Higher Is Matt Fax and Boxer's First Track Together, and Colorize Backs It Like a Single

Vanessa Nguyen · 19 January 2022

Matt Fax and Boxer have circled the same label for years without ever landing on a track together. That changes on January 14th, when "Higher" arrives on Colorize as a proper single. A radio edit and a six-minute extended mix, both credited to the pair, not a lone cut thrown out to test the water. Two versions is the tell here. This is a release Colorize wants working two rooms at once.

The surprise is the low end. It sits closer to an Anjunadeep record than anything else in Fax's catalogue — warmer bass, percs with more room to breathe, than the tighter progressive-and-trance vocabulary he usually reaches for. Set that under his own sound instead of swapping one for the other, and the two settle into each other rather than fighting. The track's comfortable in its own skin, and it earns more than one pass through it.

Colorize is Enhanced Music's progressive house imprint, running since 2011, and its two-mix single is close to a house format. A cut built for radio and playlists, then a longer one that assumes a DJ's going to use it. "Higher" follows that shape to the letter, and the gap between the two versions here is real. 3:48 against 6:21, more than two and a half extra minutes. The label's known well beyond one scene for that shape, progressive house and the warmer end of melodic techno both, and its catalogue runs deep on both sides of that line.

Fax has been on Colorize since the early twenty-tens, one of the artists who helped set the label's sound. He's a mainstay there, not a guest. He mixed part of the label's own compilation, "Colorscapes Volume Three," released last September. Boxer's route in is wider. He debuted on Anjunadeep in 2019, has since put records out on Anjunabeats, Armada and Colorize itself, and in 2021 paired with two of Anjunadeep's own label heads on "Sun Kissed." He'd worked in pairs before that too, reworking Above & Beyond's "Home" with Amy Wiles back in 2020. Trading a track with someone from an adjacent corner of the label isn't new ground for him. It's Fax who's never worked quite like this before.

Look at how each of them usually works and the mismatch gets sharper. Fax's Colorize discography is mostly solo, one name on the credit line release after release. Boxer's isn't. He's the one who keeps ending up in someone else's studio, already credited alongside Wisternoff, Grant and Wiles before this. Putting the two of them on the same release isn't an obvious move on paper, and it only makes sense once the label's decided to back it properly, two mixes instead of one, rather than quietly slipping it out as a one-off.

The pairing is the story here, more than the track itself. A first collaboration between producers this established is rarer than it should be, and Colorize treating it as a full two-track single rather than a remix or a quiet digital drop says the label rates the pairing as more than a curiosity. Whoever builds a set around "Higher" has real space to use, and the extended is the version built for it. Colorize didn't have to ship it that way. A single mix, digital-only, would've cost the label nothing and told us the pairing was an afterthought. Two full mixes says the opposite.

We'd take the extended over the radio edit, every time. The short version does its job and gets out fast. The longer one is built for a long, slow blend — a floor already warm, still climbing, in no hurry to get where it's going. That's where a Colorize single like this actually earns its release date. Two mixes on one tracklist isn't decoration. It's the label telling you which room the record is for.

Neither Fax nor Boxer needed the other to land a record before now. Both had a working catalogue without this track in it, and neither was short of collaborators when they wanted one. That's what makes "Higher" more than a footnote in either discography. Two producers who've spent years adjacent to each other finally share a credit, and Colorize shipped it like it expected the fit to hold.