Jack Adams, better known as Mumdance, has been building a new world — a space for “thoughtful, calm communication” dubbed the “MD Multiverse”. It includes an online archive of his whole creative output, a weekly radio show broadcast from his studio, a weekly Substack mailer, and a Discord server that brings his community together. “The Mumdance Discord is honestly one of the nicest places on the Internet. Everyone’s so kind to each other, and they help each other,” he tells DJ Mag. “It’s naturally blossoming, and it just feels so different from algorithmic-based social media.”
The move came after time away from the music industry while he was in addiction recovery and under Covid lockdown. “Everything was completely different. And I’d sort of forgotten who I was,” he recalls of his experience immediately post-pandemic. But now, he says, “With six years of sobriety under my belt, I feel like I’m really who I’m supposed to be.”
From the multiverse, a new concept has emerged: “ping”. The term originated on the radio show, where Adams started calling certain tracks “the pingy ones”, which then “became a running joke in the Discord community, eventually developing into a full lore — complete with hundreds of memes featuring a character called Momotaros, known affectionately as the Ping Devil”.
Ping is an approach to production, rather than a genre in itself — in the same manner as the weightless style he and Logos developed in the 2010s, in particular through their label Different Circles. “It’s a way of anchoring music without relying on a kick-drum to propel the track. Instead, a single percussive sound — a ping — holds the centre, while the rest of the track undulates around it. The ping might sit dry and high in the mix, like a metronome, or echo distantly through space. Either way, it gives the track structure, tension, and presence,” he explains.
Off the back of a dedicated radio episode in 2023 called The Ping Report, producers on the Discord began to make their own ping tracks, resulting in a full compilation which drops in August on Different Circles.
We asked Mumdance to put together a 10-track introduction to ping. “The Selections here are a kind of map, tracing the sound backwards and sideways through different influences and lineages,” he says. “Some were early blueprints. Some inspired producers on the radio show. Others simply share a similar spirit, even if they weren’t consciously part of the idea set. I hope you enjoy.”