Five of the thirty cuts on 'Golden Selection' carry Giuliano Rodrigues' name, and that's not founder vanity: it's the key to reading the whole thing. dublucid, the label the Brazilian producer launched in 2024 as the endpoint of a chain of his own imprints — Flowing Movement Music in 2012, DUBGIU in 2020, Afterdub in 2023 — bills itself as a creative hub for the global dub techno community, and this selection works as its most explicit statement of intent to date.
The tracklist backs up the editorial line. Thirteen of the thirty cuts sit in raw, deep, hypnotic techno territory, and the titles give the lineage away: Pedro Clapp's 'Stereo Dub', the slowest track here at 117 BPM, and Alexander Siva's 'Patchwork Dub' are card-carrying dub techno, echo and texture over impact. Around that core orbit seven melodic house & techno productions, three deep house cuts, three minimal ones and just four peak-time excursions. The exception that proves the rule is Jules Vaya's 'Into the Light', firing at 140 BPM for over nine minutes: the only moment the label allows itself to sprint.
The curator inside the record
Rodrigues shows up on the opener 'Sonic Veil' alongside GLNO, on 'Metalizado', on 'Hypnosis' and on 'Acid Birds', nine and a half minutes of the compilation's most acid-leaning side. His 'I Can't Believe' also arrives reworked by Klartraum, one of the record's two remixes together with Francesco Tamburrano's take on Treufeldt's 'Underworld'.
With over 430 tracks and 150 artists published in barely two years, by the label's own count, dublucid no longer behaves like a personal project but like an ecosystem: names repeating here, such as TRXPS or VOICEOVER — who closes the record with 'Stellar Frequency Drift' — point to a stable roster. 'Golden Selection' portrays a young label that already knows exactly how it sounds.
Sources: Dublucid Records · Bandcamp
