The thirty-year trajectory of Planet Mu reads like the slow accumulation of a deviant archive; an ongoing catalogue of sonic extremophiles, genre miscreants, and rhythmic heretics. Founded in 1995 by Mike Paradinas, nominally as an outlet for his µ-Ziq productions, the label has long operated as a vector for electronic music's most stubborn nonconformists. Planet Mu 30, a sprawling 25-track compilation of new and previously unreleased material, neither eulogises nor summarises the label's prolific past. Rather, it resumes its broadcast.

Mu's early imprint was IDM adjacent but never reducible to that scene's cerebral contortions. While Warp offered museum-quality sound design and Rephlex indulged its pranksterism, Mu hovered over the instability between melodic excess and breakbeat entropy. Paradinas's own Lunatic Harness (1997) stands as an early articulation of this tension. It's jungle breaks deformed into baroque melodicism strewn with circuit sparkle and ambient melancholy.

By the early 2000s, the label had already mutated well beyond its founder's stylistic coordinates. It became a crucible for emergent, noise-laced forms—breakcore, drill 'n' bass, and hard jungle—and nurtured key figures in their divergent development. Venetian Snares, whose presence here with "Drums" marks a return after more than a decade, remains emblematic of that era. His baroque anti-structure, laced with meter-defying percussion and tonal excess, rendered breakcore with precise brutality and harpsichorded surrealism.

Alongside Venetian Snares, early Mu constructed a lineage through acts like Shitmat, Hellfish & Producer, and Leafcutter John, all united not by a commitment to unruliness but by a shared aesthetic. Remarc's Sound Murderer reissue in 2003 would cement the label's archival function, threading jungle's historic teeth through a newly intensified digital framework.

When dubstep and grime began coalescing in the mid-2000s, Mu respectfully detonated the trend. Vex’d’s Degenerate (2005) is a foundational document of pre-Hyperdub, pre-brostep, pre-consensus industrialised dubstep. The label also issued early grime mutations via MRK1 and Virus Syndicate, exploiting the aural kinship between rough UK MC culture and breakbeat horrorism. Ital Tek, who debuted around this time, emerged as a key transitional figure who would map a course from dubstep's weight into IDM’s atmospheric architecture through albums like Cyclical and Hollowed.

Perhaps the most audacious Planet Mu detour came with its intervention into Chicago footwork. Bangs & Works Vol. 1 (2010) and Vol. 2 (2011) reframed this emerging scene. Planet Mu posited footwork as both a dancefloor engine and rhythmic abstraction, catalysing global interest in artists like DJ Nate, RP Boo, Traxman, and DJ Rashad. More than an anthropological export, Mu would integrate footwork's asymmetrical polyrhythms and minimalist elements into its broader body of mutant rhythm science. Traxman’s appearance here underscores Mu’s longstanding affinity for the genre’s soulful, sample-driven lineage, in contrast to its more mechanical or academicised variants. Jlin's subsequent emergence via Dark Energy (2015) repositioned footwork as a compositional strategy. Her hyper-architectural approach detached the form from its battleground roots and installed it into formal experimentation. It's no accident that she appears here with "B12," opening the compilation with a tension-drenched construction of flickering percussion and negative space.

But Planet Mu 30 doesn't self-indulge in retrospection. It simply assembles current transmissions from its long-running web of associates. It amplifies ongoing trajectories rather than closing historical loops. Venetian Snares' "Drums" is a corrosive lattice of warped rhythm. Luke Vibert's "Bullet Drop" is all squelched acid, wah-guitar loops, and post-funk. µ-Ziq's "Imperial Crescent VIP," in contrast, is mournful and glitch-inflected but melodic. In other words, it is a degraded echo of his earlier maximalism. FaltyDL, who helped open a transatlantic axis for the label in the late 2000s with Love Is A Liability, also returns here, bridging jazz-inflected IDM with New York club melancholia on "Usually I'm Cautious." RP Boo's "No Return 2" retains the raw loop economy that marked his early appearances on Bangs & Works, while DJ Manny's "Smooth Jungle" pushes footwork into more soul-inflected terrain.

Equally vital are the newer signatories. Rian Treanor's "Another Future Is Impossible" continues his algorithmic dismantling of rhythmic grids, recalling the elastic chaos of his 2019 debut, ATAXIA. Xylitol's "Nevada" mines nostalgic jungle without pastiche, building melodic arpeggios around fractured breaks. These tracks are not aberrations. They are extensions of a Planet Mu lineage where glitch, rupture, and rhythmic excess have always formed a kind of unofficial syntax.

The label's globalist reflex is also underlined as a decentralised platform for dissonant global rhythm. Kenyan producer Slikback debuts with "Foli," a brute-force hybrid of industrial, gqom, and noise. Ship Sket delivers "Dysentry," a grime-grit slow burn, while Saint Abdullah & Eomac contribute "Victorian All-Rounder (ft. Victoria LAIR)," an angular rave deconstruction.
If there's a unifying thread to Planet Mu 30, it's an antagonism toward the flattening influence of genre orthodoxy. Planet Mu has never valorised stylistic purity. Its project, over three decades, has been to explore the unstable ecotones where styles hybridise and collapse, shaping the critical vocabulary around experimental electronic music by listeners, publications, curators, and institutions alike.

Mu's refusal to become institutional is, quite frankly, remarkable. Unlike other long-running labels that transition into brand curatorship, Planet Mu retains a sense of volatility. It doesn't smooth edges or rein in its contributors. There are no ambient interludes to massage the sequencing, no techno excursions to anchor the compilation toward club convention.

That disjunction is precisely what affirms the label's cultural role. Planet Mu's catalog is a fault line that has helped carve pathways through breakcore, jungle, and footwork and experimental electronic practice more broadly. Three decades in, it remains a locus of aesthetic risk. Through its sheer curatorial insistence, Planet Mu 30 confirms that it's another dispatch from the periphery.