Go straight to track sixteen. Marcel Dettmann's 'Magnet' is the longest cut in this festival selection —7:20— and the slowest on paper: 97 BPM listed, in Db major, inside a grid where almost everything else runs between 134 and 146. The piece comes from '25 Years Cocoon Recordings – Volume Two', the anniversary box of five vinyls and fifteen exclusive tracks Cocoon released this year, and it carries the signature of a Berghain resident who has been behind the decks since the nineties. In a chart built for tents and peak hours, it is the one moment that asks you to drop the revs without releasing the tension.
'Lemon' sets the floor of the range
On the other flank sits Daniel Avery. 'Lemon' (134 BPM, F minor, 5:05) is the lowest tempo in the main block and, at the same time, the first release on the newly launched Delta Park, issued alongside its B-side 'Satisfied'. The release material describes it as a bruising cut channelling the industrial pulse that has always beat beneath Avery's sound, aimed at the last hours of the night; within this selection it works as a hinge between the deep hypnotism of the rest of the programme and something more abrasive.
The third name worth underlining is Slam. 'DRUMTRAX Vol. 3' (6:07, 140 BPM, B minor, on Soma Records) is the second-longest track of the lot, and the 'Vol. 3' in the title already betrays its calling as a tool series: percussion before melody, the kind of cut that holds a long transition without asking for the spotlight.
Around these three, the list lines up twenty cuts from labels like Clergy —appearing twice, with Kabay and Maharti—, SK Eleven, CLR and Planet Rhythm, with just one more anomaly: DJ Dextro's 'Planets and Stars', listed at 92 BPM. Amid such uniform hammering, it is precisely the foreign bodies that take the measure of the whole: when everyone hits the same way, the one who knows when not to hit runs the room.
Sources: Cocoon Recordings · Bandcamp · RA
