Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In February, some of the planet’s finest DJs went deep yet again, offering up critical sessions for both the dancefloor regulars and the headphone purists. On one end of the spectrum, Kilbourne, DJ Cumstain, and Soupka offered up a trio of bone-cracking dancefloor sessions aimed straight at the hardcore crowd; on the other, Jake Muir and Joan Gila explored deep-space ambient music suited for the morning after. livwutang, Hewan Aman, and Significant Other each used dub music as a springboard, whether that’s towards anything-goes dancefloor explorations or sun-kissed psychedelia, and DJ Voices reached into the archives for a truly moving—and truly unpredictable—tribute to the late Andrew Weatherall.
Black Rave Culture, a critical outfit of the east-coast club circuit, supplied a three-hour survey of house, techno, UKG, 3-step, and so many more quick-and-tight dancefloor idioms. Over in Berlin, DJ Fart in the Club offered up a session of cheeky minimalism and heads-down dancefloor rollers, and column favorite Yibing turned in a set of out-and-out headspinners on Planet Groovy. Evie countered the winter’s chill by wrapping their CDJs in a beach towel, and Finn & thehouseofacidhouse penned a lovelorn love letter to vintage house music. Lastly, Woe offered up a wild-eyed survey of contemporary Baltimore club music, and Berlin DJ Finn Johannsen went astonishingly deep on a single page of dancefloor history, turning out a sixteen-plus-hour session of rollicking dance music from 1991.
Here are some of the best DJ sets February had to offer.
Between their self-titled LPs and their firestarting DJ mixes, Black Rave Culture—a.k.a. D.C. dance-music dons Amal, James Bangura & Nativesun—have been whipping up a storm for a few years now. The trick’s in the name: in their music, they take a kaleidoscopic view of Black dance-music idioms, tossing decades of club-night histories into a blender in the process. Their work is consistently riotous and playful, informed by a shared chemistry and desire for out-and-out jubilee. The same goes for RA.974, a three-hour barnburner split evenly between each of the group’s members that nevertheless reads like a back-to-back-to-back, full of slick blends and wheels-up energy. Those throughlines run so tight that it’s easy to miss the sheer range on display here. RA.974 is built upon a foundation of rollicking techno tracks, but that idea splinters off into all sorts of sounds: stutter-stepping east-coast club and screwfaced UKG, bass-blasted ghetto house and ebullient 3-step, whip-cracking breakbeat and mile-a-minute juke. By threading so many ideas together in such a tight package, Black Rave Culture put together a club-ready mix that doubles as a celebration of umpteen histories.
There’s something refreshing about Crimes Against Ravers. Hard-and-fast-and-cheeky hardcore is neither new nor unusual at the moment, but the Minneapolis-based crew take a decidedly joyous approach to the style; their mixes are both riotous and carefully assembled, a mixture of gutbusters and skull-crackers calibrated just so. In February, two members of the collective turned in particularly riotous sessions. First, there’s DJ Cumstain’s Winter MixXx, which manages to find a comfortable intersection between hands-up vocal trance, scorched-earth warehouse techno, and billion-ton gabber; secondly, there’s a madcap back-to-back performed alongside fellow C.A.R. member Soupka, where they vault between earth-cracking pop bootlegs, lightspeed hardstyle, vintage makina, and just about anything else liable to put a crater in the dancefloor. In either case, you’re getting something similar: carefully considered mania underscored with a wink and a nudge, a vision of hardcore that eschews the hard-and-fast rules of the style in favor of an unabated sense of play, and a truly anything-goes attitude. This is the sound of heavyweight dance music paired with an unmissable grin.
In her music, Seoul-born and Berlin-based DJ Fart in the Club pushes a acrobatic and playful vision of dance music, frequently-but-not-always focusing on funked-up techno and house records. On 12.7 ˚, her entry in pi pi pi’s reliably remarkable ˚ mix series, she goes deep on what she knows best, turning in two hours of minimalistic drum breaks and electrifying synth explorations; think Kraftwerk making UK funky and you’re on the right track. The set is, in fact, a recreation of sorts of a live set she recorded a few years back, and that everything-goes energy courses through the mix: spend enough time with it and you’re liable to find hell-raising drum breaks, vertiginous dub techno, skull-cracking dubstep, and all manner of who-knows club rollers, all bound together by a maddeningly tight grooves and ever-present four-fours. Thanks to its structural specificity and its aesthetic range, 12.7 ˚ is both hyper-focused and deliriously expansive, an expansive and mind-bending collection of lithe grooves stretched as far as they can go. Never mind the name: DJ Fart in the Club is dead serious.
