- Rey Colino assembles an all-star cast for two hours of club sounds that have defined the zeitgeist for the past decade.
- There's something delightfully paradoxical about Rey Colino's Kalahari Oyster Cult. For the past six years, the label has helped define dance music's vanguard by looking to the '90s. Colino understands this irony. "My label is built around '90s tropes, trying to implement nostalgia with a modern sound design," he said in a recent interview. "I’m all for innovation in dance music, but there’s also a lot of good stuff from the past, so why not use it?" More than a specific aesthetic, then, the label is all about an attitude. Put on any release and you can easily pick out '90s signifiers. Dusty deep house? Yep. Hard-hitting electro? Uh-huh. Bouncy tech house? Emotive prog? Afterhours techno? Check, check and check. But the records themselves are indubitably contemporary, reflecting and refracting these sounds into new shapes.
This approach drives Colino's gargantuan six-year anniversary box set, Chant Of The Holy Oyster. Across four slabs of wax, he taps some of the best young guns out there (and a few actual '90s legends) to update classic dance music templates. To really get a sense of what this facelift sounds like, take two of the record's best tracks, Maara and Priori's "C'mon" and Big Zen's "Really Bad Habit." Both tracks fuse tech house with trance, putting groovy Bushwacka!-style drums alongside the sort of crystalline synth work that'll be getting rinsed in sweaty warehouses and basement clubs from Hamburg to Hanoi this weekend.
Chant Of The Holy Oyster, as these tracks make clear, isn't tethered to any one genre, but expands into all corners of the '90s. There’s everything from SW.'s dubby house to Sound Mercenary's IDMish breakbeats, from D. Tiffany's UK garage swing to the proto-hardcore velocity of Ray Castoldi's "1991." As expansive as this sounds, the record settles into two dominant moods. On the one hand, you've got tracks for the more tender moments of the night. Adam Pits's contribution is a whimsical piece of deep house with a hi-fi technicolor finish while S.O.N.S. and Go Dam ease us to the edge of the dance floor with sashaying strings.
Alongside these daybreak specials, you also get some late night jitters on a run of druggy psychedelic tracks. This isn't the bright euphoria of a come-up, but the squidgy anxiety of a comedown. Roza Terenzi's "Beat Pig," for example, has some moments of beauty, but the acid bassline keeps tearing the track in two. Sansibar's contribution is even darker. Although there's a choral, angelic tinge to the synths, it's more claustrophobia than spiritual transcendence, like trying to pick your way through a collapsing church in an Ann Radcliffe novel. Or on RDS and Eversines's track, "Plooooooink," the duo program their snares with a sluggishness that sounds like they might nod off at the afters while little hints of 303 poke through the shades.
At nearly two hours long, Chant Of The Holy Oyster covers a lot of territory. The contributors are a who's-who of trend-setting producers representing all sorts of different scenes and sounds—oddball house (SW.), new minimal (Sohrab), Holland's De Lichting crew (RDS and Eversines), Montreal's new guard (Maara and Priori). With a roster like that, you risk something like an all-star game conundrum: everyone wants to dunk, no one wants to play defense (or one of those Avengers films where you spend the whole movie trying to remember everyone's backstory). But the record is remarkably cohesive with the quality never wavering. This is testimony to Colino's vision. Chant Of The Holy Oyster is a celebration of '90s dance music from people who have a deep love for and knowledge of that bygone golden age.
Tracklist01. S.O.N.S & Go Dam – Force Of Will
02. Volodymyr Gnatenko – Subra
03. RDS & Eversines – Plooooooink
04. Ray Castoldi – 1991
05. Maara & Priori – C'mon
06. Big Zen – Really Bad Habit
07. Furious Frank – Red Herring
08. Sansibar – Between Two Circles
09. Roza Terenzi – Beat Pig
10. Adam Pits – Spreadable
11. Sound Mercenary – Float Downstream
12. Syzygy – Can I Dream?
13. Sohrab – Silk Road
14. D. Tiffany – Ghost Filter
15. Maara – Floating In The Swamp
16. Oma Totem – sardana sardana
17. SW. – biXsiXstreetliCKs
1.8 Eversines – Onigi (Ambient Version)