For the better part of a decade, much of the most exciting electronic music coming out of Milwaukee sounded like it crawled out of the dankest corners of a musty, cobwebbed basement. There’s still some truly incredible music coming out of the industrial corners of the local electronic scene, and likely always will be, but in recent years the scene has been shedding its bleak image, and no label is cheerleading that effort more than NiceFM, a collective of producers whose work tends more toward the beachier, feel-good spectrum of EDM.
So far the label has a handful of mixes to its name, each of them a concentrated pick-me-up, and today it released its fourth and quite possibly its brightest, cheeriest yet: Comp4Pools, which features some knockout tracks from Plaid Hawaii, CAMEone, Hot Science, Speedboat Sounds, label founder Dashcam and others. The mix’s mélange of trip-hop, funk, bizarro tropicalia, and Perfect Strangers-soundtrack-wave often sounds more like Miami than Milwaukee, but it's perfectly timed for the small window each year where we actually get to feel like we’re in Miami.
You can stream the compilation and find its tracklist below.
Tracklist:
00:00 Nice Pools Intro
00:12 CAMEone - Process
02:23 Alex Smith - NOT in the Background (feat. Christian Shebesta)
04:27 Ipa Ghost + DASHCAM - Digital Summer
07:50 Zero Tep - Vitamin
11:32 Echo Island - Ultra Violet
13:50 Speedboat Sounds - HAYA
16:53 Luxi - Lightning
20:29 The Encounter - Hope III (Time Revival)
24:18 Martiln - The Tides of Time
27:05 Plaid Hawaii - Pineapple Fantasia
31:19 Martiln - Equilibrium
34:57 Hot Science - WVVE (Part 3)
37:15 Powernerd - In the End
41:19 DASHCAM - Blue Eyes (feat. Cat Ries)
44:52 Christian Shebesta - Sense of Time (feat. Alex Smith and Damiano Della Torre)