Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
As summer drew to a close, plenty of DJs offered sets to beat the heat. Alien D turned in a session of blissed-out ambience and bass burners suited for muggy afternoons, and Ciel, Hannah D & DJ Luv You built a mountain of trip-hop and downtempo psychedelia. Hissed dug into arid ambient music and Pól Micheál explored Irish folk-music traditions, while Stone whipped up a set of dubbed-out techno and pointillistic ambience. Akanbi stuffed the Horst Arts & Music Festival amps with sunshine in a wild-eyed live recording, and Susobrino supplied ravers with a killer survey of cumbia records. The folks at Sweet Nuthin’ put out the kind of set that might make you buy a convertible, and boxofbox whipped up a set of chunky and kaleidoscopic rave music.
Elsewhere, a few DJs leaned into the weather. Amor Satyr & Siu Mata, two critical names on the contemporary Parisian club circuit, turned in a session for the finger-gun crowd, while Myles Mac cooked up a playful and dexterous set of ‘90s and ‘00s rave-ups. NYC DJ Darian slammed on the gas in a set of house and techno stompers, and livwutang went deep on brain-bending dubstep. Bored Lord uncorked a bottle of confetti for a set at Bar Part Time, and Physical Therapy rocketed between umpteen high-energy dancefloor idioms at Nowadays. Elsewhere still, DJ Cumstain grabbed armfuls of weapons-grade kick drums and hard-trance synths, and Sun People looked towards an everything-goes vision of mechanistic club sounds.
This was also a great month for the explorers. CCL and Objekt, two of the most wide-ranging DJs on the planet, offered up two live sets packed with head-trip electronics and slamming percussion tracks. Jaye Ward zoomed in on the intersection of ambience and techno until the whole thing turned outright delirious, while OKO DJ looked instead towards nervy rock records, ice-cold guitar experimentalism, and unnerving ambience. Vladimir Ivković turned in a slow-and-low dancefloor set that sauntered down countless blind alleys. The folks at NTS dug into the works of Kassia, a critical choral-music composer from the ninth century, and @DorkSirjur eulogized DJ Randall, a legend of drum-and-bass, by amassing over 500 of his recorded sets.
Here are some of the best DJ sets August had to offer.
When Alien D was last in these pages—just a month ago!—it was for Truancy Volume 332, a real opus of a set: bleary ambience and rip-roaring breaks and zero-gravity techno and heads-down stutter-steppers, whipped up for a head-spinning three hours. This time, it’s for something meaningfully different. If the Truancy session was calibrated for late nights at the club and the starlit trip home, then REC_6 is for the day after: this is sun-kissed and luxurious stuff. He spends the first half of the session working with slo-mo psychedelia, collaging together beatless ambient music, scraggly synthesizer workouts, tumbleweed-blasted sort-of-rock music, and dank dub techno; in its cohesion, range, and barely-there deliria, it’s a serious structural and aesthetic achievement. More impressive still is what he does next: throughout the following hour, Alien D folds in all sorts of drum-music experimentalism, finding the Venn-diagram sliver between sludged-up ambient music and craggy club-adjacent sounds in the process. The longer it runs on, the stranger it gets: at various points, it’s hollowed-out kind-of-techno, eerie minimalism, and rattling indie rock. REC_6 is a serious achievement in form and aesthetic alike. In its sheer stylistic range alone, it’s a minor miracle: it’s a million disparate ideas welded into one ramshackle whole; it is quiet, playful, and joyful at once.
