Picks Of The Week (18.11.23

1. Various Artists - Darjeeling 💎 [High Tea Music]

Recommended if you like: Only the finest flavours of DnB newcomers

Babe, wake up, a new High Tea compilation dropped! Well, it dropped last week already, but I was too knackered from travelling to finish this piece then, so please just act like it came out this week! You surely know the drill by now, but just in case you don't: I'll give 3 of these wonderful artists and their tunes a bit of a special spotlight, and will recap the rest of it at the end. Let's go!

Pick 1: Natty Lou, Nes Mburu - Mi Nawe (Tengu Remix)
Recommended if you like: 4x4 carnage!

Let's start our tri-to-quad-annually High Tea appreciation session with a look at the man that's been tearing up all kinds of dancefloors with his heavy-hitting, often four-to-the-floor-featuring beats: Tengu!

The man behind the relentlessly upbeat pounders is Brighton-based Chris Merison, but it wasn't always like this. Dun dun dun. For the whole story we have to go back to the distant, bygone era of 2015. Chris was living it up in the Liquid Lounge club in Worthing, just outside Brighton, where he stumbled upon a fellow music enjoyer that seemed to share his enthusiasm for the production of it: Kenny McKay! Relatively shortly after, they started working together under the Tengu name. With early support from Kiss, both FM and Fresh, and Rinse, only FM, they laid waste to the Bassline and Deep-, Bass- and House-House scenes with one banger after another. After their first real breakthrough, their tune Panther on multi-genre label YosH's "YosH Pit" compilation, they jumped from one career highlight to another on DJ Zinc's Bingo Bass, Crucast and even UKF in the years after. However, the initial passion seemed to have worn off a bit. Sure Chris marched on solo with the name after Kenny left the project (turns out that you don't need two to Tengu), but even he admitted to have become a little bored with the genre(s) in 2019.

Among a lot of other noteworthy side things, like starting to work for (and with) YosH, starting his own self-release label TNGU and launching a Patreon, he was also trying out this wild thing called Drum and Bass. First experiments in the D and the B started being mentioned in mid-2019, but Chris would still try work hard to keep up the releases on the general Bassy music front, with the culmination of that effort being his "20 tunes for 2020" project, in which he dropped a tune off his Coming In Tough debut album on YosH every single day from the 1st January on. With that out of the way, Chris was spending more and more time in DnB land, but he kept them bangers all to himself until DJ Phantasy convinced him that his tunes were ready for showtime, even offering him a debut release on his label DnB Vibes in late 2020. From there on, the Tengu DnBeast was fully unleashed, leading to releases on Macky Gee's Down2Earth, YANA, Korsakov, Viper, High Tea and DeVice, collaborations with AL/SO, Ben Rolo and Maddy V and continued support from the likes of Pendulum and Andy C. Especially when he started letting loose the 4x4 goose that had been lying dormant inside of him.

Continuing on from the successes of his bootleg of Drugs In Amsterdam and AL/SO collaboration Chris Eubank, Chris decided to al/so take the Swahili-vocalist-powered original stomper from Natty Lou and Nes Mburu to the four-by-fourth dimension! That's right, not only does Chris opt for a large, wall-of-bass style buildup hype machine, we are also bubbily head-bobbing to a beautifully bouncy 4x4 switchup that he has very nicely cooked up for us, with the powerful love-themed vocals echoing on throughout, before switching it into a rather large syncopated version of it all. Huge tune, in other words!

Pick 2: Rekium - Find You 💎
Recommended if you like: CaitC, METHOD, Rex Hooligan

After this classic wall-of-text I now want to talk about an artist I know literally nothing about - and not for lack of trying. Koen Van Rijn, in the DnB world now known as Rekium, is basically an enigma at the time of writing. A Koenigma, one might say. His name is common enough that I have found like 3 other different Koen brothers that could be him but probably aren't and all his Rekium-related socials have only been created in September of this year, with literally none of them having even a shred of info about him. Oh well!

All the more unbelievable that our first Hidden Gem Of The Week™️'s debut release Find You is as incredible as it is! It's got everything I'm looking for in an uplifting banger coming out of the High Tea camp: A super lovely vocal, paired with a melody so catchy you cannot escape its wonderfulness, placed on top of a high-energy, even-higher-delight synth and drum backdrop. What puts it over the top for me personally is that moment halfway through the second part of the drop, when Rekium brings the whole call-and-response between the vocal and the synth back with full force for a stunning finale. Not to mention that magnificent melody mixup in the second drop! Genuinely fantastic.

