VA - New Releases by OnlyBeats - [E-F]

Labels are the real index of this [E-F] volume: forty-one cuts where every catalogue arrives in blocks and shows its hand. The most telling case closes the set: three of the four tracks from Function and Nastia Reigel's 'Devocion' EP on Dekmantel, the Amsterdam house of Thomas Martojo and Casper Tielrooij, born as a club night before becoming a label in 2009 and, from 2013, the Amsterdamse Bos festival. The genre tags give the game away: 'Reverence' is filed as melodic techno, 'Flowstate' as hypnotic trance and 'Orion' as house. That ambiguity is no accident: the project grew from the shared affection of Reigel and David Sumner —Function, raised in New York's rave scene— for the melancholic trance of the early nineties, reread with the weight of modern techno.

From 'Bloom' to the niche catalogues

The other heavyweight is Cercle Records: 'Bloom', by ANNA and Freedom Fighters, appears in two extended versions at 135 BPM in C minor. The Lisbon-based Brazilian, with releases on Afterlife, Kompakt and Mute, crosses paths with Israeli producer Freedom Fighters, active since 2006 on labels like Zenon and Iboga; the single landed in May and marks the volume's peak of melodic tension.

Against those giants, the smaller imprints draw lines just as sharp straight from the tracklist:

• Balkan Connection hands four cuts to Full.K, all between 120 and 121 BPM, rooted in F and built long: 'Intergalactic Mess' stretches to 8:14.
• Zenebona lines up three Emegepe pieces locked at 123 BPM, from 'Progressive Maze' to the block-closing 'Another Galaxy'.
• Where The Shadow Ends holds the organic flank with two Francisco (PT) cuts at 122, 'Licaria' and 'Emera'.

Read this way, the volume works less like a compilation and more like a map of catalogues: each label sets a temperature, and Amsterdam runs hottest.