4 out of 5

Label: WéMè Records

Produced by: ?

20 years on and I still look to Belgium label WéMè as a go-to source of what’s next in electro, or to shine a spotlight on things – sometimes decades passed! – that I clearly missed, or am missing. It’s one of the few labels that I look at everything they release with some excitement, even if other / previous releases by whichever artist haven’t worked for me. …And they still might not, but even with Weme bringing together seemingly disparate electronic genres like ambient and extreme glitch and acid house and darkwave, there’s a sense of very choiceful curation, and passion for each release, that makes giving it all a fair shake very worthwhile. The label creates, for me, a personal relationship. It truly feels like a celebration to hit two decades, and to drop a 3xLP set stuffed with tracks from the label all-stars is a top-of-the-pile listening event.

Weme20ans proves all that faith. We get such a wide range of electro, and it’s all carefully arranged to guide us through some of WéMè’s more relatively recent contributors (inclusive of all-timers like DMX Krew, and some Jodey Kendrick variants) without alienating curious listeners who might back off something more abrasive or experimental without padding. And on the opposite front, if you come here for something specific, like IDM, you’ll find it surrounded by material you may’ve passed by on its own, but here sounds great in context. That’s maybe kind of a trick, but it helps me better appreciate some artists who I like but get a little exhausted of on their full releases, like RTR – boil their work down to a single track (and I think almost everything here is exclusive!), and it underlines what you already knew was good but maybe needed a reminder.

The journey here rather challengingly starts out with the most relatively obtuse – ambient work from Zandvoort & Uilenbal – but it’s weird enough to keep the unexpecting dialed in, and is then countered by the super accessible club funk of Matzo, followed up by an amazing curveball from Chromedealer, which shifts their Rephlex styles into wildly grooving and glitching jazz. I won’t go through every track, but it’s very purposefully arranged: we build up the intensity over a few acid tracks, peaking with Binary Digit’s BPM run on A2, shift to some electro, and then the mood gets a bit darker – Rawakari’s Stacy Study; Terrence Woodard’s old school dance track maybe isn’t dark, but its beat hits hard; and then one of the most unique and abstract DMX Krew tracks in some time, leading into a final LP of dissected works from EOD and D’Arcangelo. We close out with slightly more “traditional” works that act as a summary mission statement, and kind of a cool down.

I can pick apart some things here, though it’s all subjective, of course: the C-side feels like the ebb and flow coasts a bit, stuck between a strong build up across the A- and B-sides, and a distinctive mood shift on D; I called out RTR before, and though I still stand by that a single song of theirs is preferred over an album, even that song can go on for a bit too long. I’d maybe also wish the F-side tracks were a bit more of a hit than the kind of straight-forward stuff we got, though I do appreciate using these as cool down tunes in a sense. Maybe some bias: I’ve run hot and cold with the artists on the F-side.

Still: the main takeaways are how strongly this stuff represents WéMè, how clear it is that there’s a “vision” to the release, and how damn good it sounds – something I always forget to praise the label for: consistently producing great sounding wax.