There's an odd, gutsy decision sitting at track four of this volume: after three melodic house cuts running between 122 and 125 BPM, 'The Fall' by Yannek Maunz, carried by Johanson's voice, slams the brakes down to 81 BPM. Heard in sequence, it plays like a false ending twenty minutes in — the record lets go of your hand right when you thought you knew where it was headed.
Before that drop, the opening stretch is deceptively conventional. Zymo's 'Magic Woods' opens in a thick-aired F minor, and Jickow's 'Le Paradis' already hits the tempo ceiling of all fourteen cuts: 125 BPM in second position, like a player showing their cards early. 'Atma', in the Night Vision treatment by CLOSEFLY and Kolya Liner, stretches the tension past the seven-minute mark before the plunge.
The valley of 'Before Laying Down'
Rebuilding falls to the Afro house cuts: Deniz Kabu's 'Bezirci' relights the pulse at 124 BPM and 'Hulk' — L-EX with Frank Sonic — doubles down with more muscular percussion. But the true emotional core sits at track nine: 'Before Laying Down' by Dexter Curtin and Marcus Jahn, a Leipzig duo with a track record on labels like Manual Music, is the longest piece on the record (8:17) and the slowest after 'The Fall': deep house at 118 BPM, a second breath placed exactly where a long set would ask for one.
The final stretch climbs back through the E-flat minor of 'Chopped Up' and holds the most storied milestone of the lot: the Re/Vision of 'Heroes', the ME & her cut voiced by Sutja Gutiérrez that first appeared in 2023 on Family Piknik Music and finds a second life here. From there the descent is graceful: No Day After's 'Rodopia' returns the record to the exact F minor where it all began — a symmetry hard to read as accidental — and Marc Lenz's remix of manZoni's 'Groov'it', with Apostoli Floyd, signs off in a progressive key. Fourteen cuts that play like a single set: calculated drops, one deep valley, and a way home through the same tonal door it left by.
Sources: Shazam · Bandcamp
