VA - New Releases by OnlyBeats - [H-J]

Overview

You have to reach the fifth cut of the Ital Tek block to understand what anchors this [H-J] instalment: 'Kill Switch', 160 BPM in G-flat minor, is the central discharge of 'Mind Abandon', the album Alan Myson — as the Planet Mu credits have it — signs under his long-running alias. The ten-track arc demands a full listen: from the title cut, 66 BPM and barely 1:21 long, up to that 160 peak, before dissolving into 'Undertow' and 'Misted', already below 110 BPM. The opener, 'The Ice Is Thin', is described in the release notes as driven almost entirely by live guitar and keyboard, awash in reverb: an unusually human turn after the dense drone of his previous albums and film work.

'Sit in Their Seat': slowing down as a political gesture

The other auteur block lives on Primal Instinct, Chlär's label, which — as Hadone told Keyi Magazine — proposed the project about a year before it materialised. 'Bite the Hand That Feeds You' is five cuts of raw techno parked between 137 and 140 BPM, and its author frames it as a statement against the established order and institutions. Which is why its most eloquent moment is the one that gives up the punch: 'Sit in Their Seat', the penultimate cut, drops to 69 BPM in A minor for 5:18 of contained tension. In a discourse about autonomy, making the most radical gesture a full stop says more than any kick drum could.

Around these two axes orbits the rest of the volume: Hobin Rude's progressive on Mango Alley, Hot Tuneik's long-form cuts for Guateque Music, the minimal of Whoyostro Black. Solid material, but the real conversation happens between Myson and Hadone: two opposite ways of managing intensity — one stacking it up to the point of short-circuit, the other stripping it away until it unsettles.