Making a return to the excellent Permanent Vacation label is Edinburgh’s Theo Kottis, who has had a string of fine releases in recent years through imprints such as Shall Not Fade, Skint & Beautiful Strangers. This four-track outing is titled Enjoy The Ride, which is exactly what you’ll do when you hit ‘play’ on the decks.
The title track welcomes us to the journey, a straight-up rolling house jam which is built around bumpy percussion and bass, with soft pads and staccato synths adding to the vibe. The track takes a little turn around two-thirds through, with an added retro-sounding extra synth, creating what is a superbly executed club track for getting the floor fully involved.
Next up is the stabby Holiday Crisps, which sticks to its ravey-references with whistle sounds used throughout the track, alongside little vox clips and low running bassline which follows the stabs. While this track certainly has one foot in the “old school” ideas in terms of sounds, it’s also an excellent example of where added percussion in sections of the track can add some real power. Some of the percs have an almost Latin feel, which really elevates this track.
Modelo is the third track on the EP, with the BPMs being nudged up a little and the overall vibe leaning towards floaty tech, which is absolutely brilliant. Soft bleepy sounds come in and out of the track as it glides along perfectly, audio sparkles flying from the speakers at a fair pace. Managing to be extremely uplifting, but with no element of cheese to give that feeling, this is a fantastic slice of after-hours club action.
Closing this excellent EP is Violet, which utilises a neat percussive backbone, punchy bass and filtered key stabs, which all weave superbly together. Again, there’s a nod to the 90s here as the drum programming certainly has hints of early 90s Todd Terry, it’s put together brilliantly and so is completely current too. There are no over-the-top production styles here, just straight-up quality club sounds, which is ultimately why this works so well.
A super-solid release from Theo Kottis here and one all club DJs worth their salt should be checking out.
Theo Kottis’ Enjoy The Ride is out on Permanent Vacation.
Words by Al Bradley
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