The Sound Of: Love On The Rocks

As with the rest of the label, things just sort of happened. After Covid, when Paramida ascended to the highest pantheon of Berlin DJs as a Panorama Bar resident, the club’s management asked if she wanted to throw a party. The first one was held in 2022 and, as she says, “it’s now spiralled.” She’s hosted club nights and festival stages everywhere from Kala Festival to fabric, expanding her devoted audience. 

The line-ups are just as expansive as the label; the organising principle is house, but you are just as likely to hear New York’s crown prince of the disco edit, Eric Duncan, as you are the queen of the diggers, Laurine from Slow Life. But like everyone who takes a sip of the Love On The Rocks Kool Aid, you can slowly start to hear what it is that brings them all together.    

Nothing captures this better than the label’s recently released anniversary compilation, ‘10 Years Love On The Rocks – Sky Is The Limit’. There are familiar faces from the roster — Massimiliano Pagliara, who provided the label’s first release, returns with tropical, Italo-inflected house, Fantastic Man and Tornado Wallace push their synths to their emotional limit, and Paramida herself lays out a prog-inflected monster. But what also impresses is how newer recruits to the label blend in so easily. Sweely’s ’80s funk sounds right at home, as does the sexed-up contribution from E-Talking, who debuted last year with ‘The Cosmic Egg’ EP. In other words, press play on either disc and you’ll slip into the Love On The Rocks world.  

Early in our conversation, Paramida tells us that she doesn’t A&R so much as ask her friends for records. “Every release is a reflection of my life, what I’m into and who is around me. If I let someone into the circle, it’s someone I truly believe in,” she explains. Listening to ‘10 Years Love On The Rocks – Sky Is The Limit’ then is a celebration of how singular and expansive a world Paramida has shaped.