Every producer has that one track. The one made at 2 AM with the laptop still warm from another session, the kind of beat that falls out of you rather than gets built. For Vonenzo Baschello, that track was written at 118 BPM — unhurried, unpolished, and released into the world with the kind of confidence that only comes from making music because you have to, not because you’re chasing a deal.
“Taking A Listen” wasn’t a single in the traditional sense. It was a moment — captured, shared, and streamed live to an audience that tuned in not for the polished product but for the raw thing itself. A producer in his element, sharing the process, not just the outcome. YouTube Live as the world’s most honest release strategy.
118 BPM. That tempo matters. It’s not club pace — it’s too relaxed for that. It’s the speed of a thought that isn’t rushing anywhere. The kind of beat you’d write on a Sunday afternoon when the week’s work is done and the only thing left is to see what happens when you just let the software breathe. House music made by someone who grew up on the genre’s deeper traditions — not the festival headline version, but the one that plays at 4 AM when the room finally understands what it’s there for.
The original blog post linked back to vonenzobaschello.co.za — an older home for the Vonenzo Baschello brand, before the world expanded into what it is today. That site has since been absorbed into the main domain, but the track remains. It’s embedded in the article above — a relic and a reminder that the work started with making things and sharing them, not marketing them.
What makes “Taking A Listen” significant in the context of the Vonenzo Baschello World is that it demonstrates something the rest of the catalogue reinforces in different ways: this is an artist who treats the process as the point, not the release. The track wasn’t made to build an audience or launch a campaign. It was made because the music demanded to exist, and Vonenzo was the one there to make it.
The Vonenzo Baschello World — built across the VBWLD token ecosystem, the Vonenzonian Royalty NFT community, Darkmello Recordings, and the Chosen Chakra algorithm — is an extension of this same principle. The infrastructure exists to support the work, not the other way around. You don’t build the brand first and then make the music. You make the music and the brand builds itself around what you made.
118 BPM also means something specific for the genre classification. This isn’t tech house at 128. This isn’t the aggressive 130-plus territory that festival bookings require. At 118, you’re in a different space — the space where the music is written for listening rather than for movement, for the headphones rather than the sound system, for the Sunday afternoon session rather than the Friday night peak. That’s the tradition “Taking A Listen” sits in: deep house, functional, unhurried, made by someone who knows exactly where they are in the genre’s history.
If you’re discovering Vonenzo Baschello’s music for the first time, start here. Not because it’s the best track — but because it’s the most honest one. Made in a room, shared with the world, still available to stream wherever the music lives online. From that first release to the Identity Collection NFT releases and the Vonenzonian Royalty ecosystem that developed around them, the principle has been consistent: the music comes first, and everything else follows.
More from the Vonenzo Baschello audio archive — available on Apple Music, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Beatport. The full catalogue reflects the same attention to craft and genre depth that “Taking A Listen” established as a starting point. For Vonenzonians and listeners who want to go deeper, the Darkmello Recordings channel and the Vonenzo Baschello World ecosystem offer the next layer of context.