It’s almost trite at this point: if you’re digging into percussion-heavy club sets, you’re almost certain to run into Amor Satyr & Siu Mata. Not that that’s a bad thing! The Parisian producers have earned their spot in the modern club-music pantheon thanks to their unerring focus on quick and precise drum workouts; their music sits somewhere between techno, dembow, hard drum, and dubstep, skipping between each idiom without ever fully settling down. (Even now, they are perhaps best known for their “speed dembow” work, a style of sped-up reggaetón that’s still without peer.) On RA.948, they grab the vaunted mix series’s decks for two hours of heaters, taking their trademark bassbin-busting style to any number of dancefloor idioms: Here, it’s skittering breakbeats; there, it’s screaming techno; elsewhere still, it’s chopped-and-scattered drum-and-bass, lickety-split dembow, or skull-cracking hardcore. In any case, it’s bound to be blood-boiling. On RA.948, they pull off a few impressive tricks at once, sprinting between umpteen styles without losing the plot and keeping things uptempo without turning exhausting. Put simply: this is weapons-grade club fuel from two of Paris’s finest.
In the past several years, Bored Lord has emerged as a critical name in modern club music thanks to her everything-goes approach to the past. 3213123, a raucous LP she put out early last year, is a mile-a-minute whirlwind of breakbeats and just-so vocal samples; kiss, released about a year later, hews closer to ‘90s house records; and every now and again, she releases blink-and-you’ll-miss-it edit packs that pull from all sorts of yesteryear’s radio hits. The throughline—beyond an ear for a great hook—is this approach to history, which is respectful but not reverent; Bored Lord’s music makes a point of shaking up time capsules before hurling them a few dozen years into the future. It’s a winning approach.
Part of the thrill of Live @ B.P.T., then, is hearing her do something a bit different. Here, in a live recording pulled from San Francisco’s Bar Part Time, a wine bar with a killer SoundCloud account, she spends a few hours uncorking a bottle of vintage bubbly, grabbing house, boogie, and disco records to keep things effervescent. It’s mixed cleanly and without obvious peacocking, which betrays the quiet mastery on display here: this is full of precise blends between richly orchestrated tunes, which is no easy feat to pull off for this long; the sheer joy on display throughout only adds to the magic. (Her loudest bit of CDJ wizardry comes midway through, when she pulls up some for-your-ears-only vocals and warps the BPM underneath; it’s outright delirious, in large part because of how smooth the preceding two hours were.) On Live @ B.P.T., a one-of-one contemporary dance-music historian goes deep on a highly particular strain of the stuff, celebrating the legacy of disco and its million children.
One annual tradition begets another. Every year, a crowd of ravers and DJs descends upon the Pennsylvanian woods for a long weekend of exploratory club music; and, every year, a week or so prior, boxofbox puts out something to soundtrack the drive there. (And, every year, it winds up in these pages.) The tense gives away the game this time around. honeycomb is packed with anticipatory energy, with tracks threatening to boil over even as they offer a great pre-party soundtrack. Again and again, boxofbox returns to tightly coiled grooves, lush orchestration, and full-bodied vocal tracks, mixing slowly to let the rhythm sections vamp just a bit longer. This approach—a focus on texture and mood over specific timbres—allows boxofbox plenty of space to vault between styles. Depending on where you scan to, honeycomb is one of a million things: spy-flick nu-jazz workouts and turntablist hip-house mania; chunky new-jack swing and blissed-out diva house; heartrending R&B and electro-funk jackers—anything to keep energies just high enough. honeycomb is six hours of uncut sunshine.
At some point in the past few years, CCL and Objekt became more or less inseparable. If you spot one name on a club-night flyer, odds are you’ll find the other, too. It makes sense: they share a geographical home base but also an aesthetic one; both DJs use mechanistic club-night tools as a springboard towards parts unknown, turning in wildly unpredictable sets that reward exploratory ravers. (Uncoincidentally, whenever either of them posts a new set, it’s appointment listening.) In August, both DJs went deep and wild, turning in a pair of everything-goes sessions mixed to a tee.
First: CCL. In a live recording from Freerotation 2024, they slunk their way between low-slung club tools, favoring brain-benders and gut-twisters over out-and-out steamrollers. Here, they grab snarling dubstep and head-trip techno tools before complicating the narrative in umpteen ways; what starts as a straightforward club session turns to a universe of blind alleys and hard left turns. ani/live Fifty Six turns inside out and back again every few minutes, with CCL shedding their skin with each blend. Again and again, it feels like they’ve queued up an entirely new style behind the decks, somehow sticking the landing each time: black-hole techno and sun-bleached grime records and pointillistic sort-of-trance and no-shit rock-and-roll and rollicking dubstep.
