If you have caught one of Romania’s many top-shelf minimal artists over the last ten years then it is a certainty that you would have lost your mind to a Playedby release. From the minimal to the maximal, Playedby offers the full spectrum of electronic music, and to celebrate their tenth anniversary they have constructed a comprehensive body of work that encapsulates their hard work and dedication to the scene that they have helped nurture. The result is a 20-track VA spread across 6 discs that includes tracks from Cezar, SIT, and Alex Font to name just a handful. Let’s dive in.
We start our journey into Playedby020X with Elia Nafzger’s “Say Something” and in true Playedby fashion the sprawling entry bobs and weaves around a brooding stripped-back synth motif that is backed up by heavy-hitting percussion. The heavily processed vocal is just a small part of the magic that is unfurled over the course of the apt 9 minute and 9 seconds run time and there is plenty more to weave in and out of any mix here.
Elsewhere in the release, the full ecosystem of reductionist techno is represented here with Cezar’s modular jam on “NKV2”, Vincentiulian’s bell-driven beauty on “Owowo”, the upbeat bleepy energy found on Lumieux’s “Manhattan Tape”, SIT’s peak time bomb of “Internal Network”, and Prichindel’s “Close to me”. Incredibly, this is all to be found on just the first two discs.
We won’t give you a blow by blow account of the full compilation as this landmark boxed set release from Playedby is designed to be poured over as much as it is to kept in a record bag filed under secret weapons. Without sounding redundant, we don’t need to tell minimal fans just how important this release is, and given that artists such as Sublee, Christopher Ledger, G76, Alci, Dragos Illici all appear on the same release it is most definitely a buy on sight scenario.
You can pre-order the release from the Playedby website.
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