Jamie Stevens Brings the Producer He Mentored Onto Sudbeat

Vanessa Nguyen · 26 August 2023

Sudbeat put four tracks under one byline on 25 August 2023. Three of them are the same song. "The Rip" gets an original mix and two remixes from a single producer, Paul Deep, who did a version called Basement and a version called Terrace instead of the job going to two different names. "Utveckla," the other original, is the one track here nobody touches.

There's no radio edit anywhere on the release, and that's no accident. All four tracks sit between 7:28 and 8:39, adding to 32:29 across a release that's really only two ideas stretched long. There's enough going on between the groove, the leads and the vocal chops that the track needs its full spin for all three to actually bloom — trimming it down would have cost more than it saved. That's the extended arc Sudbeat's catalogue tends to run on, length built for a DJ who wants six or seven minutes to work a transition rather than thirty seconds to make a point. "Utveckla" is Swedish for "develop," and at 7:28 it's the shorter of the two originals.

Sudbeat's been running since 2009, when Hernan Cattaneo started it with Graziano Raffa. By August 2023 it's fourteen years into building the deeper, patient end of progressive house. Less about the peak-time drop, more about how long a track can hold a room before it repeats itself. That's the shelf Jamie Stevens and Zankee Gulati are filing this on.

The remix shape is unusual even by that standard. Most EPs split remix duty around: one version for the peak, one for the warm-up, different names to catch different playlists. Sudbeat could have called on almost anyone for that here and didn't. Giving the whole job to one producer is a bet that a single read of a track, worked twice, beats two different producers each taking one pass at it.

The bigger story is who's on the label at all. Jamie Stevens made his own Sudbeat debut less than two years earlier, with 2021's "4 Shadows EP," his first outing on the label after two decades that included the ARIA-winning band Infusion and releases on Bedrock and Balance Music. "The Rip" is Zankee Gulati's first release on Sudbeat. Stevens is the reason he's there. Gulati moved from Tasmania to Sydney to chase production seriously. He's talked about Stevens mentoring him early on. Back in February, Gulati told an interviewer he and Stevens had "something super special coming up this year." This is that record. Gulati's name comes first on it. A mentor doesn't usually hand his own second release on a new label over to somebody else's name. That's exactly what's happened here.

Paul Deep isn't new to this label either. He's already got "Dogma" and "Arishem" out on Sudbeat. Handing him the whole remix side here reads as the label betting on a producer it already trusts to make both versions work.

Gulati's other credentials matter too. He runs Bootz'N'Catz, the Sydney night he'd kept going for seven years by the time this record landed, with Nick Warren, Guy J and Cattaneo himself booked through its doors at one point or another. He arrives on Sudbeat with a résumé of his own, and with the man who mentored him standing next to him on the credit.

This is a record for a set that's already deep, not for an opener — the kind of room where the phones stay in pockets and people are as likely to be facing each other as facing the DJ. An eight-minute track needs room to get where it's going. Sudbeat's catalogue has always been built on that kind of patience. We'd reach for the Terrace remix once a room's given itself over, and hold the Basement version for earlier, when there's still building left to do. Either way, the original should carry the night. Stevens spent two decades earning the kind of name that gets to make that call for somebody else. On his second Sudbeat release, he's used it.