In a recent DJ Mag piece commemorating the dearly missed DJ Andrew Weatherall, DJ Voices put her admiration plainly. “Weatherall was far from typical,” she offered. “He was the quintessential embodiment of the Fool archetype, an unrivalled compliment in my book. The Fool prioritises the journey over the destination, is prone to intuitive off-roading that to the outside observer may appear more like unwise leaps of faith, has little regard for conventional success, and speaks honestly, and humorously, about their observed world.” Voices—a one-of-one DJ and an electric presence in NYC nightlife—would know a thing or two about this sort of thing; her music, which frequently oscillates between heads-down club rollers and joyful-noise experimentalism, is all about the blind alleys, leaps of faith, and gut-level dives down rabbit holes.
So it is with Sidestep Lifestyle, a tape recently lifted from the archives to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Weatherall’s passing. Here, Voices shuffles her Tarot deck and pulls out a fistful of Fools, using gauzy and head-spinning dance music as a vehicle towards parts unknown. If you want, you can point out all sorts of contemporary dance-music idioms, sure—spine-tingling dubstep, rickety electro-disco, who-knows sort-of-techno, a few tracks that wouldn’t sound out of place in a ‘90s Florida breaks compilation—but any such scorekeeping seems entirely beside the point. Sidestep Lifestyle is a much simpler idea than that: this is music about shimmying between so many reference points that something entirely new emerges; it’s a mix about bobbing and weaving so much that a “straight line” becomes little more than theory; it’s a session devoted to the sheer joy of yes-anding in the DJ booth. It’s tough to imagine a more fitting tribute to Weatherall than that.
When Evie was last in these pages, it was for their entry in Balearic Banana’s slow-and-low mix series: a remarkable collection of dimly-lit dance-music rollers, all shuffling house grooves and skyscraping guitar solos. So: if it ain’t broke, right? On Gop Cast 134, the Melbourne selector runs it back, pulling off a similar trick for a similarly playful and sun-kissed session. Here, she traces an arc familiar to anyone who spends enough time in nightclubs, moving from low-key to peak-time before settling back down, but filters it all through a sand-encrusted lens, offering even the most raucous stuff a charmingly off-kilter feel and trading ambient-music selections for low-slung house and downtempo. From moment to moment, the mix pulls from any number of idioms—no-BPM acid-breaks, lounge-lizard trumpet soli, jangly guitars and shuffling drum kits, shoulder-rolling house and Balearic beat, piano-house stompers and sassed-up synth workouts—but Evie holds it all together by keeping her eyes towards the sun throughout, threading the line between floor-ready dance music and head-in-the-clouds pop records. Gop Cast 134 is a club-night set aimed straight at the beach-towel crowd—or maybe it’s the other way around.
On Valentine’s Day last year, Finn & thehouseofacidhouse released Dismal House, a cassette that offered up exactly what it said on the tin. This was, as the liner notes promised, “house music to feel bad to”: dance-music jubilee slowed to a crawl and rendered a bit crestfallen in the process, a mixture of down-in-the-dumps vocal cuts and kick drums soaked in tears. It was, to be frank, remarkable. Precisely one year later, they returned with—blissfully, regretfully—more of the same. Dismal House II: Dismal Inferno shows the UK DJs once again mining the histories of UK dance musics, looking for the right shade of grey. Finn, the head of 2 B REAL and a critical fixture in Manchester’s underground dance-music circuit, grabs the A-side here, flitting between sludged-up R&B flips, slo-mo piano-house stompers, mud-encrusted UK garage, and all manner of misty-eyed stutter-steppers. thehouseofacidhouse handles the flip, turning a decidedly more uptempo set that still dodges the sunshine, blasting between scraggly house-music experiments, spectral electro, stomp-and-rattle drum workouts, and out-and-out kick-drum steamrollers. These sets move all over the place, in other words, but they’re bound by a shared interest in emotive clarity; no matter what bit you scan to, you’re likely to catch an earful of dust accompanied by a world-weary smile.