If you’re looking to stretch that mood out for another four hours, though, just queue up Objekt’s offering. The last time the selector released a Nowadays recording, it was a career-best session of long-form club explorations; this recording, ripped from the club’s decks in April, is at least as strong. Never mind the horse-race, though: what you need to know here is that this is one of the planet’s strongest DJs in top shape, locked into a wild-eyed and generous vision of dance music for six hours straight. In his liner notes for the set, Objekt wonders if it’s because of the moon phases, and it’s perhaps telling; the set is suitably cosmic, packed with deep-space gurgles, broken-machinery clang-music, and abyssal basslines. Like with CCL’s session, if you scan from bit to bit, it’s hard to imagine it all cohering: new beat and dub and drum-and-bass and tectonic-plate dubstep and who-knows drum workouts, all stapled together into a slowly shifting mass, but Objekt moves with an undeniable grace here, giving truth to the clichés about DJs as storytellers along the way. In either case, these sets are two top-notch examples of the possibilities of kitchen-sink DJing; in their latest sessions, both CCL and Objekt revel in the possibilities of an accepting dancefloor and launch the crowd into the cosmos.
Near the end of Live at LUNA Blessings, a remarkable session from three critical new-school DJs, someone pulls out a version of “Walk on By,” a ‘60s soul classic about turning a blind eye to misery. The original’s a heartbreaker, and this version—which down-shifts Dionne Warwick’s vocals and tosses them on top a low-slung Ibizan groove—doesn’t do much to change that, even if it’s angled towards the chill-out room in a way the original never was. In a set filled with brain-bending downtempo records, this one is perhaps emblematic. Here, they twist up histories and emotions at once, settling in both the ‘90s and the ‘60s, landing somewhere between plainspoken sadness and sun-kissed bliss along the way. Call it an uncanny valley if you will, but it’s remarkably plush down there. Throughout the rest of Live at LUNA Blessings, Ciel, Hannah D, and DJ Luv You grab piles of velveteen tearjerkers, leaning deep into the late-night sounds of trip-hop, Balearic house, and zero-gravity downtempo along the way. It’s most impressive for how deeply they focus in on this mood: this is a session that goes deep rather than wide, exploring a million facets of one particular strand of heartache.
The appeal of SORRYMIX34 is delightfully simple: want two hours of shoulder-rollers? Darian, a critical NYC selector, has an ear for sharp blends, left turns, and rollicking percussion; their music is cheeky and playful, full of clearly indebted to the million histories of American dance music. (If you’re looking for evidence of this approach, just check “U-HAUL,” a “Fast Car” flip that tosses it atop a head-spinning Jersey club rhythm.) On SORRYMIX34—an excerpt of a recent live set ripped from Sorry Records’s current club night—Darian chases high-energy (hi-NRG?) four-fours as far as they can go, blasting the dancefloor with confetti along the way. Part of the thrill of the set is hearing just how far they reach in pursuit of club-night jubilee: scan through the set and you’ll find chunky techno, heart-on-sleeve rhythm-and-house, no-bit synth jams, crunched-up ghetto house, wiggly acid cuts, basslines that could level a house, and a seemingly endless variety of slamming kick drums. Darian weaves through all these forms with ease on SORRYMIX34, using a focus on exuberant rhythms to tie everything together. The result is a celebration of pure dancefloor joy.
