For over a decade now Travis Holcombe has been one of Eskimo Recordings biggest supporters. His weekly Freaks Only show on LA’s KCRW is often the first place that audiences around the world hear the label’s latest releases. As part of Eskimo’s ongoing 25th birthday celebrations, Travis has curated a selection of 25 of his favourite tracks. He has dug through the last twelve years of the label’s eclectic output. The tracks range from Aili’s neon lit electro-pop to the cosmic sounds of Hermigervill and the sun kissed disco of NTEIBINT.
Trust Is the Real Currency
A record label is really only ever selling one thing, and it isn’t music – it’s trust. There’s a certain kind of label you trust the way you trust a friend with taste so good you’ve stopped double-checking it. You don’t need to see the menu. Or to read reviews. You just go, because they’ve earned it, and because the few times you second-guessed them you turned out to be wrong. For most of the last fourteen years, Eskimo Recordings was the label I trusted. This period aligns almost exactly with my time doing a daily show at KCRW.
Because here’s what nobody warns you about DJing a daily show: the whole thing runs on a single renewable fuel, which is the thrill of hearing something amazing for the first time. That’s the drug. That’s what you’re chasing every day – the record that stops you mid-scroll, the one that makes you physically sit up, the one you can’t wait to get on the air because you need other people to feel what you just felt. And the quiet problem with chasing that feeling is that it’s exhausting to source. You can spend hours and come up empty.
Chasing the First-Listen High
Eskimo was one of the rare places that reliably delivered the hit. A release would land and it wouldn’t so much need auditioning as confirming – the only real decision left was placement, whether it went up top to set a tone or got saved for the moment the room finally understands what you’ve been building toward. They were doing the searching, and handing me the first-listen high pre-assembled.
But reliability on its own is sort of boring. Dependability is the quality we praise in accountants and midsize sedans, and the genuinely mysterious thing about Eskimo is that they were never boring, even though those two qualities are supposed to be mutually exclusive. Most labels pick one. They either find a sound and mine it until the whole thing collapses into self-parody, or they chase every passing trend so indiscriminately that they never actually mean any of them.
Eskimo somehow refused the trade-off. They were releasing nu-disco and space disco before there was a tidy word for either. Right when that sound was cresting, they were already somewhere else. A lesser label would have happily printed the same record forty more times.
A Label That Never Played It Safe
Belgian art-pop. EBM – past, present, and future. Stranger, more submerged club music. Records by people who didn’t obviously belong anywhere, which of course is exactly why they belonged on Eskimo. Every time I decided I’d finally figured out what the label was, they’d put out something that quietly informed me I hadn’t. For a DJ, that’s not frustrating – that’s the dream. It means somebody more patient than you is out there mapping the territory, and all you have to do is follow.
When Compilations Become a Worldview
And I haven’t even gotten to the compilations, which are where the real re-education happened. Because a great single just gives you a great single. A great compilation gives you a worldview. The ones Eskimo commissioned from people like Curses, Bill Brewster, Optimo, and Psychemagik didn’t just introduce me to records I didn’t know – they rearranged the furniture of records I already thought I understood.
They’d set two tracks side by side that had no business being together. In that juxtaposition, you’d suddenly hear a hidden lineage. There was a secret argument about how dance music fits together. I would come away from those comps and look at my own crates differently, like a magic-eye poster resolving into a shape I couldn’t un-see. That’s a genuinely strange thing for a compilation to accomplish. Most of them are just playlists with better packaging.
These changed how I DJ. And here’s the thing I didn’t fully appreciate until later: a label, done right, is itself a compilation of compilations – the same curatorial instinct, just applied one release at a time, year after year, until it adds up to a worldview of its own. Throughout the period I’m discussing, Nadiem Shah was the one making those calls at Eskimo. Maintaining that batting average for such a long time is a quiet art form.
25 Tracks, Twelve Years, One Thank-You
So when I was asked to put a collection like this together, my first honest reaction was that I’d be repaying a debt I could never fully cover. These 25 tracks aren’t an attempt at a definitive history. They’re drawn from the label’s second chapter, roughly the last dozen years. This period happens to be very nearly the stretch I was there for in real time. They’re just the ones that stuck.
The ones I kept reaching for on the air and in clubs, the ones that survived every ruthless round of cuts because I couldn’t imagine the sequence without them. Think of it as more than a museum. It’s a thank-you note from a DJ who spent fourteen years leaning on this label. It’s also a thank-you to a label that spent twenty-five years staying two steps ahead and, somehow, always left the door open for the rest of us to catch up.
Details:
Release Date: August 19th, 2026
Catalog Number 541416669582D
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