John Tejada & Laurel Halo: Tech House on Palette Recordings

Two Artists, One Studio, and 30 Years of Palette

John Tejada has been running Palette Recordings since 1994, making 2026 the label's 30th anniversary year. Following the milestone PAL100 release, he turned to a collaborator with roots close to home: Laurel Halo, the Detroit-born, Los Angeles-based composer and producer he'd crossed paths with through CalArts. The result is Shade / Happy Trees, a two-track EP that trades in liquid tech house with a slightly left-field edge — material Tejada described simply as "bangers."

It's a modest word for what actually arrived. Both tracks sit at the junction of control and atmosphere in a way that takes craft to achieve, and the collaboration is one of the more interesting pairings Palette has produced in its three decades.

What 'Shade' Actually Sounds Like

The A-side lives up to its name. "Shade" anchors itself in a steady driving rhythm and lets tense harmonic movement carry the mood. There's no dramatic drop here, no festival-scale payoff — just shadowed textures and controlled low-end pressure that build slowly and hold the floor. Tejada reconnects with the club-focused side of his catalog after a run of more atmospheric releases, and the effect is immediately physical. The kick sits right, the chord stabs cut through the mix, and the overall feel is of music designed for the point in a set when the room is fully locked in and ready to go deeper.

It would work at the front end of a tech house set where things are still finding their temperature, or as a building block in the middle of a longer session. The track doesn't demand attention — it earns it gradually.

The Flip Side: Happy Trees and the Art of Breathing

Where "Shade" narrows, "Happy Trees" opens up. The low-end pressure is still present, but Halo's influence pulls the track toward something looser and more surreal — melodic fragments drift in and out, the groove carries a slight spring, and the overall motion feels more playful than its counterpart. In a DJ set this is the track you'd reach for when you want to keep the energy moving without tightening the screws further. It breathes without losing momentum.

Halo's presence on both tracks is the kind you can feel without always being able to identify exactly what she changed. The collaboration doesn't sound like Tejada with a guest feature; it sounds like two distinct musical languages finding a natural point of intersection. Her personal vocabulary of atmosphere, low-end movement, and improvisational detail shapes both tracks without overwhelming the rhythm-forward brief that makes them function in a club context.

Why the Palette 30th Anniversary Matters

Palette Recordings has been one of the more quietly consistent labels in underground electronic music since the mid-90s. Tejada's body of work on the imprint runs alongside his releases on Kompakt, Pokerflat, Cocoon, and Brainfeeder — a catalog that makes clear he doesn't treat Palette as a vanity outlet. It's his primary research space, the place where material gets released because it's right rather than because it fits a commercial window.

An anniversary year like this could have produced a retrospective or a compilation; instead, Tejada kept it forward-looking with a genuine studio collaboration that sounds as fresh as anything the label has released. PAL101 is the first release in the 100-series continuation, and it signals intent: the next phase of Palette will be club-focused without being formulaic, atmospheric without wallowing, and precise without feeling cold.

Shelf Life and Set Placement

The records that come out of this crossover between Tejada's rhythmic rigor and Halo's tonal fluency are going to sit well in sequences with Kompakt's minimal catalog, or alongside deeper tech house material from artists like Loco Dice and Seth Troxler where the groove is the architecture and the atmosphere fills in the walls. "Shade" fits comfortably in the warm-up or early peak window. "Happy Trees" works later when the room is warmer and a touch of melodic movement won't break the spell.

These are records built with club systems in mind, but with enough detail and structural thought to stay interesting on repeated listens outside that context. That's harder to do than it sounds, and it's the thing Tejada has been getting right for thirty years. Shade / Happy Trees is out now on Palette Recordings.