Elation comes in all sorts of forms. Trance, which works with little more than endless four-four kicks and arpeggiating synthesizers, has earned its fair share of derision over the years, but if it’s done right, it really can propel a dancefloor into the stars. But trance hardly has a monopoly on that, though: just pull up video of a gabber or hardstyle club night and you’ll likely spot a crowd riding a wave of earth-cracking kicks to similar effect. (Case in point: one of last year’s finest sets.) With Ultra Hot Summer 100, Minneapolis selector DJ Cumstain splits the difference between the styles, slowly moving from sun-dappled trance tracks to head-splitting headcore; the result is forty-odd minutes of tugged rugs and blood-boiling percussion. Throughout the set, they prioritize sheer energy over anything particularly seamless. The set is rough around the edges in a way that’s ultimately exciting—you never know what they’ll add to the din next, whether that’s pass-filtered pop records, Trap-a-Holics DJ drops, or truckloads of military-grade kick drums.
Over the past six years, the inis:eto mix series has turned out to be quietly critical: a hub for mixes bound not by sound but by texture, with a quiet psychedelia laced between each upload. In 2024 alone, you’ll find droned-out folk music, fifth-world ambience, and half-remembered dancefloors. For all that material, though—even given all those dives into surreal and disoriented electronics—Jaye Ward’s offering may be the most wigged-out yet. Here, the Hackney DJ goes deep, wide, and weird, building a universe out of smog, blind alleys, and pulled rugs: bleary ambience next to heart-in-throat techno tools, brain-scrambling nu-jazz held up against skyscraping guitar solos, downtempo IDM wigglers slammed into machine-funk minimalism. It frequently sounds like several tabs playing at once, or like a seven-deck vinyl set, but that delirium seems to be the point. It’s not dance music, but it isn’t not that, either; ditto for folk, ambience, progressive electronics, and about a hundred other forms. Throughout inis:eto, Ward stretches a tightrope between familiar and alien territories, blasting the smoke machines whenever things threaten to get too legible.
Plenty of DJs have built their career upon mountains of low-end heaters and toeing the line between dubstep, breaks, and techno, but few do it with the emotive heft of livwutang. The New York-via-Seattle selector blends tripped-out body music with a veteran’s touch, wrapping the amps in heartstrings along the way: it’s deep-space dubstep and black-hole techno, sure, but it’s hand-in-hand R&B and sun-kissed dub, too. Waking Life ‘24 is, more than anything else, a sterling example of this balancing act. Here, she slides between a million styles of muscular drum programming—it’s high-octane kuduro and screw-face dubstep; it’s screaming jungle and miles-deep house; it’s starlit breaks and clattering hardcore—but it’s never just that. Maybe there’s a particularly bright top-line, or maybe there’s a heartrending vocal hook, or maybe there’s a bit of ambient noise promising to stretch towards infinities; regardless of the specifics, livwutang balances each skull-cracking dum break with a glance towards the stars. Waking Live ‘24, in that way, is emblematic of what makes her approach so striking: here, she toes the line between tooth-cracking heft and full-on beauty with acuity and apparent ease.
In the interview that accompanies Truancy Volume 334, Myles Mac’s latest session, he describes the set as “the first club mix [I’ve] done in a while.” That’s by no means wrong, but it is a bit funny: at least for the first chunk, it’s remarkably laid-back stuff. Mac has built his reputation on two different but related pillars—first, he is one of the curators behind Melbourne Deepcast, a critical mix series that’s been running strong since 2009; and, secondly, he’s got miles-deep crates, every nook and cranny stuffed with rave-ups from the ‘90s and early aughts. His sets are often a bit balearic, plenty playful, and a bit techy, and Truancy Volume 334 is no exception; here, he just tweaks the dials a bit near the end, slowly ratcheting up the intensity until the midday summer sun gives way to images of moonlit dancefloors. Throughout the set, Mac makes his preferences clear: this is a session of chunky piano lines, heart-on-sleeve vocal runs, and hoot-and-holler percussion cuts; it’s club music presented as a space for pure pleasure and communal joy.
