TÂCHES Splits His Anjunadeep Debut Into a Song and a Tool

Vanessa Nguyen · 28 January 2021

Anjunadeep put out TÂCHES's first release under his own name on January 26th: four tracks and nineteen minutes and change, two songs and an extended cut of each. The shape argues the point before a single sentence does. "For You (My Love)", with Keilimei's voice on it, runs 4:44. "I See You In My Dreams", with nobody singing, runs 3:36. Stretch both to their extended versions and the vocal track picks up about a minute. The instrumental picks up more than two — nearly double the stretch, on the shorter original.

The vocal cut leans tropical and a little whimsical, playful rather than saccharine, which isn't the easiest note to hit in a genre this crowded with earnest longing. We like it.

One is a song. The other's a tool. Anjunadeep is betting TÂCHES can carry both.

Thirteen days earlier, TÂCHES turned up on the label's Reflections Vol. 2 compilation with second billing on a track called "Don't Bite." That's the kind of slot a label gives someone it's still trying out, a various-artists comp, somebody else's name first. This release is the follow-up, and his name is the only one on the sleeve. Two Anjunadeep credits inside two weeks isn't how a label treats an artist it's unsure of.

It's a familiar shape for this label. Anjunadeep pairs a vocal cut with a stripped companion often enough that it barely needs pointing out, so a DJ isn't stuck carrying a hook a room doesn't need once things are moving. TÂCHES' version commits to the split harder than the format usually asks for: the instrumental doesn't just lose the vocal, it gets nearly twice the extra room to stretch. This sits at the warmer, more melodic end of the label's catalogue rather than its stripped or dub-adjacent side — a two-tracker built to be sung along to on one cut and mixed through on the other. It's the same register that runs through Anjunadeep's clearest signings: melodic enough to hum, patient enough to hold a floor once the room's already up.

"I See You In My Dreams" is the harder of the two to sell on paper. No hook, no voice doing the work for it. Its extended pass runs 5:45, fifteen seconds short of six minutes, off an original that runs three minutes and thirty-six seconds. That's not a mix padded out after the fact to fill a DJ's set. That's a track built to run nearly double its own length, on purpose, from a producer with no Anjunadeep single of his own behind him yet to have earned that kind of room.

"For You (My Love)" does the more familiar job, and does it well enough that it doesn't need the case made for it. Keilimei's vocal sits over four minutes and forty-four seconds, which is playlist-length, radio-adjacent, the kind of runtime a label can send an editorial team without apologizing for its shape. It's the entry point: a drive, a warm-up set, the moment in a Sunday playlist where a voice is welcome again after twenty minutes of instrumentals. "I See You In My Dreams" waits for later. It's built for a room that's already moving, where six minutes with no lyric in it is an asset and not a gap somebody needs to fill.

Put both of those choices on the same release and TÂCHES doesn't have to pick an audience for his first time out. He gets the playlist listener and the DJ in the same nineteen minutes, on the same day, from a label that had him as a feature credit two weeks before. Going from someone else's compilation to a release carrying only your own name, in thirteen days, isn't a small vote of confidence. It's Anjunadeep building a case for an artist twice in one month, before most acts on this label get their first real slot at all.