review
Deviu remixes his own year on Steyoyoke into one mix
This plays like Deviu's own account of his year on Steyoyoke, rebuilt track by track, not a guest mix somebody handed him to sequence.
deepmelodic
Eight of the eleven tracks on Hidden Stories carry Deviu's name somewhere in the credits. Three of those are remixes he made himself. That's not how most Steyoyoke DJ mixes work. Usually it's one artist picking a path through somebody else's catalogue. This one reads like Deviu's own account of a year on the label, rebuilt track by track rather than sequenced.
We put this on expecting to watch the clock. We didn't need to: the fade-out arrived before 58 minutes felt like 58 minutes, and nothing in between announced a handoff. Eleven tracks read as one continuous take rather than a set somebody assembled, and that's the return on the credits above. Rework that much of your own tracklist and the seams are the first thing to go.
The mix's subtitle isn't a phrase borrowed from a press release. It's Steyoyoke's own genre tag, coined by Soul Button when he started the Berlin label in 2012, and opening on a track he co-wrote with Deviu hands the label's own case study to one of its artists. "Numinar," track one, is a Soul Button and Deviu collaboration from October 2024 — the label's founder is on the mix before it's properly begun.
Deviu's a Colombian producer with releases on Purified and Einmusika alongside his Steyoyoke run, the kind of catalogue that reads scattered across three labels until one of them hands him a whole hour to make the case for it himself. He's used that hour to work through his own back catalogue rather than present somebody else's.
"Lost," a solo cut from March 2024, gets folded back in two years later. "Shape of the Mind" is a newer solo track, and "Notion," a collaboration with Pablo Goyesi, closes the set. Even "Serenity," credited jointly with Anriu, doesn't run as his own version. Seismal D remixes it for this mix instead. Three more tracks he remixes outright: Clawz SG's "State Shift," Arey's "Poet," and Burçak's "Stella." Anyone can sequence eleven tracks so they flow. Fewer artists go back and rework a third of somebody else's catalogue to fit.
The three tracks that stay entirely outside his hand are the control: Santiago Celasso's "Time Codes" (remixed by Navid Kaya), MAXTAGE and Jay Aliyev's "Seraphic," and Soul Button, KADhEM and Am i Right's "Somewhere To Go." Set against those, the eight tracks Deviu touches stop being an impression and start being a count anyone can do off the tracklist.
It's built to run whole rather than get picked apart. Every track's credited "(Mixed)" instead of standing as its own cut, the same treatment Anjunadeep gives its own compilation series, and Steyoyoke's put the whole thing out as one continuous 58-minute file across Spotify, Apple Music and the rest, plus a video edit on its own YouTube. Nobody's opening a club set with this. It's a headphones record, or a quiet room, played end to end rather than raided. The kind of mix that asks for the sitting rather than tolerating it.
A various-artists mix usually flatters whoever did the picking, since the picker's name only has to survive good taste. This one puts Deviu's name inside three other people's records as well as his own, and it still comes out sounding like one artist rather than a curator's shelf. That's the harder version of the job, and it's the one he's earned.
Find Deviu on Instagram. "Numinar" and "Lost" are both on Bandcamp, and the full mix streams through Steyoyoke's own page or plays straight through on YouTube.