Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In August, several of the world’s finest DJs offered sets to beat the heat one last time before summer gave way to autumn. Baba Stiltz, mixing live at Bar Part Time, moved from classic-rock belters to wigged-out house and hip-hop cuts; Myles Mac and DJ Possum, in a set for the venue’s mix series, turned in two hours of sand-blasted downtempo. CCL, one of Berlin’s strongest DJs, cooked up a killer come-down set aimed straight at another world; over in New York, ion did something similar, but went more sedated still, looking towards jazz fusion and dub techno in the process. Mazzacles whipped up a grab-bag set of oddball slow-burners; elsewhere, Bambi & Beatrice M. used the cool burn of mint as an inspiration for a set of astral-plane dub music.
Time Is Away, in the latest set for their long-running NTS residency, produced a meditation on holiness and sacrilege, soundtracking it with bleary-eyed ambient music; Telephones, for their part, went for something a bit more upbeat but remained firmly downtrodden at a brain-bending festival set. Kilbourne and Hank Jackson broke the stupor with a pair of slammers: the first with a kaleidoscopic set of hardcore, the latter with a truly everything-goes live set ripped from Nowadays. Ciel’s naffcast moves from minimalism to minimal-techno with ease, and boxofbox’s latest marathoner is a smashed time capsule of progressive house and its million children. Lastly, RA celebrated their thousandth (or so) mix-series entry with ten fresh and archival entries. Most impressively, they’re all killer.
Here are some of the best DJ sets August had to offer.
And, again, we’re back: another year, another festival season come and gone, another killer boxofbox mix aimed straight at your car speakers. boxofbox has graced these pages plenty of times at this point, and they seem to just be getting better: especially on their long-form sessions, the east-coast selector goes deep on Discogs, excavating all sorts of vintage prog-et-cetera house-et-cetera and practicing a kind of sweat-soaked historiography along the way. Drinking Oxygen Through the Dust is yet another marathon in a long line of them: just over six hours, 130 tracks (assuming an enumeration of the tracklist is correct), and countless head-spinners. Broadly speaking, boxofbox treats wiggly and chunky house as a springboard here, taking ‘90s psychedelia towards parts unknown a million times over: reverb-drenched rock-and-roll, shuffle-and-swing R&B, radio-ready sort-of-2-step, rave-ready slammers that wouldn’t sound out of place in ‘92 Sheffield, and piles of rave-rap records pulled from house parties the world over. Oxygen is arresting for its length but also, surprisingly, its apparent brevity: here, six hours flies by like two, each track a bit more jubilant and playful than the last.
At this point, you know what you’re getting with Bar Part Time, at least sort of: the San Francisco wine bar with a killer SoundCloud account regularly hosts DJs and selectors, whether for live shows or for their in-house mix series. This time around, you’ve got one of each. First up is Baba Stiltz, a DJ that RA once described as having a sensibility “with tender sincerity at one end and goofball humour at the other.” Both sides are on full display here, a long-form exploration of yes-and mixing: tumbleweed-blasted classic rock, windows-down UK garage, soul-blasted house records, turbocharged disco, and all sorts of other jubilee besides. The best part, a breaks-inflected flip of Luniz’s “I Got Five On It,” doesn’t come in until nearly the end, and it might just be the set’s crowning selection. This one feels purpose-built for long summer drives: propulsive, wide-ranging, and plenty playful.
As for the mix series: a back-to-back from Myles Mac and DJ Possum is, by all odds, a known proposition — chances are they’ll be playing downtempo, trip-hop, G-funk, and sand-blasted house records, going long without pushing tempos too much. But is that reliability such a bad thing? At this point, the sparring partners appear to be focused less on reinvention than on refinement, and B.P.T. Radio 097 is yet another shining example in a long line of them. Here, they go just north of two hours, easing their way from low-and-slow R&B rollers to full-on house-music pumpers, with plenty of time for detours and sidebars built in along the way. (This is, relatively speaking, pretty uptempo for the pair, but that’s not to say they’re playing hard techno or anything of the sort.) This set’s late-August delivery lands just right: this a session of dance-music selections suited for lengthy evenings and warm breezes, each blend extending the daylight just a bit longer.
