Diabla: The Glasgow Record That Keeps Coming Back

In the autumn of 2001, a record with a catalogue number most people never looked at, SOMA 112, started turning up in the bags of DJs who normally had little in common. It came from a small label in Glasgow and was made by a producer called Lars Sandberg, who released music as Funk D'Void. The A-side was called “Diabla”, in a version Sandberg labelled the Heavenly Mix. It ran close to nine minutes. A quarter of a century later, the same track has climbed back up Beatport's progressive house chart. The story of how that happened says a lot about Glasgow and about what holds a record together.

A label born in a basement club

To understand “Diabla”, you have to start ten years earlier. In 1991, Stuart McMillan and Orde Meikle, the DJ duo known as Slam, founded Soma Quality Recordings in Glasgow with a small circle of friends. As McMillan told Mixmag, the label grew out of the nights they were already running at the Sub Club. Mixmag later described it as carrying the do-it-yourself spirit of post-punk labels like Factory and Rough Trade.

The first release, “Eterna / I.B.O.”, was pressed in a run of a thousand copies. What the shops paid for it funded the next pressing. There was no master plan, just a city with a fiercely loyal club crowd and two DJs who wanted somewhere to put their music. If you have ever wondered how a record label actually gets started, early Soma is close to the textbook case: one release paying for the next.

The demo from Paris

The episode that made Soma famous outside Scotland came almost by accident. Slam met two young Frenchmen, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, at a rave in Paris and heard their demo. Soma released Daft Punk's first record, “The New Wave”, in 1994. In 1995 it followed with “Da Funk”, which later appeared on the duo's debut album Homework and became the label's best-known release.

The Daft Punk story could easily have become the label's whole identity, a footnote with a famous name in it. Instead Soma kept doing what it had always done: signing people from its own orbit and from abroad who made machine music with a human pulse. One of those people was Lars Sandberg.

Lars Sandberg and the 2001 breakthrough

Sandberg, a Scottish producer, had been on Soma since his 1995 debut single “Jack Me Off”. His album Technoir followed on the label in 1997. He has said in interviews that the melodic side of his music came from years of sampling, especially from his collection of old rave and hardcore records. That habit of pulling warmth out of other people's grooves shows in his work. His records sit somewhere between house and techno, and between the machine and the soul.

“Diabla” was where that balance became a hit. The original version first appeared in March 2001 on his album Dos; the 12-inch followed on Soma in October 2001. The lead was Sandberg's own Heavenly Mix. A second 12-inch, SOMA 112R, carried two remixes: one from the French producer The Hacker, and one from Kevin Saunderson, one of the three Belleville producers who built Detroit techno. For a Glasgow label, landing a Saunderson remix was a statement: this record belonged in the same conversation as the music that had inspired Soma in the first place.

The record's reach was wide. Armada's reissue notes name Pete Tong, Dave Clarke and Sven Väth among its supporters. That is a radio tastemaker, one of the UK's best-known techno DJs and the godfather of the German scene, which is not a list that usually agrees on anything. Slam themselves later called it “a real milestone for Soma” when they picked the label's ten key releases for Mixmag.

Why a track can live in two genres at once

Part of the reason “Diabla” still travels is that it never belonged to one tribe. Retailers file the 2026 reissue under house and tech house, and in October 2026 it climbed Beatport's progressive house chart. In 2001 people called it techno. None of those labels is wrong. The Heavenly Mix builds patiently over nearly nine minutes and lets its melody take over gradually rather than relying on one big moment. That is exactly the long-form architecture progressive DJs have always relied on, as anyone who has followed the history of progressive house will recognise.

Records built this way age differently from records built around one production trick. A sound that is fashionable for a single season dates with it. A groove and a chord movement that take their time do not. That is why the same track could work at a techno night in 2001 and in a melodic progressive set in 2026 without anyone having to explain it.

The remixes that kept it alive

“Diabla” also shows how a classic stays in circulation: other people keep reworking it. For Soma's twentieth anniversary, Christian Smith & Wehbba, Metrik and Joash delivered three very different new versions. Each one pulled the track toward a different scene. That is the less glamorous side of a remix's power. Not every remix has to beat the original; some exist to carry the original into rooms it would never otherwise reach.

In 2026 the cycle turned again. Armada, the Dutch label founded by Armin van Buuren and partners, released a licensed reissue in cooperation with Soma. It pairs the Heavenly Mix and Saunderson's remix with a revisited version of the Heavenly Mix and a new interpretation by Joris Voorn. A digital remix collection with the older versions had appeared on Armada's channels in March 2026. The release also fits a larger pattern: in 2023 Armada launched BEAT Music Fund, an investment arm that buys and relaunches dance-music catalogues. Back catalogue has become an asset class, and a track like “Diabla” is exactly what such a strategy is looking for.

What happened to Glasgow's label

Soma itself never went away. In 2026 the label turned 35 and marked it with SOMA35, a remix series whose first EP was the label's 700th release, with contributors including Surgeon and Luke Slater. Slam still play the Sub Club, where the whole thing started. It is a rare continuity in a culture where most labels from 1991 survive only as entries on Discogs.

That continuity is the real story behind a Beatport chart jump. “Diabla” did not come back because of nostalgia marketing alone. It came back because a small label kept its catalogue alive, because a producer built a groove patient enough to outlast its genre, and because a new generation of DJs, many of whom were not born when SOMA 112 was pressed, heard it and found that it still works.

A record that refuses to date

Most club records have a lifespan of a season. A few make it to a second decade, usually as nostalgia. “Diabla” is rarer: a track that keeps being played as current music, filed under whatever the scene calls itself that year. It started as one release among hundreds on a Glasgow label founded by two DJs and their friends out of a basement club. Twenty-five years on, it is still doing the one thing a dance record is for: holding a room.