Pick 3: R!DM, Gideon Luciana - Identity 💎
Recommended if you like: BCee, Command Strange, Syren Rivers

For the longest time, Vincent Tuk found his communital and creative calling in both hospitality, as an entrepreneurial concept developer for the industry (and no, not the label!), and religion, as a devout Christian, but this year he decided to use his experience as a sound engineer for his church to pursue another path: Music Production! Right in the middle of cozy Dutch Gemeente Roosendaal, Vincent has been closely working together with all sorts of gospel and worship (and no, not the artist collective!) inspired vocalists to create a fusion of drum and bass and religion the world hasn't seen since Baptazia's Super Sundays. Just, more analog-sounding, way more liquid and with fewer MCs spitting filth. While he is still very much at the start of his journey as R!DM, the fact that his debut release I found you in March of this year got immediately picked up by a whole bunch of playlists and even some editorials is definitely a good omen I'd say.

For his follow-up Identity, he enlisted the help of Rotterdam-based singer/songwriter Gideon Luciana, who you might remember from a couple singing competitions like the Dutch version of The Voice or The Talent Scout, which he actually won this year! His heartfelt, soulful message of self-worth, -actualisation and, well, identity, is elevated to new heights by Vincent's precisely composed arrangement of dreamy pianos, funky bass guitars, soothing synths and swiftly moving drums. Simply splendid!

The Rest
Of course we've got a whole bunch more great stuff to ho along with these three shining picks! Liquid enjoyers will be satisfied to hear that both Danish up-and-comer Redemptive with his lovely roller Good Times and Estonian Swiss Army Man Rex Hooligan with his absolutely gorgeous anthem Now & Then, featuring the lush vocals of the one and only Zoe Moon, have delivered only the best of the best. More into a skanking mood? Don't worry, noone other than Quoone and Houndeye (Huoondeye) are back with the vibey chug-chug-chugga Follow Me and intergenerational bad boi duo Drum Dad & Bass Boy brought THE HYPE. Yes, the hype! Oh, want some loveliness instead? Alright, good thing that Finnish super talent Howlan went all-out again with his newest gem Find You and KNGHT went all-in on the emotional aspects of his songwriting, with some rather cathartic syncopation to boot.

In other words, yet another glimpse into the wide world of talented newcomers and all-around underrated artists.

2. BULC - Solar 💎 [Selfreleased]

Recommended if you like: Jon Tho, Circumference, Zombie Cats

Now that the bulc of the review section is done, how about one more Hidden Gem Of The Week™️ to finish things off for this week? And yes, this one was actually released this week, get off my back about this already!

As you might have already figured out by that exquisite, high-effort pun right at the start of this section, our second pick for this week is BULC's debut release (!) Solar. But wait, where did this high quality output (spoiler I guess) suddenly come from, you ask? Well, to figure that out we have to turn back the clocks, to the distant lands of a couple years ago. You see, Mathies van den Bulck, BULC's real life alias (you can see where he got the artist name from), has actually been creating wonderful bleeps and bloops since he was a mere 14 years of age! Growing up in Hulst in (old) Zealand and inspired by the likes of Flume, Kygo and Martin Garrix, Mathies got his start into this whole music thing as MTHS in 2019-ish. After producing his first dolphintastic banger, he started venturing out into the worlds of House, Bass and Future, and Dubstep, with DnB fortunately shortly following in 2020, even if only on his second SoundCloud account. With the graduation from his Music Producer studies at Albeda College also came the graduation of his DnB productions from second to first account, just under a new name: BULC!

And that's where his debut track Solar comes in again! Seriously well-produced, even when compared to established artists in the scene, with a hand not just for pure sound design, as heard on these absolutely mind-bending synth plucks, but also for the overall musicality of it all. Dark and brooding waves of warm bass underneath smoothly rolling, techy drums, with some distorted stabs giving them that extra punch, delightful synths looping on and on in the background, atmospheric sounds to die for, unexpected yet perfectly fitting rhythmic switchups - it's almost unfair how good this is!

If this debut is anything to go by, BULC will bring us a whole lot of joy in the next couple of years. Amazing!

Other deep and techy things from this week:

DIVICIOUX - Don't Know Why
Daptif - Fast Reality 💎
switch/case - DXM EP 💎
Vortex, Dub Ten - Diffusion 💎
Monika - Radio People EP
Aaron Payne - Silver Linings / Fix-hate
Task Horizon - Shrink Ray (Phace Remix)
Various Artists - Incurzion Remixed 2023