Tim Reaper: Real Name, the Jungle Revival, and Why 2026 Is His Year

Tim Reaper is the stage name of Ed Alloh, a London DJ and producer who has become one of the two or three central figures of the current jungle revival. That much answers the question most people arrive with. The more interesting story is what sits behind the name: a self-taught junglist who found the music on a covermount CD, taught himself production off web forums, built a record label into an institution, and in 2024 put jungle on Hyperdub for the first time in the label's twenty-year history. This is a working DJ and producer's guide to who Tim Reaper is, what he has actually built, and why 2026 finds him at his peak.

Tim Reaper at a glance

• Real name: Ed Alloh, confirmed in Beatportal's cover story on the artist.
• From: London, usually described as an East London junglist.
• Genre: jungle, pushed into hardcore, darkside and jungle-tekno rather than pure nostalgia.
• Day job: he has worked as a web developer, including for NTS Radio, alongside the music.
• How he found it: an Andy C mix CD given away on the cover of Mixmag, around GCSE age.
• Label: he runs Future Retro London, which won DJ Mag's Best of British Breakthrough Label award in 2021.
• Sublabel: he co-founded Globex Corp with Dwarde in 2016.
• Landmark album: "In Full Effect" with Kloke, released on Hyperdub on 20 September 2024, the label's first ever jungle album.
• Prolificacy: reporting cites roughly 45 tracks released and around 70 shows played in a single year, 2023.
• Recent work: a four-track EP with Fracture and the FR050 compilation, both landing around 3 October 2025.
• 2026 live: dates include London, Dekmantel Selectors in Croatia, Bristol and Manchester.
• The birth-date question: the "17 July 1993" figure circulating online traces only to a self-reported Reddit AMA, so we do not state it as hard fact.

Who is Tim Reaper?

Tim Reaper is a London DJ and producer, real name Ed Alloh, and he is one of the key figures in jungle's return to the centre of British club music. If Nia Archives, jungle's other 2026 headliner, is the melodic, vocal, mainstream-crossover face of the revival, Reaper is the engine room. He makes fast, breakbeat-driven music rooted in the 1993 to 1995 era of the genre and drives it hard into hardcore, darkside and jungle-tekno territory. He runs a label that has become a reference point for the new-school scene, and he has spent more than a decade doing the unglamorous work of keeping jungle alive and moving it forward.

The short version of why he matters: he is regarded as one of the artists most responsible for jungle's revival across the late 2010s and early 2020s, both as a producer and as a curator. Plenty of people make good jungle records. Reaper makes a torrent of them, and then builds the infrastructure to release everyone else's too.

Tim Reaper's real name, and the birth-date myth

Tim Reaper's real name is Ed Alloh. It is confirmable in a reputable outlet: Beatportal's cover story frames his origin story as the moment "London web developer Ed Alloh becomes Tim Reaper." A 2021 feature in Loud And Quiet refers to him by his first name, Ed, which corroborates it. So on the headline question there is a clear, sourced answer, which is more than can be said for a lot of underground producers whose civilian identities are guessed at rather than documented.

Where we want to be honest, and where the pages that currently rank for his name are not, is the birth date. Wikipedia's stub entry lists his birth as 17 July 1993, and that figure has been copied around the web as though it were established fact. Its only support there is a self-reported Reddit AMA, not the kind of documentation we would print as hard fact. What the 2021 interviews make clear is only that he was in his twenties at that point, which is as far as the reliable record takes us. It is a small thing, but it is exactly the kind of small thing that separates a profile you can trust from a page that scraped Wikipedia and moved on.

The web-developer detail colours everything else. Reaper has held down a day job building websites, including work for NTS Radio, while producing at a rate that would be a full-time output on its own. It puts him in the lineage of British dance musicians who built their catalogues in evenings and weekends rather than in a funded studio bubble.

From an Andy C covermount CD to FL Studio

The origin story is almost too neat. Reaper found jungle through an Andy C mix CD given away free on the cover of Mixmag, which he picked up around GCSE age, roughly fifteen, and became obsessed. That is the sort of small, analogue accident, a magazine covermount in the pre-streaming era, that used to route a teenager's whole life into a genre.

