Forty cuts and one name that shows up four times: Quivver. Behind the alias is John Graham, the British producer who helped define late-nineties progressive house, a former member of the Tilt production team who has recorded and toured with Hybrid, and the same man who has signed work as Skanna and Space Manoeuvres. When a signature runs through an entire selection like that, the review writes itself: follow his trail and you understand the record.
'Starship Disco', the axis
The centre of gravity is 'Starship Disco', co-signed with Dave Seaman for Global Underground: 125 bpm in C minor and a good seven minutes joining two veterans with real club memory. Seaman was Mixmag's youngest editor and one half of Brothers in Rhythm, the duo that remixed David Bowie, U2 and Michael Jackson; today he runs Selador alongside Steve Parry. Released in May on Global Underground, here it plays like a statement of intent: British-school progressive still has dancefloor pulse.
The counterpoint is 'Cosmic Egg', out on Anjunadeep Explorations: at 5:07 it is the shortest cut of all forty entries, a condensed Quivver in G major at 124 bpm proving the long-progression school also knows how to trim. Two more angles from the same author remain: 'Another Storm', which Mike Rish stretches to 8:39 in D minor for Mango Alley, and Graham's own remix of Miro's 'Paradise' for UV, returning the favour from remixed to remixer.
Around them, the selection backs up the curation: Mango Alley lands six entries, the tempo band barely moves between 120 and 126 bpm, and there are reworks by Hernan Cattaneo with Kevin Di Serna and by Gai Barone. But the real find in this crate-digging exercise is something else: four snapshots of a single career that, three decades after its first steps, still sets the genre's pace.
Sources: Wikipedia (Quivver) · Wikipedia (Seaman) · Beatport
