Droog’s label Culprit has been quietly going about its business over the last year or so, cooking up plenty of slow burning house from the likes of M A N I K, Lee Foss and Hot Natured. For this release, the LA stable turn to D-Town boy Lee Curtiss and the UK’s Leftroom boss Matt Tolfrey for their input and what results is the label’s freakiest and most dancefloor outing to date. It also counts as another goal in the ongoing vocal revolution (Troxler, Art Department, James Teej, Soul Clap are all at it now) as Tolfrey’s voice is woven throughout the course of the one original track, ‘Candy’.

Away from the bubbling, contained, sultry sonic soups which have been previous Culprit records, ‘Candy’ is a much busier affair, built on a rasping, freewheeling coked-up synth bassline it sprays around like an unfastened hose, dampening down the squelchy beats and dripping percussion below. Once it gets peeled back, eco systems of warm, tightly knit sounds rotate around each other as Tolfrey’s processed voice breathes some human animation and affection into proceedings.

It’s easy to forget the importance of early electronic labels like Glasgow’s Soma in these times of lightning fast trends, but we shouldn’t.  And alas, helping to ensure we don’t are this label’s 20^th anniversary celebrations: throughout 2011, single/EP releases will come from a number of artists old and new, each of whom will tackle a track from Soma’s prestigious back catalogue. Sometimes they will be close associates of the label, sometimes less so, or sometimes it will be a mix of both, such as on this first outing, Phase One.

If you’ve been following any of the Visionquesters (known to their mothers as Seth Troxler, Shaun Reeves, Ryan Crosson and Lee Curtiss) over the last few years, you may not have predicted that their first label releases would sound quite like they do.  Although the quartet are well know practitioners of house and techno in both their DJ sets and their own charismatic productions, it’s r&b which loomed large over VQ001 and now pop music is the predominant force throughout VQ002.  Having said that, I suppose it isn’t all that surprising that the free-spirited Detroit ex-pats have instead chosen to champion structured ‘songs’ which last, in place of zeitgeist surfing house or techno ‘tracks’ that so often don’t.