Dutch experimental producer Torus and London-based musician, composer and producer Danny L Harle have released Starlight Divergence, a nine-track project made by Torus using stems of Harle’s acclaimed recent single ‘Starlight’ as the source material for each track.
Torus (Joeri Woudstra) is a multidisciplinary artist who operates at the intersection of visual art and experimental music. Taking the hyper out of hyper pop and transmuting it to genres like ambient and club, Torus utilises dance music vocabularies to dissect pop culture and politics. By laying bare Harle’s interlinking and often densely-arranged material, Torus encourages the listener to focus on one element at a time, allowing for a more focused sense of emotion to come out of the harmonies and melodies. The layered grandeur of Harle’s original is dissected and laid out into a frieze of static emotion.
The concept of an extended Divergence release occurred to Harle while he listened through to the stems of ‘Starlight’ and realised how much material there is in music that could branch off into other interesting tangents, and how it might be interesting for another artist to harvest this material to make something new. Torus took this concept and added a new dimension to it, structuring this Divergence as a mixtape. He stretched, reversed, and chopped the material, sometimes bringing it to the brink of recognisability.
Love Me Back
This idea also references traditional dance music formatting, where multiple mixes of a song were released alongside the original track. First appearing as a mysterious NTS transmission, Starlight Divergence is a twist on that practice, with the goal of these alternative versions being a shift in the listener’s perspective rather than club-ready remixes.
The original ‘Starlight’ single, released on 8th June, is a collaboration between Danny L Harle and alt-pop icon PinkPantheress, with Harle searching for euphoric melancholy via his love of Elizabethan Madrigals, 90s Eurodance and 2000s trance to stunning effect. The first Danny L Harle release since 2021’s Harlecore album, it was met with widespread acclaim (“One of Britain’s best electronic music producers” – The Times, “Harle’s production accelerates from wistful electronic lament to manic, pounding electro-pop, strewing countermelodies all over the place” – New York Times, “an exhilarating ride to the top of the BPM counter and up towards the clouds above” – The FADER). ‘Starlight’ was also Harle’s first release for new label home XL Recordings, marking a bold new chapter in a career defined by sonic innovation, heartfelt maximalism and genre-defying vision.
Starlight Divergence marks the latest in a series of acclaimed releases from Torus, who first drew attention in 2020 with The Flash, a split album with DJ Lostboi that quickly became a cult classic of contemporary experimental music. Since then, he has created works for New York’s New Museum with artist Kate Cooper, developed the critically acclaimed A/V collaboration These Cars Do Not Exist with artist Mark Prendergast, and unveiled last year’s Summer of Love album, now set for a proper re-release this September featuring Malibu and others.
LISTEN TO STARLIGHT DIVERGENCE HERE
Torus & Danny L Harle
Starlight Divergence
14th August 2025
XL Recordings
- Sea No Evil
- Voil
- Stardew
- Someone Like You
- Meteor Shower
- Up In Flames
- Love Me Back
- Starlight (Paulstretched)
- Club Paradise
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