review
Tim Walche needs company on This Never Happened
Three of the four tracks on Somnia are co-writes, and that's the record. After two years of solo techno on this label, Walche finally isn't building it alone.
deepmelodic
Somnia EP landed on This Never Happened on December 3rd, 2024. Four tracks, 16:13 total, the shortest release Tim Walche has put out on Lane 8's label. It's also the least solitary. Three of the four tracks carry a second name in the credits, and that's the record. After two years of building tracks alone for TNH, Walche finally isn't.
What holds the four tracks together is pacing. The palette mixes organic and inorganic tones, most of them leaning inharmonic, and neither one gets rushed offstage. Each is held in the light long enough to pull the listener into a strange, off-kilter space rather than jar against the one next to it.
Walche, billed as Artem Vasylchuk on the credits, is a Kyiv-based mixer and ghost producer who's been at it since 2008, most of that time behind other people's names. TNH is where his own name shows up, and he debuted buried in a compilation, two cuts tucked into 2022's Root to Branch, Vol. 8, alongside a rotating cast of the label's regulars. Those two, "Mess Of Mind" and "Orbit," carried none of the softer register Somnia leans into now. His first release under his own name, 2023's Opia / Acidalia Planitia, pushed hard toward the techno end of the label's range. Lean, built for the peak rather than the warm-up, closer to the harder half of TNH's roster than the warmer one. Somnia pulls back toward the label's actual center.
Track one, "I'll Be Your Light," is the one Walche still made on his own, and at 4:34 it's the longest thing on the record by a clear margin. Then the co-writes start. "Enigma" and "Echoes Of Aurora" both carry Mike Gannu, a melodic techno producer with his own run on Atlant and Siamese, back to back at under four minutes each, and together they're the strongest stretch on the record, tighter and better paced than anything on the 2023 EP. "Resurgence" closes it out with Elio Chaeban at 3:45, the shortest cut here and the one that sits furthest from the harder register Opia was built on.
None of this is a big swing, and it doesn't need to be, because This Never Happened has spent eight years building its reputation on how a set moves, not on any single track. The phone-free shows Lane 8 started the label around are still the whole premise, and a label built that way wants records that carry a room through an evening rather than records that make a statement on their own. Sixteen minutes across four tracks, front-loaded with the longest cut and closing on the shortest, is exactly that. A set piece, built to go on early, while the room's still filling and the tempo's doing more of the work than the arrangement is. Nothing here runs past 4:34, so a DJ can move through all four in the time it usually takes to sit inside one longer cut, exactly the kind of tight programming a warm-up slot rewards.
That's the real difference between this and Opia. The 2023 record wanted a peak. Somnia wants a room to warm into, and it gets there two collaborations deep, Walche bringing in Gannu's melodic-techno instincts for the middle stretch, then handing the close to Chaeban rather than keeping it for himself. It's a different way of getting to the same label, two years and three releases into knowing what This Never Happened actually wants from a night.
A label's bet on a producer like Walche comes down to one question. Can he build with other people in the room and still sound like himself? Somnia earns a yes, two collaborations deep.