Tommy Baynen's New EP Lives in the Extended Mixes

Vanessa Nguyen · 28 July 2021

Four tracks, twenty-five minutes, and two of them don't count on their own. Wave Behaviour and Signs of Dark Matter each come two ways. A radio edit under five minutes. An extended mix that's close to twice as long. The release carries the name of the first track. Colorize tends to badge a two-track single that way, not call it an EP outright. That's not padding, either way. The short versions read like trailers for the long ones, and the extended pair's the one we'd play.

The bass and synths run harder than what Colorize has been leaning on lately. When the arrangement fully opens up, on both cuts, it sits right at the edge of harsh. No cushioning. The plucked, guitar-like arpeggios in the breakdown are what pull it back level, before the low end drops in again.

Colorize is Enhanced's home for the deep and progressive end of the label group's catalogue. The corner built for records that need room rather than a hook. Baynen fits it. He signed his first EP to Finity Recordings in 2009, working in trance. Above & Beyond picked up his "Blue Morning" for their weekly podcast and put it on their own Beatport chart.

"An Ocean Without Water" followed. Support came from Armin van Buuren, Dash Berlin and Paul van Dyk, the kind of co-signs that make a trance producer's name. In 2013 he walked away from that sound anyway. He didn't look back. "TomB Raider" landed on Tritonal's Tritonia compilation that same year, and the pivot stuck. He remixed Tritonal's "Long Way Home" last year, and Colorize has carried most of what he's released since "Effervescence" in 2019.

This is his second EP for the label this year. Four Rocks and Bird Song came out in January. Another two-track release built the exact same way, radio versions up front and extended mixes behind them. Colorize keeps giving him that slot every few months, without fanfare, the kind of steady, unglamorous release schedule that a bigger name would never accept and a working producer builds an actual career on instead. He's not the artist the imprint leads with. Nothing wrong with that. He's the one they can count on to fill the gap between the bigger names, reliably, at a length a DJ can actually use.

The two originals split the difference between the trance instincts Baynen came up on and the deep house move Colorize specializes in now. Wave Behaviour is the mover, built around a rolling low end that carries a set rather than announcing itself. Signs of Dark Matter sits lower and slower. The closer of the two. The one you'd play once the room's already committed, not the one that opens it. We ran the two extended mixes back to back. It's a solid sixteen minutes of a set, not two singles that happened to come out together.

This is peak-adjacent material, not an opener. Wave Behaviour wants a room that's already moving, past the point where a DJ's still building trust with the crowd. Signs of Dark Matter works later than that. The comedown before the actual comedown. The one you reach for once the peak's happened, when you're not ready to let the room go yet. Neither track's built for headphones. The low end carries too much of the work for that, and on a home system it just reads as slow. The extra length sits almost entirely at the top and the tail on both extended mixes. Room to beatmatch in and out cleanly. Not extra song.

The two extended mixes run sixteen minutes on their own, longer than the whole EP would be without them. Colorize didn't have to include the four-minute versions at all. They did anyway, and they're fine on their own terms, competent radio cuts built to get a track onto a playlist and out of the way before the extended version even starts to matter, which is the whole point of a radio edit in the first place. But the extended pair's the reason to have this record. It's the one Baynen built first.

Find Tommy Baynen on Instagram. Stream Wave Behaviour / Signs of Dark Matter on Spotify.