In its seven years of existence, Stefan Kozalla and Marcus Fink’s Pampa Records label has been defined by its stance against purism. The techno and house artists featured by the German label, from DJ Koze himself to the underground king Isolée, from the madcap experimentalist Roman Flügel to the fan-favorite Dntel, shun conventional genre wisdom and of-the-moment sounds, instead favoring an approach wrapped in humor, warmth, and the pleasure of small surprises. “All the best things happen from mistakes,” Koze told Pitchfork three years ago, in a statement representative of the spontaneity that he’s embraced in heading up the imprint.
That’s not to say that the tasting menu represented by the new label compilation Pampa Vol. 1 is incoherent, even with the unexpected appearances of big-name guest stars including Jamie xx and Matthew Herbert. The 19 tracks that make up this confectioner's array sit in neatly ordered rows, most of them sweet, light, and pleasant, with novel ingredients often cropping in the middle or even near the end of tracks. With a running time of nearly two hours, the compilation shouldn’t be ingested in one go—doing so might bring on the overstuffed achiness of gobbling down a box of chocolates. The offerings on hand here are meant to be picked out at random and savored; Pampa Vol. 1 is the album as discovery machine, rather than completist’s task. It’s as good an album as any to justify the existence of the shuffle setting.
Starting at the beginning may run counter to the record’s freewheeling design, but Matthew Herbert’s remix of Lianne La Havas’ “Lost and Found” is irresistible as an album opener. In Herbert’s hands, the pain and beauty of the London singer’s 2012 ballad are transmuted, as staircases of bass elevate the track’s more hopeful qualities. If you feel like taking a side entrance, another possible point of immersion is the Swedish house producer Axel Boman’s offering, “In the Dust of This Planet.” Boman’s 2010 EP Holy Love was one of Pampa’s first big releases, and the new track is characteristic of the exploratory push that Pampa’s artists receive from the label. Its winding back half, considered by Boman to be its proper ending, interrupts what had been a climactic crescendo. That shift changes the song's entire direction, allowing it to evoke a sense of regret, an actualization of the wish to go back in time and start again.
Newcomers to Pampa may skip right to the Jamie xx offering, “Come We Go,” and thankfully, it’s as good a portal as any into the label’s core values. At first, the track seems as if it’s following the path of In Colour’s dance floor fetish. Then, suddenly, the walls close in and the bass becomes claustrophobic. It’s a left turn typical of DJ Koze’s sense of play, and although it’s not entirely clear, he appears to be Jamie’s collaborator on the track, working under the pseudonym Kosi Kos.
Other standouts include the cotton candy world built by the Swiss house veteran Michel Cleis on his contribution, “Un Prince,” Acid Pauli’s fractured beauty “Nana,” which dices its sampled melody into thousands of tiny pieces, and Die Vögel’s bizarrely lovely pastoral, ”Everything,” which features the American singer Sophia Kennedy, another track to which Koze contributed something essential (in this case, advising that the beat be pulled out altogether.)
Some tracks don’t make as much sense within the mix, including “I Does It,” a serviceable slab of funk-infused hip-hop from the electronic duo Funkstörung that’s aggressive and low-slung in a way that feels out of sync with its airy companions. The crooning that provides the centerpiece of Josef’s “I Wonder,” is so shrill that it makes the track hard to stomach; it seems like a joke that was pushed a bit too far.
The record is bookended by two versions of Roman Flügel’s “9 Years,” the original and Koze’s club remix, which fans may recognize from Flügel’s Essential Mix. Koze’s version is no mere ego trip; if anything he does more justice to the tracks core attributes—its pensiveness, its beauty—than the original. It’s the most obvious example of Koze’s influence on his collaborators, but in the statements included with the press copy of Pampa Vol. 1, several of the artists mention how a suggestion he made helped them finish their tracks. Koze has described the label as a “small family,” a “gang which makes you feel that you’re not alone.” If that’s the case, the new record suggests that he’s operating as the ideal paterfamilias, daring the artists he works with to go beyond their boundaries, to try something unfamiliar, to surprise themselves, and in doing so, to give listeners a taste of something new.