There’s countless ways to look at DJing, and most of them are right; that’s part of the fun. One of those angles—speaking personally, one of the most compelling—positions DJing as a kind of live historiography, as a study of how we tell stories about culture and how we link ideas to each other. If his Rewind Selection series is any indication, Berlin DJ Finn Johannsen might sympathize with this approach to the craft. In February, over the course of five sets, he went astonishingly deep on club-music sounds from 1991, focusing on the ways that breakbeats stretched across CDs, tapes, and nightclubs in those twelve months. The result, Rewind Selection 1991, is impressive for its sheer scale alone, but that’s never been enough to get in these pages—it’s got to be great, too. Fortunately, it is. What could, from the titles, seem like a kind of rote archivalism, quickly reveals itself to be something far more interesting: this is a dynamic and shoulder-rolling selection of house, breaks, bleep techno, hip-hop, and early hardcore, a collection of tracks that feels half its length thanks to its sheer energy. Throughout the session, it becomes obvious that Johannsen is both a masterful curator and a veteran selector; this is a session full of slick blends, breaks with just the right amount of dust, and plenty of love.
For a certain stripe of hardcore head, Kilbourne’s sets are appointment listening. Her music—whether she’s behind the decks or the boards—tends to strain towards a hard-earned kind of euphoria, with billion-ton kicks and scorched-earth synthesizers locking horns until the whole thing turns white-hot. The same is true for POWER SOCA GABBA THUMPER, a breathtaking set presented with a shrug. (The accompanying brief on SoundCloud keeps it simple: “the two best genres smushed together.”) The tracklist, which contains more entries than the mix does minutes, might suggest something manic and unfocused, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here, Kilbourne rifles through her rolodex and pulls out a seemingly endless number of soca and dancehall cuts, tossing them on top of an equally bottomless range of barnstorming kick drums, seamlessly fusing the styles thanks to their shared focus on sheer energy. The set is undoubtedly dark and stormy, but Kilbourne nevertheless finds plenty of different energies amidst the chaos, moving from warehouse-gabba stormers to hands-in-the-air anthems and back again, showing just how many ways you can distort a kick drum in the process. POWER SOCA GABBA THUMPER is simultaneously jubilant and tough as nails; here, Kilbourne takes a confetti cannon and packs it with cracked teeth.
Perhaps the strongest aspect of Jake Muir’s work is its specificity. This might seem like a strange way to think about it—the Berlin musician’s productions and mixes tend towards gauzy ambient and fourth-world sound design, and his music is frequently emotionally amorphous—but the broader context tends to be in plain sight. The most obvious example of this might be Bathhouse Blues, a remarkable LP he released two autumns ago: this was music that took the softly lit psychedelia of bathhouses to headier territories, working as both a paean to a history and as an exploration of texture. 03 makes that approach even more literal: in Muir’s words, “This mix is essentially a studio distillation of the two DJ sets I played during bathing hours at Washington Baths in Portland, Maine.” The result is, to be frank, remarkable; this is nearly two hours of aqueous ambient and dreamy sonic collagery, a zero-grav tumble of singing bowls and blissed-out drones and deep-space choral music. As with much of Muir’s best work, it’s both highly abstract and spatially immediate; here, as ever, he takes intimacies and coats them in a thick blanket of fog.
If you’re looking for something a bit further afield, though, why not turn your eyes towards the stars? Joan Gila’s turn at The Observatory—a consistently remarkable and reliably disorienting mix series curated by Jay Keegan—takes a deep-and-wide approach to “ambient” music, suggesting that the specific sounds matter less than the intention that underpins them. Gila spends The Observatory populating the mix with all manner of deep-listening head-spinners: it’s liturgical drone records; it’s static-encrusted synth workouts; it’s aria for a tenor and a ghostly string section; it’s astral-plane electroacoustic records; it’s freaked-out jazz soli; it’s modern classical music dunked in a vat of molasses. On paper, in other words, The Observatory might seem a bit of a mess; in practice, however, it all coalesces thanks to Gila’s patient—and slightly hallucinatory—approach behind the decks, which makes even the strangest sonic jumps feel connected by a sort of dream logic. Here, with one bleary-eyed selection after another, Gila builds a Tower of Babel out of fog and grit.
Liv Klutse, a.k.a. New York-via-Seattle selector livwutang, has a working M.O.: “Play weirder, not harder.” That serves as the core of her sets, which take all sorts of dance-music idioms and toss them down rabbit holes; her music is exploratory and cognisant of its own history, encasing decades of dance-music timelines in a package that nevertheless looks towards the future. RA.975, Klutse’s latest offering and one of her most impressive mixes to date, works in a similar manner, grabbing a foundation of zonked-out dub records and sprinkling it with stardust. Again and again here, she returns to dub, with slow-and-low basslines rattling underneath deep-space MCing and skip-and-rattle drum kits; it’s the kind of stuff that might scan as low-key if you don’t have the low-end EQ’d high enough. It’s so much more than that, too, of course; give Klutse time and she’ll find her way towards dub-siren post-minimalism, pumping house records, and tracky techno without so much as a scuffed blend. No matter the moment-to-moment particulars, though, RA.975’s highly particular mood—generous, playful, and plenty vertiginous—all comes from a highly particular wellspring. Here, one of the States’s finest DJs spends 90 minutes excavating a foundational dance-music style and using it as a springboard towards the stars.
