VA - New Releases by OnlyBeats - [T]

Overview

Nineteen labels share this instalment, yet two of them claim more than a third of the ground: RADHAM Records fields nine Tim Hanmann cuts, and Permanent Vacation five from Teen Daze with Pacific Coliseum. When a VA tilts like that, it stops being a shop window and becomes an exercise in catalogue reading: each block works as a statement of editorial line.

Munich in major keys

The Permanent Vacation case is the juiciest. The Munich label run by Benjamin Fröhlich and Tom Bioly has been blurring the borders between disco, house and electronica since 2006, and its block here fits that brief to the millimetre: deep house between 120 and 132 BPM, mostly in major keys ('Distort The Colour' in E major, 'Rise And Fall' in D, 'Music2001' in A), sunny down to the track titles. The detail that seals it: Teen Daze and Pacific Coliseum are the same person, Canadian producer Jamison Isaak, duetting with himself — the texture-minded producer in conversation with his Balearic dancefloor alias.

RADHAM makes its point without any outside history: its block arrives with 'Space Traveler (Intro)' and 'Nature of Reason (Outro)', a full album arc embedded in the compilation. Organic house and downtempo between 81 and 122 BPM, with four cuts running past the eight-minute mark ('The Sunset in Crimea', 'Moonblan', 'Welcome to My Universe', 'Andromeda'). A label that thinks in long-form listening, not singles.

Around them, identities drawn in a single stroke:

• Knee Deep In Sound, the British label Hot Since 82 founded in 2014, sends two TVRNER cuts at 125 BPM: no-frills club house, true to the imprint's name.
• Autektone opens the set at the very top with T78's 140 BPM trance on 'Tornado', the polar opposite of RADHAM's 81 BPM outro.
• Get Physical shows up with a single card, Touzani's tech house cut 'Soave' — enough to recognise the pulse.

Read this way, the logos matter less than the handwriting: every label writes in its own, and this tracklist lays them all out on the same table.