review
James Grant and Jody Wisternoff take Anjunadeep 16 to vinyl
Anjunadeep pressed a compilation to vinyl for the first time in sixteen editions, and on the evidence of this one, that's the edition that doesn't get filed away.
Forty-two tracks, two discs, three label rosters pulled into one two-hour set, and for the first time in sixteen editions, part of it is going out on vinyl. That's the news.
We preordered this one the day it went up, which we don't do for every release that lands here. James Grant co-founded Anjunadeep back in 2005, and the label's spent the two decades since raising a good chunk of the artists melodic house runs on now. Lane 8 and Yotto both came up through Anjunadeep before either one had a name outside it. Ben Böhmer's Breathing is still one of the label's strongest records, five years on. Grant and Wisternoff mixing the sixteenth entry in this series isn't two guys picking their favorite tracks of the year — it's the two people who've spent two decades deciding what this label sounds like, doing it again, and on the evidence here, this is as strong as anything they've put their names on.
The vinyl is the actual news, and it's overdue. Anjunadeep's run this compilation as a stream-and-CD release for fifteen straight editions, and 16 is the first to come with a vinyl sampler at all. Twelve tracks, pulled out of the mix into extended, non-mixed form, pressed to blue-black marble vinyl across two 12"s in a gatefold sleeve with printed inner sleeves. The CD ships alongside it, two discs in a trifold booklet, plus FLAC, WAV and MP3. It landed February 20.
The mix itself opens patient, warm pads and soft, textured percussion, and takes its time before committing to anything. It turns propulsive from there, rolling basslines and looping arpeggios that never tip past the control it started with. The sequencing is where the work actually shows: every transition earns the one before it, which is what two hours needs if it's going to hold somebody across both discs.
The tracklist backs up what that says about the curating. Cubicolor, Dosem, Marsh and Spencer Brown, the label's regulars, sit against artists making their first appearance on Anjunadeep, Kiskadee among them, pulled from the Anjunadeep, Anjunachill and Explorations rosters at once rather than kept to one. Spencer Brown's "Comeback Kids" carries an "Anjunadeep 16 Outro Edit" tag two tracks before the first disc's actual last cut. Wisternoff's own "Sweetest Thing," in its Chill Mix, sits well ahead of that, not up front where a curator with less restraint would've put it. Placing your own track where the sequencing needs it instead of where it flatters you is a small thing. On a mix with forty-one other tracks it could've used to make the same point, it's not nothing.
Anjunachill is the label group's ambient and downtempo line. Explorations is the newer imprint, built to find whoever nobody's signed yet. Pulling from all three instead of sticking to the main Anjunadeep catalogue is how a series this deep into its run avoids just repeating its own last edition. It's exactly the instinct you'd expect from two people who've been doing this since before most of the artists on the tracklist were releasing music.
Grant and Wisternoff marked the twelfth mix they've made together by filming it, not by staying in the studio. They shot it live across two sessions at Tà Đùng National Park in Vietnam, the same treatment the series gave Iceland and Malta the two years before it. That's promotion, not the record. It fits one built to be sat with rather than skimmed.
We don't say this about every one of these. Two decades into shaping half this scene, Anjunadeep put something on wax for the first time on its sixteenth try, and it's not going to be the one anybody forgets.
Find James Grant on Instagram and Jody Wisternoff on Instagram. Stream the full mix on Spotify.