What happened next matters for anyone who thinks they have missed their window. There was no local scene, no mentor, no crew handing down knowledge. He taught himself through YouTube, jungle web forums and MySpace, with no formal musical training whatsoever before he started producing. Speaking to Beatportal, he put it plainly: "I had no musical experience at all before I learned to produce." He told Loud And Quiet that "when you have no one to show you the way, you have to guide your own path and discover stuff yourself." That is the whole ethos in a sentence, and it is why his story lands with bedroom producers so hard.

He works in FL Studio, the default first DAW for a generation of self-taught producers, and he began making jungle around 2009 to 2010, with Resident Advisor noting that his first track landed in 2010 when he was still a teenager. So by 2026 he is not some overnight beneficiary of a trend. He has been at this for the better part of fifteen years, most of them long before jungle was fashionable again, which is precisely why he has the standing he does now that it is.

Future Retro London: building an institution

If you want to understand why Reaper is more than a prolific producer, look at Future Retro London. It began during the pandemic lockdown, not as a label but as an events and club-night brand, and when the clubs were shut it evolved into a record label instead. That pivot turned out to be one of the more consequential moves in the modern scene. In 2021 Future Retro London won the Breakthrough Label award at DJ Mag's Best of British awards, a rare piece of establishment recognition for a genuinely underground operation.

The label's model is distinctive. It runs a collaboration-series format that pairs Reaper with a rotating cast of contemporary jungle artists, and it is instantly recognisable for its Simpsons-themed artwork, which is where the Globex Corp name comes from as well. That sublabel, a project Reaper co-founded with Dwarde in 2016, predates Future Retro London and shows the instinct was there early: build vehicles for the music, not just tracks. The collaboration series documents the whole new-school scene rather than promoting one name.

Reaper has been explicit about the intent. Speaking to UKF, he described wanting "to build a reference point, showcasing as many different names in our scene as possible." That is curator language, not producer language. In the same conversation he framed how different the present moment is from jungle's lean years: "back in the day, if there was one jungle event taking place, the chances of there being any other jungle event on the same night was just impossible." The label is his answer to that scarcity.

The scale of it is worth stating plainly. UKF reporting has Future Retro London releasing 33 projects in a single year, 2023, with an ambition to platform seventy or more new-school jungle artists. That is not a boutique label putting out a record a quarter. It is a piece of scene infrastructure, closer to a platform than a traditional imprint, and it slots naturally alongside the other institutions that have carried UK breakbeat music forward, from the UK drum and bass platform DnB Allstars to Boiler Room, the underground's global stage.

"In Full Effect" with Kloke: jungle's first album on Hyperdub

Here is the correction that the pages ranking for his name mostly get wrong. "In Full Effect" is not a Tim Reaper solo album. It is a collaborative record by Tim Reaper and Kloke, and presenting it as anything else misrepresents both artists. It was released on Hyperdub, catalogue HDBCD068D, on 20 September 2024, and its significance is hard to overstate: it was Hyperdub's first ever full jungle album.

Hyperdub matters here. This is the label Kode9 built, one of the most important imprints in British electronic music across roughly two decades, and one that had never released a jungle album until Reaper and Kloke. That the honour went to a self-taught junglist who came up on forums says a lot about how far the revival has travelled. The record runs eight tracks across roughly forty-five minutes, with highlights including "Blood Pressure," "Wildstyle" and "Impasse."

Kloke is a Melbourne-based producer, and the collaboration has a good story behind it. The two met in person during Reaper's 2023 Australia tour, and that meeting seeded the album. It is a reminder that jungle's revival is not a purely British phenomenon, and that Reaper's touring has become a way of finding collaborators as much as playing shows. The critical reception was strongly positive. Resident Advisor called the album "a triumph" and wrote that "over eight deftly sequenced tracks, the album's propulsive percussion and spacey, skewed atmospherics balance heavy-duty engineering with earnest eruptions of feeling." The same review made the broader point that "as jungle's cultural influence and dance floor popularity continues to rise, In Full Effect serves as a potent reminder that fast, breakbeat-driven music is just as emotionally and creatively fertile as ever."

That last line is the crux of Reaper's whole project. The lazy read of a genre revival is that it is nostalgia, a re-run of old sounds for people who missed them first time round. The point of "In Full Effect," and of Reaper's output in general, is that jungle still has somewhere to go. He told Beatportal he believes the music "can do almost anything it wants to," and the Hyperdub album is the closest thing to proof.

