Review: To celebrate notching up 50 releases, Uncanny Valley offered up a septet of colour-coded EPs featuring never-heard-before cuts from its growing roster of artists. With that campaign finished, they've now collected together all of those tracks on one suitably epic compilation, All Colors Are Beautiful. It's a pleasingly positive, life-affirming and kaleidoscopic collection all told, with the likes of Lauer, Jules Etienne, Johannes Albert, Cuthead and Basic Soul Unit taking it in turns to deliver cheery, synth-heavy cuts that variously join the dots between deep house, nu-disco, synth-pop, proto-house, jacking acid, crunchy electro, Motor City techno, ghetto-tech and glassy-eyed late-night sleaze. The results are uniformly excellent, making this one of the most essential compilations of 2020.
Review: Like many of the artists that grew up and were nurtured by the Smallville label, Christopher Rau's music owes a debt to deep US house and techno. On The Keys, his first release on the label for a number of years, those influences loom large, but are intertwined with other sources. "Who Am I" sees Lone-style psychedelia fused with lithe break beats, while on the title track, Rau strips back his approach for a lean dance floor track. However, he returns to deeper territory with the woozy synths and pulsating bass of "Slu Terms", while "Beamer" ends the release with a swinging, summery groove and dreamy chimes.
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