The Vitals:

Label: Queep Organic Music
Genre: Deep/Tech House
Number of Tracks: 12
How to Obtain: www.beatport.com, www.queeporganicmusic.com

Factor Scores:

Production Quality: 6.0
Programming and Arrangement: 5.3
Entertainment Quality: 5.0
Total: 5.4 - Average

Digital Aura's Take:

This is the first in the Deep Queep Cutz series of albums released by the Queep Organic house label. The objective was to offer a collection of "simple, deep, thoughtful, clever numbers, designed to take you away to another place, whilst staying away from the generic deep funky house sound". I'm not sure if they succeeded here in deviating from the "deep funky house sound", but admittedly, I'm not much of a connoisseur regarding deep house. I can tell you one thing: This compilation is exactly what they claim: simple, first and foremost, and deep and funky.

There are 12 tracks ranging from progressive house to tech-house. The Queep line-up consists of artists like Man In A Room, Afrodrops, Melchyor A, Atom, and Mr. Fuzz Presents Twisty Fuzz, alongside new label signings Cristian Paduraru, Filtered Boogie, and Djamel. For those of you that don't know, Cristian is "one of the most promising net-based artists currently making a name for himself in progressive and tech-house circles". Filtered Boogie is a new Canadian artist with a very unique sound, and Dublin-based Djamel has just seen his debut release on QOH (Queep Organic House) with his "Soulmate" remix.

By far, the strongest productions on this release are from these three talented producers. Djamel's "Dance You Machine" is one of the strongest musically, while Filtered Boogie brings a lot of spacey (even psy) elements to his deep house tracks "Ghosts" and "Suburban Train".

I need to qualify, perhaps, the difference between appreciating house vs. deep and progressive house. For me, the most important thing to realize is that the deep and prog house tracks are "groove" oriented rather than "melodic" in content. What I mean is that, after listening to these tracks, you'll notice that there's little musical content actually and that the tracks are built from percs and the odd instrumental stab around a bassline. Often, the songs on this release contain only 2 or 3 chords at most, but the tracks are superbly and skillfully crafted to evolve over several minutes. There seems to be quite a bit of repetition, so it's difficult to get into if you're new to the genre. Man In A Room is one my favourite Queep artists, so it's nice to see his "Like Mind, Like Mine" track get a couple of remixes on this album.

My main beef with this release is that there is one too many tracks on board. You simply cannot burn these all onto one audio CD.

Mix-wise this production is fairly good, except for Afrodrop's remix of  Fuzik's "Never Ever" (track 9), which seemed very thick, bottom heavy, and subdued in contrast to the others.