On Repeat: Harold Heath looks back at some of the best electronic music albums of 2025 in this special series for 5 Mag.

Night Blooming Cereus is the sixth album from maverick producer Maurice Fulton under his “Boof” pseudonym, the other five dropping seemingly randomly among Fulton’s prodigious output since his Boof debut in 2000. It’s another sparkling and creative house collection, ten 4/4 jams based firmly in the house tradition, all dancefloor targeted, but each track — continually different in character and mood from the previous — is potentially targeted at very specific, distinctive dancefloors.

Fulton serves up spiky, angular, post-punk synth wave, tech-soul synth wig outs, shimmering, chiming, silvery techno, edgy, anxious, wonky-ish alt-disco-house jams, dubby, squelching, bleep-bleep murk-house, all with enough variation to exhaust this writer’s slim armoury of adjectives, the only sonic constant his supa-soulful piano work.

What makes the tunes distinctive, and this is obviously conjecture, but they sound as though they’re made of one or two musical or rhythmic ideas that have been purified, distilled, and boiled down to their most basic, elemental expression, as though at no point during production did Fulton think ‘I’ll add something else here’ until he’d spent a few hours trying to make the most of what he already had.

It’s definitely a club album of DJ music, with the lengthy intros, elongated vamps and repetitive looping that this involves, and maybe a DJ mix version might function better for home listening, but regardless, there are enough ideas, interesting sonic juxtapositions and fresh rhythmic hybridising to make this a highly listenable and playable album.

Boof: Night Blooming Cereus (Bubbletease Communication)
1. Breakfast In Collingwood (07:51)
2. Night Blooming Cereus (06:44)
3. One Little Oyster (06:40)
4. We Won (05:50)
5. Boatride In Melbourne With J (06:33)
6. Bumpy Space Ride (07:07)
7. I Want C & B To Fix My Car (07:52)
8. Help Me Find Janette’s P (06:05)
9. Save The Bee (W) (05:59)
10. Next Time (06:10)

⚪️ Disclosure Statement

This record was not submitted as a promo.

 

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