“Multi-genre” DJing is having a moment right now, with plenty of DJs building their careers upon USBs that stretch across oceans and decades. But, even in that everything-goes environment, OKO DJ—a.k.a. Athens DJ Marine Tordjemann—stands out. She works in dance-music spaces, but her sets are frequently packed with jump-cuts to coldwave and industrial metal, and even her most straightforward stuff moves with a system-busting punk’s sneer. (Her set from Lentekabinet 2023, which features a dive into baile-funk nu-metal, among a million other left turns, stands as one of last year’s finest sessions.) Part of the thrill of OK027, the latest two-hour opus from Tordjemann, is hearing her go deep on her connections to ice-cold rock music: this is a veritable kaleidoscope of the stuff, packed with jagged guitar lines and busted drum kits. She spends OK027 stuffing the amps with mud and stardust, making equal space for bone-crunching guitar music and joyous punk-rock stompers. This is the sound of a critical post-everything DJ zeroing on a highly particular sound, smashing an electric guitar against the CDJs until one of them cracks in half.
At this point, Physical Therapy’s no stranger to these pages. The DJ, née Daniel Fisher, has pulled off something deeply impressive in his years behind the decks: he goes deep and wide in equal measure, with some crates zeroing in on hyper-specific genre ideas (For example: slo-mo garage; “sad disco”; and weirdo ambience); and others going just about everywhere (including, in what would be a high-water mark in any other DJ’s oeuvre, his performance at Honcho Campout 2019). With Live @ Nowadays, Fisher’s playing his favorite time slot, soundtracking a sunrise with all manners of high-NRG dance music: storming old-school trance, heavyweight dembow-techno, feather-weight UKG, piano-house belters, gut-twisting hardcore, new-school hip-house, Transatlantic donk and hard-house scorchers—you get the gist. Two things hold it all together: one, Fisher’s obvious experience behind the decks, which leads to even the most audacious blends going down smooth; and, secondly, his uniform focus on hip-shaking rhythms. It’s easy to intellectualize this stuff, but, fundamentally, Live @ Nowadays is about undiluted dancefloor fuel, and, here, Fisher slams on the gas for three hours.
Since they adopted the Stone moniker about two years ago, the London dance-music producer has gone on a bit of a tear, going deep on left-field downtempo, wigged-out illbient, and barely-there dance music. (It should come as little surprise that, last summer, they appeared on 3XL, a post-post-ambient-music hub that’s no stranger to hard left turns.) The most surprising thing about Osmura Live 01, then, is how straightforward it is: this is dubbed-out downtempo and ambient techno mixed with virtually no seams visible, a shades-on session for the headphone crowd. Again and again, Stone returns to miles-deep grooves, balancing airborne synthesizers with bass drums that land like heartbeats, landing somewhere between the dancefloor and the beach along the way. Highlights abound: an extended run of aqueous ambient-techno in the first third, a dip into tech-ish microhouse right in the middle, a handful of cuts that sound like they’ve been ripped straight from a ‘90s trance compilation. For all the sonic jumps Stone has taken over the years, Osmura Live 01 may be one of the wildest yet: no-nonsense dance music blended with obvious care and surgical precision.
About half an hour into TOWER Imports 003, after thumbing through his USBs and pulling out all sorts of new-school juke and techno rollers, Austrian dance-music producer Sun People takes a hard left. Prince Ozay’s “Volo Magico” is a future-funk workout that sounds like it was ripped straight from the Jet Set Radio airwaves, all acrobatic basslines lickety-split drum snare-drum smacks; it’s riotous and bright in a way that stands in stark contrast with the past thirty minutes. But, in another way, it’s perfectly in line with the session: even if the aesthetic is wildly different to the footwork that preceded it, “Volo Magico” is still a full-on exercise in rhythm science, with hyper-precise rhythms clattering against each other in the service of elated dance music. Sun People spends the bulk of TOWER Imports 003 chasing that dragon, rocketing between umpteen forms along the way: Rollicking sort-of-jazz records, steamrolling 160 experimentalism, vertiginous juke, rapid-fire industrial-techno slammers. No matter the specifics, though, Sun People’s singular focus on white-hot dance-music brain-benders holds the session together, allowing them to vault between all sorts of styles with ease.
