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The profile · researched 18 September 2026
The Beat Vault and the free door: Jelsen's slow build out of Manchester
Jelsen is a Manchester producer and DJ who co-runs the house label OBP Music, self-releases almost everything under his own name, and has spent four years moving from stripped-back minimal house towards vocal-led garage. His newest music arrived on OBP's Summer Sampler on 31 July 2026, and two dates are currently on sale.
Manchester, and a label built to have somewhere to play
Jelsen is based in Manchester and works at the smaller end of the British house circuit, where the same person tends to make the record, run the night and sell the ticket. His own listings describe a minimal house sound that runs from feel-good to darker and more stripped back, which is a fair summary of the first few years of the catalogue and an increasingly incomplete one for the recent work.
The rooms are the honest measure of where the career sits. His booking profile names 93 Feet East in London, The Loft MCR and the Progress Centre in Manchester, and a show in Paris. These are club capacities rather than festival stages, and the billing is usually shared. The same profile records support from Jamie Jones and Josh Baker — the sort of DJ-to-DJ backing that moves a track through other people's sets long before it reaches a press desk.
The other half of the job is OBP Music, a Manchester house label and collective that Jelsen co-founded and where he lists himself, without ceremony, as beat provider. OBP puts on parties in Manchester that its own listings describe as sold out, and it releases the music of the people who play them. Running a label as a booking engine is not unusual in the city, but it does explain the shape of the discography: most of it is self-issued, and much of it is dated to the year it was road-tested rather than the year it was signed.
The records, 2022 to 2024
The Back On It EP appeared on 7 January 2022, two tracks — the title cut at 6:53 and Special Request at 6:36 — presented as favourites produced during the previous year, which puts the start of the writing back into 2021. Both sit in deep house and tech house territory, long enough to mix properly and structured for that purpose rather than for a streaming playlist.
In My Feels followed on 23 September 2022, again two tracks: In My Feels at 7:11 and Inside The Garage, a mashup, at 6:52. The release note is instructive — the pair had been getting a good reception in recent sets, so they were put out. That is the working order for this catalogue. Material gets tested in a booth in Manchester, and the Bandcamp page is where it lands afterwards.
The Beat Vault: Chapter One, released 31 January 2024, is the most substantial thing under his own name so far: eight tracks built from six titles, with Just Dance and Jacksonville each given a vocal and a dub mix. The framing is a year-end vault of the tracks that carried 2023 — North West, It Takes Two, Technicality, My Soul Is House — and the vocal-and-dub pairing is a DJ's habit rather than an album-maker's. A dub is something to mix out of. Chapter One implies more chapters; none has yet followed.
The turn towards the vocal
Something changed across 2025. Movin' On, out on 14 February 2025, was described by Jelsen himself as pure garage house — swing-heavy drums, a rolling bassline, a vocal hook — and the genre tags on the release added garage house and UK garage to a list that had previously been anchored in deep house, tech house and minimal.
Move Your Hips, released 7 August 2025, went further. It is the first release to carry a credited featured vocalist, Angelio, and the first to come with a radio edit: 4:01 alongside the 6:45 club version. Cutting a version to radio length is a small technical decision that signals a larger one. A producer who has spent three years making seven-minute tools for his own sets is now making something intended to travel without him in the room.
The wider Bandcamp catalogue fills in the working method around these releases — Groove School, Expand, a Take Control rework with Joel Michael, a Promises mashup, and edits of Ain't Nothin' Goin On But The Rent and Coro's Can't Let You Go. Edits and mashups are set furniture: made for a specific night, released because they worked.
OBP Music and the collective around it
The most recent Jelsen music is not on a Jelsen release at all. OBP's Summer Sampler, issued on 31 July 2026, gives one track each to eight artists on the label — Strike-E, Simmo, Jude Lenihan, Stocked Up, Malachy, Tate, Yoke, and Jelsen, whose contribution is Sunday Service at 5:47. Priced at £8 and running to roughly forty-eight minutes, it functions as a roster document: this is who OBP is now, and this is what the parties sound like.
The label collaborations run both ways. House It Up is a Jelsen and Simmo record on OBP, and Malachy — another sampler artist — has appeared on Jelsen's own billings. The overlap between the record sleeve and the flyer is close to total, which is the point of a collective operating at this size.
OBP takes demos publicly and handles its own management enquiries. There is no distributor story, no sync deal, no press cycle. What exists instead is a catalogue that has been added to steadily since early 2022 and a run of Manchester nights that have kept selling.
Where it stands, September 2026
As of September 2026 the position is modest and clearly documented. Sunday Service, from 31 July 2026, is the newest released music; before that, the last record under his own name alone was Move Your Hips in August 2025. That gap suggests a year weighted towards label work and bookings rather than solo output, and Chapter Two of the Beat Vault has not materialised.
The live side is live but small. The Skiddle profile carries 108 followers and two dates on sale, which is the entire announced diary. There is no national press coverage of the act, no review in the dance monthlies, and no festival billing that could be verified — a claimed appearance in Gottwood's 2026 second-phase announcement does not appear in that lineup. What does exist is a public record of the work itself: full-length set recordings posted after the fact, dated release pages, and a label sampler with eight names on it.
For an act at this stage the useful signal is not a chart position but the consistency of the output and the identity of the people playing it. Four years of releases, a co-founded label with a working roster, and DJ support from Jamie Jones and Josh Baker is a foundation rather than a peak.
The show, now
A Jelsen booking is a club DJ set, not a production show: decks, a small room and a long stretch of time rather than staging or visuals. The Manchester dates are typically shared bills at intimate venues — on 6 June 2025 he played Ramona in Manchester on a night billed as Jelsen VS Jentzen, with Malachy and Lily-CD in support, free entry and capacity limited, so the room filled on a first-come basis rather than a ticket count. The OBP nights follow the same pattern: the label's 11 February 2023 date at The Loft MCR put Jelsen alongside MADVILLA, and his full set from that night is posted publicly, which is the clearest guide to the shape of the thing — extended mixing across seven-minute records rather than a sequence of short peaks. The material is drawn largely from his own catalogue plus edits and mashups he has made for the purpose, with the dub mixes from The Beat Vault: Chapter One functioning as transitions; since 2025 the sets have leaned harder into garage house swing, following Movin' On and Move Your Hips. Two dates are currently listed as on sale through Skiddle. No published reviews of recent shows could be verified, and the available fan record is the set recordings themselves rather than written coverage.
Researched from skiddle.com · jelsen.bandcamp.com · jelsen.bandcamp.com · jelsen.bandcamp.com · jelsen.bandcamp.com · jelsen.bandcamp.com · jelsen.bandcamp.com · obpmusic.bandcamp.com