France’s Sound Pellegrino label launched in 2009 with Zombie Disco Squad’s “Esperanto”/”Eurovision” single. Laced with Brazilian funk carioca, it was a laser beam across the bow of a complacent club-music underground. The cover art on that record and subsequent releases riffed on Deutsche Grammophon’s iconic yellow plaque — old-world gravitas remixed for the new school — as if to say, “This is the new tradition, suckers!” Four years and 35 releases on, founders Teki Latex and DJ Orgasmic, former members of Paris’ electro-leaning rap crew TTC, have made good on their promise.
The label’s first full-length compilation, SND.PE 01, shows just how far the Sound Pellegrino sound has come. Featuring a crew of label regulars, friends, and newfound co-conspirators, and drawing from 14 cities in nine different countries, the album is a bullet-train tour of dance music’s scattered city-states, taking in techno, moombahton, electro-disco, grime, hip-house, and more — sometimes, all at once.
Unlike a lot of their former blog-house brethren, who got stuck in a harder/faster/louder cul-de-sac, Sound Pellegrino know that it’s not just about beating clubbers over the head. Some of the compilation’s best tracks, such as Matthias Zimmerman and SCNTST’s “Rick” and 123Mrk’s “Can’t Believe,” are also its gentlest. At the other end of the spectrum lie tunes such as Djedjotronic and Maelstrom’s “Buran,” an epic slab of warehouse techno that applies Richard Serra’s sense of scale to ’90s rave tropes and grime-inspired bass lines — a hangar-sized banger, as it were.
Stream “Buran” below. SND.PE Vol. 01, out June 17, is available for pre-order now; listeners can catch the Sound Pellegrino crew on BBC Radio 1’s Diplo & Friends show on June 15 and LuckyMe’s Rinse FM show on June 20.
And if you’re at Sonar this weekend, Sound Pellegrino Thermal Team and Matthias Zimmermann rock the SonarCar stage on Friday night, right next to the bumper cars. Seriously. Protect ya neck: There will be whiplash.