Prolific to a fault: the numbers behind 2023 to 2026

The single most striking thing about Tim Reaper, once you get past the real name, is the sheer volume. UKF and Junglist Network reporting cites roughly 45 tracks released and around 70 shows performed in one year, 2023, while running a label that put out 33 projects in the same period, and, for at least part of his career, while holding a day job. It is an output that most artists would spread across half a decade.

That prolificacy is central to who he is. It is why he has become a reference point so quickly, and why he can put out records on respected outside labels including Lobster Theremin and Sherelle's Hooversound without any of it slowing the flow of Future Retro London material. He is not releasing occasional statement records and waiting for the reaction. He is a constant presence, and a constant presence is what a genre needs when it is trying to build momentum after years in the wilderness.

There is a live dimension to the numbers too. In 2023 he toured Australia, the same run of touring that produced the Kloke collaboration. He told Loud And Quiet that "having the live crowd to react to the music you [are] playing, and being able to bounce off that is an experience that's quite unmatched." He has never been a studio recluse. The records and the rooms feed each other, and both run at a pace that is hard to credit.

Tim Reaper vs Nia Archives: two faces of the revival

The revival has distinct wings, and the clearest way to understand Reaper is against his most prominent peer. Nia Archives is the crossover face of jungle in 2026: vocal-led, emotionally direct, comfortable on festival main stages and in the mainstream press. Reaper is the underground counterweight. His jungle is ruffneck and tekno-leaning, archival in its knowledge but forward in its intent, and his cultural weight comes as much from the label and the collaboration series as from any single crossover moment.

Neither is more legitimate than the other, and that is the point. A healthy scene needs both the artist who takes the sound onto radio and the artist who deepens the catalogue and platforms the next thirty producers. Reaper told Loud And Quiet that "it does feel like jungle's having an 'in' period," adding, "I think you should make the most out of it." He has made the most out of it by out-working everyone and building the plumbing the revival runs on. Nia Archives took jungle to the charts. Reaper made sure there was a scene deep enough to matter once it got there.

Both belong to a wider ferment in UK breakbeat culture, one that also takes in Bou and the jump-up wing of UK bass, the new-school breakbeat collaborations around Facile, Flash and E4teen, and the wave of Bristol's UK bass breakouts. The revival is not one artist or one sound. It is an ecosystem, and Reaper is one of the people who built it.

Recent releases: Fracture, FR050 and the 2026 run

The catalogue has kept moving right up to the present. In October 2025 Reaper released APHAFR001, a four-track collaborative jungle EP with Fracture, one of the more respected names in the wider breakbeat world. The tracklist runs "Dancing Toms," "Whipcrack," "Operator" and "Lickshot," and it landed on 3 October 2025. Around the same date Future Retro London put out FR050, a various-artists compilation marking the label's fiftieth release and featuring Tim Reaper VIP remixes. Fifty catalogue numbers for a label that started as a lockdown events brand tells its own story about how the project has scaled.

Into 2026 the pace has not let up. His streaming profiles list further releases across the year, though aggregated data can be imprecise on exact titles and dates, so the honest thing is to point readers to his Bandcamp and Discogs for the confirmed list. This is an artist releasing constantly, on his own label and with collaborators, and showing no sign of easing off.

Where to see Tim Reaper in 2026

The live schedule is dense in 2026. Listings point to a London date at The Old Blue Last in early August, a run at Dekmantel Selectors in Tisno, Croatia across 20 to 24 August, a Bristol show at a secret location on 26 September, and a Manchester date on 17 October. He has also been listed for London club nights including FOLD and The Cause, which puts him squarely on the map of FOLD and London's club map and among the acts worth tracking across the best London clubs in 2026.

A note of caution that applies to any touring artist: aggregator listings drift and festival slates fill in closer to the date. Treat the dates above as a snapshot from mid-2026 and confirm each one on Resident Advisor, DICE or the promoter's own page before you buy. If you are new to navigating this end of the scene, our guides to how to get Boiler Room tickets in 2026 and to the future of London club culture are useful companions to a night out at this kind of show.

