Batu and Donato Dozzy unveil Drift, a hypnotic minimal techno collaboration

Batu and Donato Dozzy have turned a long-running scene connection into their first recorded collaboration, and Drift lands like more than a lead single. Released on May 5 through !K7, the track sits in the narrow lane between Batu’s clean-lined, percussive club pressure and Dozzy’s slower, psychedelic pull, a balance that makes it feel like a statement of intent for the full-length Exhale rather than a standalone tease.

The pair’s route to the record gives that weight real context. Batu and Donato Dozzy first met in Japan in 2019, bonded over each other’s work, and kept the conversation going before finally sharing a back-to-back set at Draaimolen Festival in Tilburg in 2023. The project was revisited again when Batu went to Dozzy’s studio in Rome in February 2025, where the two tested different tempos and rhythmic patterns. That kind of patient, iterative process matters here: Drift sounds like the product of two artists who know exactly where their shared language overlaps, but are still willing to push the grooves until they tilt.

For minimal techno listeners, the appeal is in how clearly the record reflects both catalogs without flattening either one. Batu, aka Omar McCutcheon, has built Timedance into one of Bristol’s sharper touchpoints for modernist techno and experimental club music. Donato Dozzy, aka Donato Scaramuzzi, has spent years shaping a more immersive European techno vocabulary, one that leans into subtle motion, dub pressure and deep atmosphere. Drift sits in the middle of that Venn diagram: detailed enough for the booth, hazy enough to keep its head down and keep moving.

Exhale itself looks like a proper album, not a bundle of loose cuts. The eight-track sequence runs through Emergence, Spiral, Drift, Off Axis, Swarm, Flicker, Exhale and Bloom, with credits for Thoma Bulwer on mixing, Rashad Becker on mastering and Guillaume de Ubéda on artwork. Release listings place the digital pre-order on June 30, with physical editions on 2xLP and CD following in early July. That matters because it frames the record as a carefully built LP cycle, not a one-off collab for the timeline.

Dozzy’s timing also tells its own story. Alongside this release, he has launched Nautilus Musica, a new label focused on voice-led, song-based music, with Anna Caragnano set to open the imprint. Taken together, the label move and Exhale suggest an artist broadening his palette while still returning to the tightly controlled club language that made a pairing with Batu feel overdue in the first place.