Not the Flag project and Karen Ng are in the works. Jaclyn Blumas of DOOMSQUAD and E-Prime is also set to debut a new solo project.
The label has transcended its early use as a way for Psutka to compartmentalize his own creative output. Today, it’s a fertile ground for collaboration across far-flung scenes and genres. In that sense, the label has become as much a platform for creative dialogue as it is for the music it releases.
This article appeared in the 2025 April/May issue.
