- Every label is a little family; Souvenir happens to be several. Not only is it the project of the two Tiefschwarz brothers, its latest addition Santé is composed of a fraternal trio: Philipp, Marius and Mathias Maier. In the wake of their remix work on Rekids, the Maier clan's Souvenir offering is a promising release that shows the brothers in full deep house thrall and neatly encapsulating both ends of the revival: the inspired and the not-so-inspired.
"White" begins sunny and beatless, a clipped wail and reggae organ pulsing over a bright bed of pastoral ambience. Then this warm, bucolic clearing gets sent reeling when the low end snaps into position and the track suddenly careens into a deep house tunnel. Gradual it's not: the tune works in discreet, abrupt shifts, not crescendoing or unfolding as much as lurching back and forth. On several occasions the track seems to be on its way to winding down only to erupt again in a clipped, uptempo grind. Stripped and emotionally spirited, "White" is cause to once again give thanks that house music has finally found its way to German lands. It stages the Germanic engagement with house as an act of delicate surgery, where the goal is to deftly extract the soul while leaving the cheese behind.
"You" relies on overlaid vocal slivers and flurries of sampled congas. Its full-fledged middle stretch is satisfying, where layered conga rolls become the expression of dense and fleeting patterns. The drops, however, aren't particularly compelling. While in production the drop is in essence a game of subtraction, you don't want the game to be immediately apparent. The goal is the semblance of a natural progression, not the display of calculation. Here the sounds feel a bit like they're petering out, each remaining element simply marking time until the flush of the full groove returns. While it thus feels a bit rote when compared to the joyful A-side, the unintentional side benefit to such roteness, however, can be its pedagogical value—when a work's surface fails to conceal its inner scaffolding, the listener can more easily glean the tricks of its construction.