Eight months ago, in the middle of the Australian summer, Street Mix, Vol 1 appeared on Bandcamp. The timing made sense: this is music for sand-covered towels and dropped tops, for lazy days and bright evenings. It recently got re-upped on Soundcloud, just in time for the northern hemisphere’s muggiest weeks, and it’s a balm here, too. Sweet Nuthin’ Street Mix Vol 1 is eighty-odd minutes of sun-kissed dancehall, forlorn R&B, and laid-back hip-hop—to be blunt, it feels custom-built for humid evenings and carefree convertible rides. They’re clearly working with deep crates; over the course of the set, they dig up all sorts of dollar-bin gems, using their iron grip on aesthetics as a jumping-off point towards all sorts of sounds: piano-stomper sort-of-new-jack-swing; screw-faced G-funk; delirious post-disco; zero-BPM R&B heartbreakers; zonked-out dancehall. Sweet Nuthin’ Street Mix Vol 1 feels like a bit of a time capsule—it’s tough to exactly place anything here, but it’s doubtful anything’s from this century—but a nice pair of shades is perennially cool.
In a dance-music moment defined by high-energy selections, skull-cracking BPMs, and barnburning pop-radio flips—no shade on any of that, mind!—Vladimir Ivković’s music lands as something of a balm. He’s built his craft on miles-deep cuts from crates that plenty of DJs wouldn’t even deign to look for in the first place, teasing brain-bending psychedelia out of sludged-up rock records, wrong-speed trance, amber-encrusted techno, skyborne ambience, and anything bound to send a dancefloor into a spiral. (A few years ago, he went deep on the value in playing things slightly askew: “[Pitching things down reveals] certain frequencies, silence, gaps between sounds, that suddenly appear when you stretch the tune by playing it at the wrong speed. […] Such moments give people so much more space to breathe, to feel way more than a simple pressure to dance.”)
All this is to say: If you want to hear someone like Vladimir Ivković DJ, you often have few choices other than the man himself. Fortunately, he’s prodigiously busy. One of his more recent recordings, San People Sougia, catches him in peak form in the depths of summer. Here, he’s clearly got an eye trained on the dancefloor, but he’s more interested in dropping out the floor than setting it alight: the session moves at a pleasantly laid-back chug, with synthesizers and drum machines and who-knows sounds making for a psychedelic game of Jenga; this is dance music for deep-space disorientation. It helps that Ivković has plenty of time—the set runs just north of three hours—but it’s worth underlining just how much ground he covers, moving from wigged-out new-wave to bone-crunching acid techno, from horror-flick bass workouts to no-BPM rock experimentalism, from lushly orchestrated electro-lullabies to low-end bass workouts liable to cave in a stomach or two. There’s immense power to be found in slowing down and stretching out, and Vladimir Ivković understands this: on San People Sougia, he grabs ahold of his CDJs and disappears between the cracks.
The purest thrill of an Akanbi set is this: while it’s tough to pin down what, exactly, you’re going to get, you’re certain to come away with a grin. The New York DJ pairs miles-deep crates with a devil-may-care approach to jubilee; in his sets, he routinely stuffs the amps with sunshine. So it was in his set at 2024’s Horst Arts & Music Festival: here, he threads between sweltering spiritual jazz, mountains of dub, shoulder-rolling amapiano, and slamming house records in a bright and playful ninety minutes. Ten minutes in, Akanbi cedes the stage to a chant for a free Palestine. Beyond being—obviously—the right thing to do, the moment stands out for another reason, too: it underlines the sheer collective joy and freedom he chases in his work.
If you’re looking for something that’s a bit more zoomed in, though, look no further than Susobrino’s set from the same festival. For their time behind the decks, they look towards the low-slung rhythms of cumbia and reggaetón, reveling in the power of a steady drum line and a bit of heart-on-sleeve lyricism. Sosbrino pairs those idioms with plenty of dips into cumbia sonidera, a contemporary approach to the style which involves dipping it in a vat of sludge and slowing everything down a bit, lending the set a psychedelic edge. As a result, he’s able to shift between all sorts of emotions with the twist of a knob—disorientation, revelry, and heartache, all set to the sound of a can’t-miss rhythm section.
