BARELY ALIVE spent about a year running Killed It! on their own releases. The label's first compilation for outside artists hands almost all of it to other people.
Killed It! Vol. 1 is 18 tracks. The duo appear on one of them, the opener, and they share that with Cyclops. The other seventeen go to seventeen other acts, one track each: Smiles Only, Edison Cole, K1N, elden, Marcix, Bizo, LOST FRIEND, sapphi, Ganimed, KING WORM, SHMING, AUDIOWEAPON, Empty Stomach, rickster, Sample Bandit, Phaceless and altair.
The opener is called "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DUBSTEP". EDM Identity and Magnetic Magazine both file the record as brostep and as modern dubstep in the same breath, which tracks: brostep is a strain of dubstep, the loud mid-range one EDM Identity dates to a 2010s heyday.
We counted the same thing at ÆDEN in the same month. Anyma turned his show into a label with ÆDEN: Digital Renaissance Vol. I, fourteen tracks, four of them his, and only four more going to a producer with nobody else on the credit. Killed It! hands out seventeen.
The hire, not the tracklist
Magnetic's headline says the record "aims to become brostep's new home". That phrasing is Magnetic's, not the label's, and eighteen tracks released on one day cannot settle it either way.
Vishal Bhanderi is director of label operations at NIGHTMODE, was A&R and label manager at Disciple, and founded the management company To Be Fair. Magnetic reports he is helping guide the label's shift to a platform; EDM Identity calls him a co-founder outright. Someone with that CV does not get brought in to ship one compilation.
In July we read BARELY ALIVE's 100% NO AI EP as an authorship signal, a seven-track record whose title promised before the first bar that people made it: credits are becoming the first thing you check. Putting seventeen other producers' names on your own label's first compilation is that instinct pointed outward.
Whether the floor holds shows up in what these seventeen put out next, and on whose label.
