review
Bachir Salloum Spends His Best Idea First on Never Landing
Bachir Salloum's Never Landing spends its best idea on the opening track, then hands the rest of the EP to tracks built for holding a room instead of topping one.
deepmelodic
Four tracks, twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds, and Bachir Salloum leads with the best one. Never Landing came out February 17 on Balance Music, his first release for the label since 2021's Foggy Morning, and the title track is the strongest thing here. The three that follow aren't filler, and they don't try to be. They've got a different job: hold a room, not top an opener.
"Never Landing" itself opens on rhythm before melody. A groove that clicks and pops on its own for a stretch before any pad or lead shows up, then a hazy topline settles in once the percussion's already doing the work. Most progressive openers build the tune first and let the drums catch up later. This one runs it the other way round, and by the time the melody arrives the groove's already carrying most of the tension. It's the clearest idea on the record, and the one we keep coming back to. Nothing that follows tries to top it, and it doesn't need to. That's a sequencing choice, and it's the right one.
Binary Vision is the one to hear on a real system. The payoff lands at 2:52, when the vibes come in over everything already built, and it's not built for a crossfader and an RMX1000. A slow build like that wants a rotary mixer under it, the kind of gear that rewards a blend instead of a cut. The mood's a shade darker than the opener: a heavier kick sits under a hi-hat pattern doing double duty as rhythm, and a sub-bass line syncopates against both at once. The synths don't arrive together. They stack in slowly, building toward something that reads like a peak, then pulling back before they get there. Leave the release for whoever plays it next.
The back half tightens further still. Escape Tunnel narrows the palette down to a low, tight bassline and a rhythm that stays close instead of expansive, the least melodic thing on the record and clearly on purpose. It's built to sit low in a mix, not stand out of one. White Samurai closes hardest of the four: rhythm and low end pushing forward with none of the opener's patience, built for the part of the night when patience isn't what a room wants. Two tracks meant to hold a peak rather than climb toward one, and neither pretends otherwise.
None of the four runs under six minutes, and that's the tell. This isn't a listener's EP first. It's a DJ's. "Never Landing" works as an opener from a warm-up set through to a peak-time one. "Binary Vision" and "Escape Tunnel" are the hour after that, when a set needs to hold a room rather than announce itself to one. "White Samurai" is the handoff, built to push things toward whoever plays next. Four tracks, four jobs, and the record knows which is which.
Salloum's Beirut-born and Dubai-based since 2014, and Balance isn't a one-off stop for him. Foggy Morning landed there in September 2021. Never Landing is the return, seventeen months later. The label carries weight past its own catalogue, and that's not incidental. The Balance mix series has run since 2000 and counted Hernan Cattaneo and James Holden among its selectors, which makes a producer's slot here read as an endorsement, not just a release date. Salloum's own catalogue runs wider than Balance alone. Sudbeat, Do Not Sit…, Akbal Music, Hoomidaas. Those are the same rooms Cattaneo's and Lee Burridge's rosters work in, not the one next door to them, and he's shared stages with both of them on the way here.
Never Landing doesn't ask to be heard as an album. It asks to be played as one. Four tracks built the way a working DJ builds a set, each one doing a specific job instead of making its own case for attention, and the best of them comes first because that's where it earns the most.