If you want to turn things up a notch, though, look no further than subglow/Live 3. The mix, the third offering in subglow’s nascent-but-already-critical podcast series, Parisian selector Hewan Aman does something nominally similar to RA.975—dub as both throughline and inspiration, with selections spidering off in all sorts of directions—but tilts things a bit closer to the dancefloor. It’s undoubtedly aimed at the ravers, sure, but just about every kick on subglow/Live 3 is offset by a bit of stomach-churning ambience. It’s one hell of a tightrope to walk without tipping too far into heads-down club music or head-spinning ambience, but Aman pulls it off with panache, turning in something that’s tripped-out and driving at once. Over the course of the set’s two hours, she ropes all sorts of forms into this exacting vision of dance-music: subglow/Live 3 is abyssal drone-techno; it’s bass-blasted acid; it’s pitter-patter breakbeats; it’s electro-ambience paired with metronomic hi-hats. If livwutang’s set imagined dub as a universe of rabbit holes, this one sees it as a path that leads straight into ink-black waters.
Lastly, it’s worth looking towards New Jersey. Back in June of last year, Roddy Parker—a critical Berlin DJ and producer better known as Significant Other—took the decks at Dripping. When the two of us spoke last year, in the months leading up to this performance, Parker presaged the approach he’d take here: “I love doing warm-up sets; it’s an opportunity to play weird, wonky, often beatless stuff. Through that, I get to hear completely non-club music in a club environment and notice how powerful it [is].” Parker uses that power to its fullest force here, taking what was supposed to be a two-hour ambient-music set and stretching it into a seven-hour opus of spine-tingling electronics, heartrending dub, and muffled techno rhythms. As with livwutang’s offering, this is as danceable as you wish it to be, with drums doubling as heartbeats; it sits somewhere between “listening music” and outright club fare: the set is, ultimately, rooted in dub and ambient music, but there’s also zonked-out krautrock, full-steam new-school bass belters, dark-alley noir-jazz, dimly lit dub-techno, eight-bit electro-funk, roots-reggae balladry, and so much—so much!—more. The result is something that’s both dreamy and playful, a wild-eyed who-knows masterclass drenched in delirium and dub sirens.
Late last year, JiaLing and Kade Young—a.k.a. two critical names in new-school Baltimore club music—launched Woe. The label has a clear, and exciting, mission: to push the sounds of their city and uplift the community that makes it. (If WOE001 is any indication, they’re off to a rip-roaring start.) Midway through February, the pair hopped on the Radio Flouka airwaves and spent an hour underlining their vision of the genre, and it’s as riotous as you might expect. It’s both exacting—this is undeniably east-coast club music, replete as it is with just-so sample flips, storming drum breaks, and chopped-up gunshots—and deliriously wide-eyed. (It turns out the line from, say, gqom to ballroom to the DMV is a lot shorter than you might have expected.) Given the precision inherent in Baltimore club’s production—this is crisp and exacting music—it follows that the whole session is almost uncannily clean, full of whip-cracking blends and drum lines folding over each other until it’s unclear precisely where one ends and the other begins. It’s sun-kissed and a bit riotous, a veritable cluster bomb of breaks and flips liable to cave in any proper dancefloor. If Woe is the future of Baltimore club, the city’s in good hands.
In the liner notes for Transmissions From Planet Groovy, Yibing makes her approach clear: “[GROOVY GROOVY] felt like the perfect environment to bring in some tracks that make me emotional, and weave them with others that make me feel challenged.” That’s good news for any fans of the New York-via-Mexico City selector: her best work sits at that intersection, bobbing and weaving even as it tugs at the heartstrings. On Transmissions From Planet Groovy 007, ripped live from the Public Records decks last year, she weaves a double helix of tripped-out club sounds and electronic balladry, making something that seems to move in three tempi at once, folding together umpteen genres and idioms until naming any specifics begins to seem like an exercise in pedantry. This is sludged-up electro-disco; it’s acid-soaked new-age; it’s dubbed-up microhouse; it’s duets for mobile phones and electric guitars. Yibing holds all these ideas together thanks to an unerring focus on left-field dancefloor sounds, curating a mood that’s both psychedelic and immediate. Transmissions From Planet Groovy 007 is a masterful demonstration of body music that you could just as easily drift off to.
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