Five volumes in, Bestiary has become the clearest picture of what Marginalia actually is. ELIF started the label in Barcelona as a home for the producers whose records fill her sets, naming it after the drawings and scribbled notes that 11th century scribes left in the margins of manuscripts, the one place on the page where imagination was allowed to run wild. Bestiary is where that idea gets counted out loud. It is where the label brings together the artists it has been building with, the ones who have been supporting it from the beginning, and the new names joining for the first time. Seventeen tracks this time, moving across house, melodic house, indie dance, afro and melodic techno, sequenced to end somewhere softer than it starts.

‘Jamaica’ opens the compilation, and it exists because ELIF could not finish it. She had been sitting with a reggae leaning rhythm for a while, one of those loops that refuses to tell you where it wants to go, so she sent it over to her dear friend Xinobi. It came back finished. What the two of them landed on is loose and warm rather than heavy, an afro tinted groove with enough swing in it to work at golden hour and enough patience to hold a floor at three in the morning. Putting it first on a seventeen track record says plenty about the mood the rest of the compilation is chasing.

Xinobi has been a fixture of the Portuguese scene for close to two decades. Based in Lisbon, he co-founded Discotexas in the mid 2000s and has since built a catalogue spanning Anjunadeep, Cercle, Frau Blau and Ministry of Sound, three albums of his own, film soundtracks, a live band, and more recently his own imprint On The Quiet Records. He has also had a long standing presence in the Marginalia world, which makes this collaboration feel less like a guest appearance and more like a conversation that was always going to happen. ELIF, for her part, has spent the last few years turning Marginalia into one of the more reliably interesting labels in melodic house, a place built to champion the hardest working and often least rewarded people in the industry. ‘Jamaica’ is a neat piece of evidence for why that approach keeps paying off.

You can now listen to the full premiere of ‘Jamaica’ exclusively on When We Dip. Enjoy!

Release Date: September 16th, 2026. Buy Here

ELIF: Instagram / SoundCloud
Xinobi: Instagram / SoundCloud
Marginalia: Instagram / SoundCloud