After initially appearing to disband in 1996, the Bay Area hip-hop label-slash-collective SoleSides wasted little time in re-emerging under a rebrand, Quannum Projects, the following year. The timing was ideal — artists like Lyrics Born, Lateef, Joyo Velarde, and Blackalicious who’d made their initial impressions on SoleSides were about to hit their stride as pillars of Quannum in the late ’90s/early ’00s — and this label-spanning compilation reinforces that flourishing creativity while nodding to the foundational artists who’d gone on to bigger things but hadn’t entirely moved on. SoleSides vet DJ Shadow fills that latter role well; his Divine Styler collab “Divine Intervention” is a to-the-point tower-of-drums juggernaut that regroups from UNKLE’s sprawl, while his beat for Latyrx’s apocalyptic nature’s-revenge nightmare “Storm Warning” is equal parts jazzy Krautrock and breakbeat accelerationism. It’s a big enough tent to draw in like-minded artists from outside their sphere, most notably El-P co-producing and spitting acid on Latyrx’s impressionistic pre-millennium tension panic attack “Looking Over a City,” Jurassic 5 lacing Quannum MCs summit “Concentration” with a rapport-heavy, deep-focus take on their close-harmonic doo-wop-hip-hop, and Souls of Mischief sharpening their blades on the Hiero/Quannum summit “The Extravaganza.” But it’s also a stylistic reiteration and a next-phase leap forward all at once, featuring some of the most exhilarating displays of free-flowing lyrical pyrotechnics to ever come from the SoleSides/Quannum camp. Blackalicious’s “One of a Kind” is a potent shot of what they did best, Gift of Gab unspooling preposterous internal rhymes with powerful assonance over Chief Xcel’s zero-fat headknock funk, and alongside his work with Latyrx partner Lateef on the aforementioned indie-rap gems, Lyrics Born’s ingratiating melodic sing-rap soul with German funk revivalists Poets of Rhythm on the breakup epiphany “I Changed My Mind” is a creative detour that wound up opening a major lane for him. And Velarde’s “People Like Me” is a surprise dose of Rufus-ized R&B that expands the parameters of the label’s ambition beyond hip-hop — though it winds up doing so by expanding the parameters of what Quannum considered hip-hop in itself.