Amelie Lens – Exhale VA007
Amelie Lens’ EXHALE imprint announces the seventh installment of their celebrated compilation series, Exhale VA007, featuring new track ‘Activate’, by Lens, plus cuts from both returning EXHALE faces and newcomers including Flour, GALLØ, AIROD, FLKN, Blondex and more.
The album coincides with EXHALE’s fifth anniversary and arrives on all platforms the 28th of November.
For five years EXHALE has been at the cutting edge of underground club culture, rewriting the rulebook of future techno, powered by shared love of uncompromising rave culture. A dynamic community-driven label, platform and event series bridging the gap between DIY warehouse culture and mainstage sonics, EXHALE has grown exponentially from its early seeds on the legendary dance floor of Labyrinth Club in Hasselt.
The brainchild of then resident Amelie Lens, whose talent for curating unreal line-ups, including artists such as Marcel Dettmann, Ben Klock, Ellen Allien, Rødhåd and Kobosil, helped build the foundation of the EXHALE ethos – unearthing raw talent and helping it grow by platforming alongside bigger names. Since those early days in 2020, Lens has brought EXHALE to some of the world’s most respected dance floors, with showcases in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, Paris, Athens, Istanbul as well as colossal stage hosting for Awakenings ADE, Creamfields UK, Tomorrowland and many more.
In just half a decade EXHALE’s unique brand of boundary-pushing, futuristic electronic music has marked them out as one of techno’s all-time greats, bringing together rising artists with heavyweight international names like no-one else. Evidenced succinctly on their highly impressive VA series, now on its seventh release, the compilations are a testament to the brilliance of Lens’ curatorial skill and the remarkable pool of talent in her orbit making waves in techno’s global underground.
Across thirteen tracks, Exhale VA007 is a magnificent taster menu of some of the best in the game right now, featuring a number of familiar faces from the EXHALE roster including Flour, fresh from his recent Visitors EP on the label, previous VA returnees GALLØ and FLKN and EXHALE regular AIROD. Fittingly 5th birthday celebrations are opened here by label boss herself, with the incredible ‘Activate’. The track is everything you could want from Amelie Lens: pummeling kick, flawless, high impact production, trancy big room arps and a gargantuan drop that will put you in spin mode.
EXHALE fave, Italian producer Flour, follows with aptly titled ‘Love It’. Replete with driving intensity, melodic vocals add contrast to the pounding techno tranceosphere, ‘like a song you wanna play on repeat’ it’s got earworm status in spades. Next up is Spanish DJ and producer Blondex with ‘Zor’who delivers crisp thumping kicks and darkly urgent synths ‘Raving til we fall’ – it’s dynamic, trancey and epic. Hot on their heels is French artist FLKN with ‘The Light’, where hard techno and a punk sensibility are the order of the day – emotive vocals lead us straight into the dance where we’re met with distorted lazery synths that erupt into behemoth trancey 303s.
Glaswegian producer via Berlin, AISHA, delivers trippy euphoria with ‘Pill Crusher’, giving notes of 90s euro dance in the addictive synth horn melody loop, breathy samples make this fresh cut feel like coming up for air deep in the rave. The first of two more returning EXHALE faces, Parisian AIROD, is next dropping some ‘LSD’, with more trippiness via gated vox, pumping intensity, bounce and wonk. The second comes in the shape of innovative Scottish producer GALLØ and his track ‘Vul Dica’, where we’re treated to signature pounding rhythms and squelchy acid lines, offset with an emotive lightness of touch courtesy of hauntingly diaphanous synth melodies and vocal loops.
Emerging from Berlin’s underground, rising star Ellen Trenn’s ‘Regulate’ gives us searing pump mode from her cross-genre palette, fusing tough electro breaks with spades of metallic techno futurism. Young Palestinian artist from Gaza, Jomaa, makes his debut with the movingly titled ‘Free Bird’ – a reflection of the longing for freedom, delivered through driving rhythms, urgent sonics and the implicit sound of resilience, hope and humanity, ‘turning silence into something that can be felt around the world’. A compilation highlight from this talented newcomer.
It’s all eyes on promising French techno producer Carla Schmitt with her track ‘Look At Me’ next, progressive and groovy, her background as a dancer reveals itself through the track’s dark, sensual energy and irresistible thump. For ‘Just A Friend’, Canadian Alexa Borzyk gives us panned synths and dubby detailing, revealing an almost underwater feel as we dive deep into the night for this pearl of a track. The penultimate track comes from Dutch DJ and producer VE/RA with ‘No One Else’, who takes us to transcendent places with relentless rhythms, soaring pads and choir-like vox.
Closing us out is Kurdish artist Lawyn, inspired by the rich electronic music culture of his now home Germany, on ‘Nami’ he delivers a dramatic finale to Exhale VA007, with ‘Tubular Bells’ adjacent melodies, gothic beauty and driving intensity. The perfect sign-off for a compilation that brims with raw energy, exciting talent and encapsulates EXHALE’s dynamic techno universe with aplomb. As essential as the label itself, here’s to the next five years and many more to come!
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