VA - New Releases by OnlyBeats - [M]

Heard front to back, this installment traces an energy curve no DJ would have plotted on purpose: alphabetical chance — every artist files under M — turns it into a journey with memorable detours. Makss opens with 'Got Like', no-nonsense tech house at 130, and MarAxe immediately swerves into the raw techno of Naked Lunch: 'Hardwired' and 'Cloud 9' hammer away at 142, while 'Spirit', at 88, lands as a strangely early breather.

The Dettmann detour

The first big landmark comes with Marcel Dettmann's four cuts on !K7, taken from 'My Own Shadow: Faultline', the follow-up to 'My Own Shadow: Approaching' in a series that, per its own notes, moves away from the pure club context toward a more open, cinematic space. You can hear it: 'Hall Of Mirrors' balances weight and warmth, 'Lower Lodge' rolls reduced with vocal fragments at the edges, and 'Faultline' stays deliberately unresolved. Right after, the opposite swerve: on 'Bad Man', released through Toolroom, Mark Knight and James Hurr hand the spotlight to dancehall icon Cutty Ranks, whose voice becomes the melody over a tech house chassis.

The middle stretch breathes: progressive from Mark Lennon and Matan Caspi, organic house from Martin Lipan and Missfeat, and a conceptual wink from onedotsixtwo, which pairs Mind Echoes' 'Answers' with 'Questions' alongside Togni — both at 120 and anchored in G, one minor, the other major. From there the climb is clear: Mind Static pushes peak-time techno between 140 and 145 on Diverse Rhythm Theory, and Modular Phaze crowns the summit with the 149 BPM hard techno of 'Cyclic Cataclysm' on Mephyst.

The descent is long and kind: Mobile Soul System's minimal cuts hovering around the eight-minute mark, the progressive of Morttagua's 'of Nebadon', and a close on 'Siente La Vida' by Tibetania and MVDI, an afro house roller at 120 that shows up in triplicate, as if the record were insisting on its own moral. Few selections this heterogeneous end with a message this clear.