Only one cut on 'The Workshop Evo One' dares to sit in a major key: 'Desire', Muzungu's opener, spins in C major at 125 BPM while the other four sink into minor territory. That imbalance reads less like an accident than like the record's thesis: light first, introspection after. There is a hidden symmetry too, since 'Walking' also closes at 125, leaving the middle block three beats lower, at 122, like a valley between two crests.
Yost, twice over
The juiciest contrast lies in the names. Muzungu and DJ Christian B arrive as discovery bets, fresh blood with nothing to justify, while Kevin Yost shows up twice carrying the label's history with him: he has said himself that joining I Records is what set his career in motion, after years of self-taught experimenting from the late eighties on a 505 drum machine, and today he plays the vast majority of his dates across Europe. His 'Messing With My Soul', here in its RAW Remaster version, is also the longest cut of the lot: 7:36 against the 5:37 of DJ Christian B's 'Regular Highs', the most compact piece on the record. The veteran takes his time; the newcomer gets straight to the point.
The third axis pits the new against the revisited. Three original productions live alongside two rereadings: that Yost remaster and the extended remix that T.Markakis — a Greek based in Athens with over twenty years behind the decks — delivers on Crew Deep's 'Location', an F minor stretch of 6:50 that talks to the closing 'Walking', in the same key, where Crew Deep and Yost finally meet on the same groove. That the remixed and the remastered end up walking out together says plenty about the workshop idea in the title: here, opposites are not avoided, they are assembled.
Sources: Flow Music · Bandcamp