Five tracks to start with

If you are coming to Tim Reaper cold, the "In Full Effect" album with Kloke is the obvious front door, and within it "Blood Pressure," "Wildstyle" and "Impasse" show the range from heavy-duty engineering to the more atmospheric end of his writing. From there the Fracture EP, APHAFR001, is the clearest recent statement of his collaborative instinct, with "Whipcrack" a good way in. Beyond that, dig into the Future Retro London and Globex Corp catalogues on Bandcamp, because the point of Reaper is not any single track. It is the volume, the consistency and the sense of a scene being documented in real time.

Why Tim Reaper matters

Tim Reaper matters because he is proof that the underground can produce its own institutions. He took a teenage obsession sparked by a free magazine CD, taught himself production with no scene to lean on, and turned it into a body of work prolific enough to change a genre's momentum, plus a label that platforms the people coming up behind him. He put jungle on Hyperdub for the first time. He does the archival, unglamorous work of keeping a scene deep, not just visible, and he did nearly all of it while a lot of the world was not paying jungle any attention at all. Now that it is, Reaper is not a beneficiary of the trend so much as one of the reasons it exists. That is why 2026, with the shows stacked up and the releases still pouring out, reads as his year.

FAQ

What is Tim Reaper's real name?

His real name is Ed Alloh. He is a London DJ and producer who records and performs as Tim Reaper, and the name is confirmed in Beatportal's cover story on him, which frames his origin as "London web developer Ed Alloh becomes Tim Reaper." A 2021 Loud And Quiet feature also refers to him by his first name, Ed.

How old is Tim Reaper and when was he born?

His exact birth date is not reliably documented. The "17 July 1993" figure circulating online traces only to a self-reported Reddit AMA cited by a Wikipedia stub, so we do not state it as hard fact. Interviews from 2021 describe him as being in his twenties.

Where is Tim Reaper from?

London, England. He is usually described as an East London junglist, and that London grounding runs through both his music and his label, Future Retro London, whose name nods directly to the city.

What genre is Tim Reaper?

Jungle: fast, breakbeat-driven music rooted in the 1993 to 1995 era. Rather than treating it as nostalgia, he pushes it into hardcore, darkside and jungle-tekno territory, which is why he is seen as moving the genre forward rather than simply reviving it.

What label does Tim Reaper run?

Future Retro London. He built it from a lockdown events and club-night brand into a full record label, and it won DJ Mag's Best of British Breakthrough Label award in 2021. It is known for a collaboration-series format and Simpsons-themed artwork, and it has released dozens of projects a year.

Is "In Full Effect" a Tim Reaper solo album?

No. It is a collaborative album by Tim Reaper and Kloke, released on Hyperdub on 20 September 2024. It was Hyperdub's first ever jungle album, runs eight tracks across roughly forty-five minutes, and was widely praised, with Resident Advisor calling it "a triumph."

Who is Kloke?

Kloke is a Melbourne-based producer. He and Tim Reaper met in person during Reaper's 2023 Australia tour, and that meeting led to the collaborative album "In Full Effect" on Hyperdub. It is a good example of how Reaper's touring has become a way of finding new creative partners across the world, not just a way of playing shows.

How did Tim Reaper get into jungle?

Through an Andy C mix CD given away free on the cover of Mixmag, which he picked up around GCSE age and became obsessed with. With no local scene or mentor, he taught himself production through YouTube, jungle web forums and MySpace, having had no formal musical training beforehand.

Is Tim Reaper touring in 2026?

Yes. Listed 2026 dates include The Old Blue Last in London in August, Dekmantel Selectors in Tisno, Croatia across 20 to 24 August, a Bristol show on 26 September and a Manchester date on 17 October, plus London club nights including FOLD and The Cause. Confirm the latest listings on Resident Advisor or DICE before booking.

Why is Tim Reaper important to jungle?

He is regarded as one of the key figures of jungle's late-2010s and early-2020s revival, both as an extraordinarily prolific producer, with roughly 45 tracks and 70 shows in 2023 alone, and as a label boss platforming the new-school scene through Future Retro London. He also put jungle on Hyperdub for the first time.

Facts in this piece were checked against current sources in August 2026. If something has moved since, that is the nature of a living scene.