DJ Life - Peia (2019)

The track of the day today is DJ Life - Peia, a masterfully crafted and lush break track, with acid touches to please the ear. I stumbled upon it randomly in my favorite record store of Amsterdam: Bordello a Parigi. I rushed there a couple days to find a farewell gift for my bff Adam, who interned in my group in 2019. In those days we went to the office to work… crazy, I know. Adam and I would usually chat about research, then quickly branch off to discussing music and club nights.

From all the discussion about electronic music genres, I remember his (harder than it seems) question: what is breakbeat? I pointed him at my breakbeat case playlist, which is more of a pot-pourri of break sub genres than anything focused. Yet, this specific track from DJ Life embodies quite well where the genre is at nowadays, tracks that seem perfect both for home listening and for tearing down dancefloors. Usually around 135BPM, these tracks sound slower through clever drum patterns and jungle samples (hey!), and combine comfy ambient sounds from liquid drum and bass with high pitch sounds from electro, adding surgical grade acid lines as binder.

Two landmark labels come to mind when thinking of this type of tracks: the UK-based Craigie Knowes and Berlin/Melbourne collab Salt Mines. Highly recommend digging through their entire catalog. A stellar example of an artist who released on both is Reptant, who like DJ Life represents (part of) the Melbourne club scene. To close this article, here is my fav from him:

Reptant - Ether (2018)