Roughly once per season, NTS Radio offers its supporters a wide-ranging prompt—Heartbreak, On the Road, Metamorphosis—and challenges them to make a tight hour exploring it. Each time, part of the thrill is seeing how many ways the themes get twisted up; the archives are well worth a dig. The station’s most recent round of sessions is in, and, as per usual, there’s plenty of gold. This time: “Heatwave.”
One standout session from the bunch deals with heat as an oppressive thing. Gravel Ghost and Desert Thistle is, put simply, an hour of sun-baked ambient and slow-mo Americana. (It’s telling that, in the set’s liner notes, Hissed eulogizes Brian McBridge, one-half of Stars of the Lid and a critical figure in arid drone music.) Here, Hissed offers a suitable soundtrack for a trudge through Death Valley, conjuring a world of dust, heat hazes, and very little else. It is most striking for its spare beauty: tracks here often consist of little more than a tumbling drum kit and a mournful guitar line, or a wall of feedback, or a stomach-churning synthesizer droning away in the distance.
If you need to cool off just a bit—and then work up a good sweat for balance—why not catch a flight to Ireland? With Samhradh, Pól Micheál offers up a survey of Irish folk music, making something that is as alive as it is moribund, a session that splits the difference between riotous and elegiac energies. The throughline, here, is less emotive than it is textural; these are, by and large, brusque tunes, prone to hard lefts and sudden dives into unexpected territories. (Not that that’s unfamiliar territory for folk music.) Impressively, Micheál sidesteps any sort of preservationist or archeological concerns here thanks to sheer vitality; thanks to its sheer range—apocalyptic drone-folk and richly textured close-harmony singing and bone-rattling fiddling and just enough jigs—the set takes the weight of histories and thrusts it into the future.
For all its talk of smoke-filled rooms and heaving kick drums, dance music has an awful lot of sunlight in it, too: language of elation and escapism, of daylight cutting through the windows, of tears and holy communion. It is hardly a new observation, but it bears underlining anyways. In many important ways, the line between the club and the church is wafer-thin. As such, the recent episode of NTS’s essential In Focus series is aesthetically familiar, even if it works with different textures to many of the sounds this column focuses on. (Not to say this column is strictly about dance music, of course.) The special looks towards Kassia, a liturgical-music composer from 9th-century Constantinople, offering a survey of her works. Given its age, it’s remarkable how contemporary this stuff sounds: it straddles the line between ethereal and dense, with tightly clustered harmonies and droning counter-melodies alike stretching towards the stars. In Focus is the sound of choral music as an explicitly holy thing; like much of the finest liturgical music, it explores quiet awe until it becomes outright psychedelic, a cacophony of whispers and wails yearning for something greater and willing it into focus.
In late July, dance music lost one of its dons. DJ Randall, a critical figure in drum-and-bass and jungle, was only 54 years old when he died. His influence was suitably seismic: if hardcore ever had a “DJ’s DJ,” it was Randall. His career stretched from pirate radio to club nights, from club nights to record shops, from record shops to legendary parties. Per Fabio, another legend of the style: “He absolutely ruled, I’ve never seen a DJ take over a club and rule. They had six other DJs playing in there and no one really gave a shit because they were just waiting for Randall to come on and play.”
Randall’s legacy is too massive to neatly distill into a short blurb, but, not long after Randall passed, @DorkSirjur started assembling a massive archive of his work. At the time of writing, it stands over 500 sets strong. If hardcore music—or dance music in general—is about sheer inertia, about histories snowballing into barely recognizable futures, then a dig into the archives is both informative and exhilarating. It helps that many of these sets capture Randall at peak form; he was a walking encyclopedia for drum-and-bass and jungle, eager to share its histories and possibilities with anyone willing to lend an ear, and that sheer optimism bursts through with every drum break. Hardcore, as the saying goes, will never die, and people like Randall are why. R.I.P. to the master.
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