Opening the ride with 'The Word Becomes Flesh' is a statement in itself: it's the Boards Of Canada cut from 'Inferno' (Warp Records), the album that brought Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin back this year after thirteen years without a studio LP. Five minutes in B-flat minor at 109 BPM that work as a threshold: what follows is a long descent, two valleys and a final climb.
The drop is gradual. 'Offshore', reimagined under the Café Del Mar Music banner, and 'Ultramultra' by Iorie & Sydka ease the pulse down to 98 BPM, and at track five the Ektoplast Remix of 'Nur Noch Hier' hits the first floor: 80 BPM. From there the journey settles into the 100-107 range, with Frequenzy Alchemyst's 'Mirage' — over eight minutes, the longest cut of the batch — as its central plateau, plus one oddity on the sheet: AALEX's 'Forest in the Sky', tagged at 150 BPM, the strangest number in the whole table.
The Kid Loco valley
The second valley arrives at track eleven and carries a proper name: 'Wrong Number' by Kid Loco, the project of Frenchman Jean-Yves Prieur, a punk guitarist in the eighties who went on to become a fixture of French downtempo since 'A Grand Love Story' (1997). Its 78 BPM mark the slowest point of the entire ride, and Felipe Gordon's 'Tezeta' (89 BPM, via Shall Not Fade) stretches that calm one stop further.
From there it's all ascent: 'Nur' at 110, 'Unfolding Road' at 115, the Y-Emre Music remix of 'Ushuaia' holding that tempo, M8's 'El Viento' at 110 and the close with the Marcelo Berges Remix of 'Digui' at 119 BPM, the fastest stretch of the finale. The remarkable part is that this arc is built from eighteen different labels across twenty cuts — only Serafin Audio Imprint and down. repeat — so rather than a catalogue, the list reads like a map of current downtempo: scattered at the source, surprisingly coherent in the listening.
Sources: Wikipedia · Warp Records · AllMusic
