You’re reading this on TYFTH, so clearly you’ve already checked out Alek Szahala’s Neonya!! Live PA. This post is less about sharing news, then, than it is for giving credit to Alek for the effort he’s clearly put into developing the technical and structural sides of his sets. One of his all time bests, without a doubt.

For more than a decade, Alek’s sets have tended to run the whole range from uplifting to dark, but this is definitely the strongest in the ways it smoothly switches up the atmosphere and cruises through the bpms. It makes you realise how active he’s been lately, with the first half of the set entirely made up of new tracks and edits (including Ascend to the Stars). I can’t stress enough how impressed I am with how the hour is put together – a Live PA is less about mixing in key of course, but this is a far cry from Alek’s sets of a couple of decades ago, where each track would reach its outro and the intro of the next would come in for a few seconds before the switchover. Back then the tracks were so ahead of their time that a simple approach still did the trick, but here there’s a real understanding of the flow of a set, cutting tracks in to maintain the pace or change the atmosphere, as well as some very well chosen longer transitions. The edits do a lot to help with that, the absolute banger of the Lab-4 vs. Strobeflux rework being one of my favourites, as it edits its way in underneath Tears and Whispers.

There’s even a touch of the Melancholias in the use of samples to add some consistency to the set, with ‘I am your only friend’ being a lovely addition that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in 2004. On that note, I’ll admit that the appearance of The Sample in Fuji’s breakdown made me tear up a little, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. The timely reminder of how much freeform can still move me, maybe? Whatever it was, it’s fittingly followed by a great cut into Blood from the Sky that signals the dark closing sequence, including a superb use of Origami Hearts.

This is next-level Live PA business, in short – if it sounds this good as a recording then it’s hard to imagine the impact it must have had live. Just a quick look at the soundcloud comments shows that some were hearing Alek for the first time, and that surely means there’ll be a few new additions to the growing 2020s freeform intake – this bunch starting in the best way imaginable.