Past week, in the UK, we had the first ever National Album Day, which brought the focus on the fate of the format inside the modern music business, where it’s constantly mistreated on one side by listeners’ bad habits, and on the other side by streaming service algorithms. The same fate in my humble opinion is pending on compilations. Outclassed by the (apparently) similar playlists, compilations are a format which constantly suffer of devaluation due to its extreme accessibility. You put some tracks together and you’re done, right? Hell no, that’s not how it works. Moreover, in this case there’s no scapegoat, independent artists and curators are the ones who are slowly killing it, using and abusing the term as a ‘cool’ etiquette for some random collection of tracks without context, with neither head or tail.
Inside this insidious branch of the music industry, the good guys at Below The Surface are trying to make their way to the top with their Sounds From Below series and, with this fourth installment, things appear to really take off.
If you take the time to pay full attention, instead of binge-listening to just 10 seconds per track, the solid coherence that links each track to the others will soon clarify the intent behind the project: create an album that can be the proper standard for the subculture established around the experimental trap mania of this year. It’s not a random box, but a solid product finely shaped specifically for fans and enthusiasts of the genre.
To those who may claim a supposed exaggerated flatness across the thirteen tracks, I simply answer quoting a recent Porter Robinson tweet that invites you to enjoy the pleasures of “songs that require a few extra listens to be understood.”
In the case that your life really doesn’t let you appreciate a full-length sequential listen, it’s my duty to suggest my highlights of the album: leet & Chark’s ‘Garbage’, Fioritura’s ‘Maegju Gajeoda’ and Underbelly’s ‘Wonk’.
