Every month, Philip Sherburne listens to a whole lot of mixes so you only have to listen to the best ones.
Were halfway through this strange, unsettling year, and the outlook for electronic music isnt looking any better than it was when the pandemic first shut everything down four months ago. Some promoters, festivals, and DJs have tried to pretend things are reverting to normalwhich pretty much everybody agrees is a terrible ideawhile others are crowdfunding just to stay in business. (The Berlin-based DJ Eric Cloutier articulated something thats probably on a lot of musicians minds when he recently predicted, I don't think many, if any of us, will be DJing in clubs ever again.)
Happily, the proliferation of online mix series in the last few years means that the art of the DJ mix itself is more versatileand more portablethat you might expect. This months best mixes encompass sets that, sure, would be more pleasurable if experienced in a sweaty club with a few hundred dancing bodies, but dont lose too much in their transition to 1s and 0s: Just see Juliana Huxtables industrial-strength Dekmantel podcast, or Soso Tharpas homage to riding roughshod over genre boundaries. As usual, theres no shortage of headier, home-listening fare, either, like Mood Hut regular CZ Wangs love letter to trip-hop, or Danish deep-house tricksters Sports and Centrals spin through the corners of the Regelbau collectives archives.
Recorded entirely during lockdown, the UK producer pattens recent album GLOW is pensive and hazy, a collection of contrapuntal synthesizer loops spinning aimlessly in place. His mix for Ransom Notes Monday Is OK series captures a similar mood. Like the album, its entirely drum free, eschewing the tough club rhythms that distinguished pattens 2019 album Flex; its dissonant sonics are even murkier than GLOWs, recalling the low-bitrate collage work of early albums like 2011sGLAQJO XAACSSOand 2014sESTOILE NAIANT. One curious fact about the mix: It was made entirely out of snippets of Ariel Pink songs, processed and re-pitched until they take on a sludgy sort of gleam, like the iridescent surface of an oily mud puddle. Along the way there are nods to the gelatinous textures of GAS and Actress, while the radiant finale sounds almost like an ambient remix of My Bloody Valentine.
Washington, DCs Soso Tharpa is all about the drums. His set for Truants mix series takes in house, UK garage, broken beat, techno, acid, electro, and more, yet no matter the style of music hes playing, his selections all feel unusually elastic; his habit of zig-zagging between genres only serves to accentuate all that snap and swing. Tharpa covers a lot of ground in just an hour, mixing up contemporary UK bass with curveballs from Baltimore club legend Rod Lee and punk-disco screamer Mutsumi; beyond the songs percussive punch, the through line drawing many of them together is their ultra-vivid textural sheen. John Roberts Glue sounds like a post-club take on Yellow Magic Orchestra, while you can feel the vibrations of Errorsmith & Mark Fells bizarrely bright Cuica Digitales deep in the fillings in your teeth. Its a party setjust check the cheeky blend of ballroom with Ariana Grandes 7 rings toward the endbut its plenty serious, too. Right after Grandes hair-flipping finale, Tharpa drops LL Cool Js freestyle tribute to George Floyd. For 400 years you had your knees on our necks, the hip-hop veteran raps. Americas a graveyard full of black mens bones. Its a heavy conclusion to a breezy, unburdened houra reminder that the freedom of the dancefloor quickly dissipates once the lights go back on.
Juliana Huxtables set for Amsterdams Dekmantel podcast is not for the faint of heart. Following a brief introductory crescendo of abstracted sound designrustling, murmuring voices, then the metallic crunch of a car crash, or perhaps an artillery barragethe New York DJ launches into thundering, 140 BPM techno and refuses to let up for the next hour. Along the way, she slips between pile-driving four-to-the-floor rhythms and sandblasted breakbeats, drawing energy from trance, industrial, and even alt rock. Nathan Micays streamlined Nightfall in Neo-Tokyo provides a colorful point of contrasta calm before the radioactive stormwhile shoegazers Curves 1997 single Chinese Burn flashes back to the days of The Matrix, when every action film soundtracked its fight scenes with metal guitars and distorted breaks. Scattered throughout are snippets and samples of songs you might recognize, but Huxtables fast-and-furious style of mixing means that theyre often gone before you can identify themor, as in the case of the disco strings at the sets climax, simply obliterated by her drums overwhelming force.
