Rian Treanor

British artist Rian Treanor crafts intricate, high-energy electronic music that balances club-oriented energy with bold sonic experimentation. As the son of glitch and IDM innovator Mark Fell of SND, Treanor shares a penchant for jagged rhythms and textural detail, yet his lean, propulsive beats draw more heavily from U.K. garage and footwork, resulting in tracks that emphasize dance-floor momentum over pure abstraction. While most of his live sets unfold through real-time improvisation, his first album-length statement, the 2019 release Ataxia, arrived as a fully realized studio construction that nevertheless preserved an air of playful unpredictability. The follow-up, 2020’s File Under UK Metaplasm, intensified these traits with accelerated tempos and rubbery, elastic timbres. Subsequent joint projects paired him with Fell on 2021’s Last Exit to Chickenley and with Acholi fiddler Ocen James on 2023’s Saccades.

Raised in Rotherham, just outside Sheffield—the city that fostered Cabaret Voltaire and Warp Records—Treanor immersed himself in skating and graffiti before beginning to DJ and produce as a teenager. He withheld any material from release until his mid-twenties, choosing instead to organize events at Leeds’s Enjoy art space, apprentice in vinyl mastering under Lupo at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, and exhibit design projects and installations. Viewing himself primarily as a visual artist rather than a coder, he adopted the improvisation-oriented Max/MSP environment for both recording and performance. His earliest EP, A Rational Tangle, appeared on Boomkat’s The Death of Rave label in 2015; Pattern Damage followed within the year. Contraposition, issued in 2018, inaugurated the revived Arcola imprint, Warp’s formerly inactive experimental-techno subsidiary. Later that same year The Death of Rave put out RAVEDIT, featuring Treanor’s well-known rework of Whigfield’s ’90s Euro-dance staple “Saturday Night.” Planet Mu released his debut album Ataxia—a collection of sharp, playful dance cuts—in 2019. The 2020 album File Under UK Metaplasm drew from Tanzania’s singeli scene alongside dancehall, grime, and footwork. Obstacle Scattering arrived as an EP in 2021, while the Boomkat-issued Last Exit to Chickenley documented his collaboration with his father. Recorded during a residency in Kampala, Uganda, Saccades appeared on Nyege Nyege Tapes in 2023 and contained a remix by the glitch collective Farmers Manual.