Batu and Donato Dozzy release debut joint album Exhale

Bristol producer Batu, real name Omar McCutcheon, and Italian producer Donato Dozzy, real name Donato Scaramuzzi, have released Exhale, their first album together, on !K7 Music, telling Mixmag the record grew out of nearly a decade of friendship. The two met at Italy's Terraforma festival in 2018, and repeated festival mishaps, including a cancelled set at Japan's The Labyrinth in 2019 and another washout at Albania's ION Festival in 2024, kept throwing them together long enough to become close.

Dozzy first discovered McCutcheon's music through his Timedance label without realizing it was tied to Bristol. "It was an important place for me musically growing up," he said, tracing his own connection to the city back to 1995 and the trip-hop of Portishead and Massive Attack. McCutcheon, in turn, came to Dozzy's music around 2010 or 2011, drawn to its hypnotic, slow-building basslines through releases like Voices From The Lake.

They finally sat down to record during a February 2025 session at Scaramuzzi's Rome studio, built around his network of hardware synthesizers and drum machines. "We didn't plan anything at all before we started," Scaramuzzi said, describing a three-hour session that produced roughly 12 sketches of ideas, with McCutcheon layering digital processing over the analogue sounds Scaramuzzi generated live.

Both artists said the chemistry worked because neither tried to control the process. "For collaboration, if you have two people sitting in front of a computer trying to steal the mouse from each other, it's not fun," McCutcheon said, describing instead a back-and-forth where Scaramuzzi would gauge his reactions in real time and keep adjusting the machines.

Scaramuzzi described his own studio as essentially one large modular instrument. "It's a modular studio," he said. "Every machine is not completely independent because they all go into a patch bay." Because most of the gear can't store sounds, he said, once the machines are switched off, the recorded ideas are gone for good.

The album's eight tracks, including the floaty "Emergence," the swampy "Spiral" and the speedy title track, move between hypnotic rollers and heavier, bass-driven cuts, reflecting years of the pair swapping records and playing back-to-back DJ sets, including one at the Netherlands' Draaimolen festival in 2023.

Both said they're open to a second collaboration, though Scaramuzzi expects it would sound nothing like the first. "If we do another collaboration, I'm sure it's going to be very different to this one," he said. "It will be a new chapter with new surprises."