Los Angeles Maral made her name as a DJ by extending the Iranian folk music of her upbringing into new contexts, like ambient and industrial-strength club music. This hard-charging mix for the Arabic-language publication Ma3azef is one of Marals most wide-ranging sets yet. Kicking off with a spoken-word poem by the long-suppressed Iranian feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad, it bulldozes through borders to cross Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, South Africa, Mauritania, and more, with heavy bass, churning percussion, and dub effects as the common denominators. Marals own productionsincluding some from her upcoming album on Leavingare the glue that holds it all together. Sometimesoftenits unclear just what youre listening to: A stretch of marimba, breakbeats, trance synths, and Gasolina chants makes for a particularly head-spinning highlight. Maral describes the mood as a combination between melancholy and anger: When she recorded the set in April, she was processing the looming possibility of war between the U.S. and Iran, as well as the ways that American sanctions were putting Iranian COVID-19 patients at risk. That context might explain a particularly blistering stretch featuring Kathleen Hannas Le Tigre, British anarchists DIRT, and Olympia, Washingtons Farsi-language punk rockers ETERAZa display of righteous fury thats equivalent to warming your hands over a pile of burning passports. To finish up with Skeeter Davis tearful 1962 hit The End of the World is a stroke of inspiration; to let the record slowly, eerily drift to a dead halt is genius.
Few mixes hold onto a single groove the way this one from Clevelands adab does, and fewer still do it with a groove this slippery. The tempo is a cool 95 or 96 BPM from start to finisha lazy andante, neither too fast nor too slow: Goldilocks meets rockers uptown, perhaps. Theres more than a hint of dub to their selections, too, albeit more in the reverb and delay than in the beats themselves, which lean toward hand drums and tuned percussion with the deep, resonant ping of water droplets on metal surfaces. Its a heady set that holds its cards close to its chestat least until a little more than halfway through, when a strange, squirrelly classic from Mouse on Mars kicks off a psychedelic stretch that wends through Psychick Warriors Ov Gaias breakbeat trance, DJ Pythons ambient dembow, and the shimmery crunch of Meat Beat Manifesto. In the sets final stretch, the North African reeds of On-U Sounds African Head Charge and DJ Stretch make good on the otherworldly impulses bubbling just below the surface.
Since kicking off its residency on Crack Magazines virtual airwaves a year and a half ago, Anthony Naples and Jenny Slatterys Incienso label has turned in sets from Beta Librae, Nikolajev, and Sleep D, along with the label founders themselves. Now, New Yorks CZ Wang closes out the run with a pleasantly sluggish set thats perfectly suited to summer heat waves. He opens with a real head-turner: a Russian-language ballad for string synths, rain stick, and voice with an almost Lynchian vibe. The surreal mood now set, he sinks into a mix full of trip-hop breaks thats got the mid 90s written all over it. (Indeed, the first such track Shazam successfully identifies is Single Cell Orchestras Transmit Liberation, from 1993.) Its been a long time since these sorts of head-nodding grooves had much cachet, but Wangs forays beyond modish boundaries end up surfacing some gemslanguid tracks full of muted trumpet, hip-hop scratching, and squiggly acid lines, the sort of thing that once flourished on labels like Mo Wax and Ninja Tune. The tempo subtly rises across the sets back half, until suddenly were in jubilant piano-house territory, and a conclusionpitting an alternate mix of Seals Crazy against McCoy Tyners spiritually rich For Tomorrowthat really shouldnt work, but somehow does, wonderfully.
Aarhus, Denmarks DJ Sports & DJ Centralaka brothers Miln and Natal Zakshave kept a low profile over the past couple of years. After Sports 2017 album Modern Species augured an imminent breakthrough for their hometowns Regelbau collective, they retreated into their cozy DIY world, selling vinyl-only singles via Safe Distribution, their mail-order operation, and generally kept an arms distance from most digital platforms. But the two recently turned in an hour-long broadcast for a Dublab showcase from 12th Islethe label that put out Palta Og Ti P Den Tolvte and it makes for the perfect opportunity to catch up with their curious, self-contained universe. The selections flit drowsily between dubby downbeat, deep house, rolling breakbeats, and even the occasional stab at quick-stepping techno. No matter the tempo, the colors are as rich as all-natural pigments, and the mood is laid back and even a little bit whimsical, complete with between-song commentary as reassuring as a therapists voice.
Ben Bondys music tends toward deep abstraction. In the past few months, the Brooklyn electronic musician has put out three releaseshis debut album, Sibling, for Experiences Ltd.; a split EP with Berlins exael on Huerco S.s West Mineral Ltd.; and a self-released mini-albumeach one more ineffable than the last. Shapeless synths jostle and drift, aimless as flotsam in the tide; when there are drums, they burble along, practically out of earshot. He takes his ambient tendencies to an extreme in this set for radio.syg.ma, an online platform run by the like-minded Russian artist Perila. It feels as much like a still life, or a landscape photograph, as music: Theres little in the way of forward motion, just swirling chords, a luminous background glow, and faint rustling sounds. At times, it seems to nod to the textural obsessions of ASMR. Early in the set, a Spanish-language poem by Daniel Rincon deepens the hypnotic mood; toward the end, an unexpected passage of breakbeats from exael flashes back to the liquid drumnbass of the 90sa brief explosion of kinetic energy before the set crumbles into dust.
Go here to see the original: