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: Uncanny Valley ends the year with a 13-track retrospective that sums up why it is such an idiosyncratic label. 13 Tracks moves in style from the bizarre acid beats of "Macho Man" by Mr Incognito and Amrint Keen's vaguely epic electro track "Believe" into more dance floor friendly tracks. These include the moody, atmospheric techno of Qnete's "Alone Together" and Chino's acid-heavy "Kolaps". In between these ends of the spectrum there are once-heard, never forgotten moments such as the vocal electro of Credit 00's amazing "Hammer Jack Voices Wall" and Serial Error's tribal house meets new beat track "Drum Abuse (Vocal)" - which both underline again what an idiosyncratic label that Uncanny Valley is.
Review: Cuthead's most recent release, 2014 album Total Sellout, portrayed him as a producer equally at home making swinging, off-kilter experimental hip-hop instrumentals as sample-heavy, soul-flecked deep house. It's these contrasting but complimentary styles that are once again explored on Presets Of Your Mind, a thrillingly warm and woozy mini-album for French imprint Sampling As An Art. While there's much to admire about the gentle dancefloor deepness of "From The Basket To The Casket" and "Bring Back The Snares", the standout house tracks here are undoubtedly "Presets of Your Mind" (built around a killer disco rhythm) and the shimmering electronics of "Dubchords". Best of all, though, are the head-nodding interludes, with the Fly-Lo style "Badly" standing out.
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