All things considered, “Herbarium” is a clever conceit for a mix series: it’s both flexible and focused, offering DJs plenty of space to go wide and deep in equal measure; it just depends on which planting the selectors choose to focus on. That first idea — wide-ranging but stylistically taut material — could double as a descriptor of whatever seems to happen when Bambi & Beatrice M. get behind the decks together. Here, as ever, the nu-school wunderkinds go deep on dub, pairing it with mint because of its “cool, tingling, slightly sweet” taste. So it is for their set, which moves between foggy ambience and tracky techno, each kick drum landing like a heartbeat and each synth sounding like a cool breeze. There’s plenty of dancefloor-forward material here, to be sure, but it’s hardly the high-NRG material you’d expect at a contemporary BASEMENT or Berghain; instead, it’s slow-mo four-fours, the kind of zero-BPM syrup that has a way of infusing directly into the marrow if you play it loudly enough. Plenty of club sets devote themselves to dub, but, here, Bambi & Beatrice M. inch ever closer towards the source, finding something chilling and invigorating at once along the way.
CCL — a real Mount-Rushmore figure for new-school DJs, one who’s built a reputation atop mountains of hair-raising dance-music selections pulling from dubstep, breaks, and the contemporary left-field — has a habit of ending their festival sets with a bit of dream-pop, or at least something that sits in a similarly hazed-out world to the best Cocteau Twins material. It’s a great trick, offering ravers a come-down while nudging open a door to another universe. On Invisible Cities I: Saphira, the Berlin selector kicks that door wide open, pulling out their rolodex and filling the room with smog: lights-out dub tools, sludgy techno suited for 3-a.m. drives, a truly psychedelic take on electro-cumbia — you get the gist. Invisible Cities I is the sound of one of the planet’s strongest DJs turning the lights and tempo down in tandem, looking towards something a bit more zonked-out in the process.
On naffcast011, Toronto CDJ wizard Ciel spends two hours turning a statement into a question: what happens when you put “little sounds in[to] huge expansive spaces?” In structure alone, the set offers a nice symmetry to the question, moving from gauzy ambience and dub tools to something a bit heftier and more defined, using “small” sounds first to mean minimalism and later to mean hyper-precise drum programming. The set’s two hours show a seasoned DJ slowly but surely moving from the astral plane to the dancefloor, never quite leaving either behind but undeniably shifting their focus. Tracking that arc is, ultimately, the mix’s principal pleasure: Ciel pulls off all sorts of invisible-ink connections here, finding commonalities between aqueous dub and dimly-lit R&B and minimal-tech rollers liable to please any fan of Brian Leeds’s work as Loidis (or the early-aughts clicks-and-cuts sound he mines so carefully). Once Ciel focuses on club flavors here, she locks in for good, and the set’s all the stronger for it: what starts as a fog-blast of sort-of-ambient music slowly transforms into a bulletproof session of funky, playful, and wiggly dancefloor disorienters.
When Hank Jackson was last in these pages, it was for ED045, a back-to-back that saw him Yumi, another everything-at-once NYC dance-music don. The combo made sense: both DJs tend towards kitchen-sink approaches to the dancefloor, prizing lickety-split drum-breaks and what-was-that blends. So: why not run it back? With Live @ Nowadays, the selector goes solo for longer than that team-up ran, but, beyond that, it’s (blessedly) more of the same, a gradual ratcheting-up of tempo, energy, and mania, a set that’s both delightful and devilish in equal measure. Scan around and you’ll find all manner of club-night heaters, frequently of the style likely to tilt the floor off its axis: NES-blasted IDM-slash-Miami-bass, negative-tempo exercises for synth bass and robotic vocalists, second-line drum-and-bass, lid-flipping techno and house cuts aplenty.
It’s tempting to have a certain image of a live set: pumping, sweaty, playful, raucous — that kind of thing. There’s plenty of joy to be found in that kind of performance, to be sure, but it ought to go without saying that you can load anything onto a CDJ. On pi/live, New York’s ion dives deep into wildly different waters. (More on these stylings later, funnily enough.) Here, it’s less about specific genres or histories than it is about a thoroughly dissociative atmosphere; even at its rowdiest, pi/live is downright blissed-out. Don’t mistake that for uniformity, though — over the course of the session, ion touches on pitter-patter jazz fusion, squiggly acid cuts, haunted-house organ workouts, mountains of dub and dub-techno tracks, and plenty more slow-and-low dance-ish stylings. Even a last-minute excursion into chopped-up drum breaks can’t get ion to break a sweat here; in context, it sounds like clouds parting and a bit of sunlight trickling into the club. This is a chill-out session for the ages.
Kilbourne is a column mainstay at this point for a pretty basic reason: her music, which moves with tectonic heft and frequently breaks speed limits along the way, presents a wide-ranging, historically informed, and exploratory view on hardcore, looping its histories in on themselves and suggesting other possibilities for its future. With Live at Touching Infinite, the hard-and-heavy dance-music lifer goes deep on that ethos yet again, whipping up a tempest of industrial hardcore, power-soca MC showcases, billion-ton trance, and steamrolling gabber — basically, if it packs not one punch but one hundred, it’s fair game. The real joy of this, then, is about the combination of texture and speed; Touching Infinite is a light-speed sprint between buzzsaw synths, tooth-shattering kick drums, livewire drum-machine exercises, and full-on dancefloor screamers. (A mid-session call for collective liberation — the kind of thing she’s told me about elsewhere — certainly doesn’t hurt the madcap energy.) “Hardcore,” at its best, can mean just about anything; here, Kilbourne showcases that idea with flying colors.
Apricot 69 is filled with clever, disorienting, and quietly out-there blends, but the most audacious might arrive about halfway in. One minute, they’re playing — what, exactly? There’s some kind of probably-French dialogue, chopped-up birdcalls, a MIDI flute floating in the middle register, a slow-motion beat that feels like you’d find it on a ‘91 chill-out compilation. Then Mazzacles grabs a triple-time hi-hat and a heavy-hitting proto-funk bassline, and, before you know it, it’s off to the disco. The two tracks out to be in total discord with each other, but, somehow, they aren’t. It’s so wild that it loops back around to working again.
The rest of the set never quite reaches those heights, but that’s hardly fair criteria, is it? Throughout Apricot 69, Mazzacles employs this why-not approach to blends, reaching for all manner of styles — starry-eyed rocksteady and tumbleweed-stuffed Americana, tripped-out acid rollers and harmonica-trance experiments, muffled spoken-word who-knows-whats and lovelorn soul records. If this sounds like a lot, you may be right, but Mazzacles holds it all together thanks to the set’s unerring chilled-out energy; the specifics may vary, but the mood — hushed, playful, and plenty joyous — never wanes.
Chillout music — too often relegated to a sort of window-dressing — gets a bad rap. Not-quite-dance-music plays a critical role at festivals, offering exhausted ravers a space to decompress or disassociate, eschewing pumping four-fours and steamrolling breaks in favor of something a bit more blissed-out. (A recent hardcore show I went to, much to my surprise, had a chillout room, and its relatively low-key mood made the slamming rhythms in the other room hit all the harder by contrast.) For his showing at Between Mountains, a midsummer Swiss music festival, Berlin-based selector Telephones, an artist who typically works with heady ambience and hefty house records in equal measure, stuffed the amplifiers with clouds, moving slow, low, and a bit left-of-center for a killer two hours. Here, it’s out-west fingerstyle guitar workouts; there, it’s payphone post-minimalism, all crunched-up flutes and keys; elsewhere, it’s shimmering walls of synthesizers or it’s laid-back jazz that sounds like a Birth of the Cool outtake. The result of all these jumps is a session that feels studiously unhurried and plenty joyous.
By this point, plenty of ink has been spilled on RA.1000 — as Michaelangelo Matos said in Beat Connection, it’s the kind of thing that “us old-media heads would have once called a box set,” a.k.a. the kind of DJ-mix offering liable to get outlets talking, even those who don’t often cover them much.
That said, it’s still worth exploring them again here, because RA.1000 is, frankly, astounding. This is true for reasons far beyond its length or ambition — plenty of sets in these pages over the years have doubled as tomes, offered up historiographies, or presented DJing as a truly anything-goes kind of thing — though those ideas certainly don’t hurt, either. To be frank, they’re all here for something much simpler: they’re gas top to bottom. Given the sheer volume of individual names here, we’ll make efforts to keep each one (relatively) brief.
Theo Parrish, a.k.a. quite possibly the strongest living DJ, opened things up in fine form with his offering, a rip-roaring rug-puller of a set pulled from the fabric archives: it’s sun-kissed disco and roughshod house galore here, each transition a bit more head-spinning than the one before. Tim Reaper, a lodestar of contemporary jungle and drum-and-bass, turned in a steamrolling seven and a half hours — 229 tracks! — for his follow-up, sprinting between techno, dubstep, grime, sort-of-trap, and, of course, plenty of hardcore. Mark Ernestus, an experimental-electronics legend best known for his work in Rhythm & Sound and Basic Channel, went deep on — what else? — amapiano and gqom for his turn behind the decks, cooking up something both breezy and a bit menacing, packed with log-drums, a seemingly bottomless sense of play, triplets on triplets on triplets.
Sama’ Abdulhadi, a critical Palestinian techno selector, went deep on heavyweight techno for her offering, piling up an hour of industrial-strength kicks, scorched-earth synth lines, and gritted-teeth energy. Terre Thaemlitz, a.k.a. DJ Sprinkles, took resistance in a very different direction, assembling a radio-play style series of voice memos, radio rips, and white-hot ambient music in a meditation on the genocide in Gaza. To put it bluntly, it just may be the most bracing set of the year: heartrending, disorienting, strangely beautiful, and directly damning in a way unlike much contemporary dance music.
Bicep, a long-time rave-music duo from the UK, grabbed the reins next, vaulting between all sorts of contemporary dancefloor sounds: breakneck breakbeats, blistering dubstep, million-pound trance workouts. Helena Hauff, a critical Germany-based selector, turned in something of a mirror to Abdulhadi’s set from the previous day, using gritty electro and techno tools as a springboard towards black holes, weaving together nearly two hours of sci-fi-inflected machine-music.
Jyoty turned in what might just be the most jubilant of the 1000s: a recording grabbed from a recent Nowadays party sees the selector in a truly freewheeling mood, opening things up with some East-Coast sample-chop steamrollers and slamming on the gas from there, careening her way into wild-eyed R&B flips, no-shit house and techno, and piles of dancehall brain-benders. (At points, it seems a Ha Dance away from a GHE20G0TH1K party — a very good thing indeed.)
Lastly, we’ve got two sets from three veritable legends. First, Frankie Knuckles’s estate passed RA two tapes from the house-music don — one from 1989, another from 1996. They’re bright-eyed, party-starting, and full of no-nonsense stompers, all the kinds of vintage house, soul, and disco and you might expect from a foundational figure for this stuff. The final set in the series is a one-of-one back-to-back from DJ Harvey and Andrew Weatherall, recorded over a decade ago in Amsterdam. (This is the only back-to-back Harvey ever agreed to.) The resultant six and a half hours are truly out-there, replete with high-octane blends and dares to dancers: chunky piano-house with soaring strings pasted on top, screaming piano solos dropped on top of new-age orchestration, shuffle-and-stomp acid-trance belters, monastic chants towards God and master plans, slow-and-low funk who-knows-whats. It’s a searching, wide-ranging and utterly enthralling set, full of hard lefts and why-not blends. Here’s to another thousand.
In their work, Time Is Away chase ghosts and rebuild town-down monuments, creating something that feels like it exists just outside of time — they play dust-covered ambient music, folk-music selections that jumble up oceans and timelines, and healthy amounts of spoken word. Their work, at its best, is beguiling, mystifying and a bit hermetic: in conversation with the rest of the world, to be sure, but in its own language.
There’s any number of potential ways into Oracle, a remarkable slow-burner from London’s Time Is Away, but perhaps the most informative bit — provided you’ve got a bit of context — is in the description. The piece is dedicated, in part, to “Jane Wildgoose, our oracle.” Time Is Away have visited Wildgoose in the past, in a session that still stands as one of their most bone-chilling, not so much an open invitation as it is a clenched fist. This time around, they split the difference between those two ideas, turning in a session of slow-motion synth tracks and sort-of-modern-classical music, placing meditations about holiness, thirst for knowledge, and sacrilege on top.
A few times in the session, the speaker returns to the same line: “What brought you to the navel of the world?” The first time, it feels like a question borne of curiosity; the second, it sounds like a thinly veiled threat. The third time around, it’s tough to tell which. Is that a monument or a warning?
How’s this for a thrown gauntlet? “The 6th chapter as the previous 5 chapters is education that a lot of alleged “House” DJs and Producers are obviously lacking,” the notes for Traxx’s latest set read in part. It’s the kind of posturing that’s tough to justify if you don’t have the material, but Traxx does — nearly four hours of it. On the latest edition of his house-music mix series, he goes deep on the early stuff: tracky and minimal and swung hard, with static-encrusted kick drums and rickety synths racing loops around each other until the whole thing turns to a veritable windstorm. (Not to say it’s all lingering on the same thing, mind — there’s a seemingly bottomless well of textures and ideas here — but that machine-funk lingers throughout and underpins the set’s best moments.)The set’s really defined by its lo-fi grit: Traxx’s selections are rough-and-tumble to a tee, encompassing a kind of drum-machine minimalism for so long that it turns hypnotic.
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