Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
Slow month, huh? No such thing. In January, plenty of world-class DJs dug into their crates and pulled out all manner of head-spinners. Leesh, the founder of the vaunted Daisychain mix series, closed up shop with a riotous session that stretched across all sorts of hardcore dance-music idioms; over at Truants, Space Drum Meditation dug deep into groggy and heady techno rhythms. Philadelphia experimentalist Pontiac Streator donned his Slunty alias for a mile-a-minute session of drum-and-bass, and upsammy turned the tempo up a bit higher, cooking up a hefty and psychedelic session of lickety-split drum breaks. Peanut used minimal techno as a launchpad towards the cosmos; over in France, Low Pitcher did something similar with dub, dubstep, and spaces between. Russell E. L. Butler, DJ Fett Burger & Jana Falcon, and Ciel all went deep on house and techno, offering up long-form explorations of the sounds that spiderweb off in a million different directions; elsewhere, Cousin & Priori, two critical names in who-knows club music, pushed each other into increasingly delirious territories.
Elsewhere still, k means—a critical selector whose music spirals around footwork and bass-blasted ambience—turned in a two-hour masterclass of the stuff at Unsound 2023; DJ N***a Fox looked towards the firestarting sounds of hard-drum musics the world over; and Kilbourne, a mainstay of the U.S.’s hardcore scene leaned hard into the tooth-cracking intensity of terrorcore. If you’re looking for a bit of a balm, look no further than NAP’s latest radio session, which sits somewhere between neo-psych and left-field dub, or Sunju Hargun’s set at rural 2024, which sees the trance-music maestro digging into meditative drone, ambient music, and bleary-eyed electronics. In a pair of low-slung sets released a week apart, Jeepsooni stuffed her CDJs with sand and sunshine; and in a long-form who-knows-what from Draaimolen Festival 2024, Vladimir Ivkovic & ISAbella strolled down umpteen blind alleys. Lastly, a trio of cassette series continued their hot streak: Tom Val grabbed armfuls of psychedelic folk music and left-field jazz; fka boursin stretched a tightrope between ambient music, old-school Americana, and deep house; and Julien Dechery & Ivan Liechti explored a universe of rickety and bleary-eyed indie rock.
Here are some of the best DJ sets January had to offer.
About half an hour into naffcast003, Cousin & Priori pull off a miracle. One of the DJs pulls up Freaky Chakra’s “Glimmer of Dope,” a mid-’90s trance-breakbeat belter that’s, somehow, both sludgy and propulsive; then, they slip into some acidic IDM courtesy of Autechre’s “Weissensee,” and, then, it’s—what? Trip-house? Nu-R&B? Who knows? Who cares? The point is: this is a set of pulled rugs and black holes, of sudden left turns and bends in the road. Throughout the session, Cousin & Priori egg each other on into ever stranger territories, zeroing in the wiggliest corners of deep-space techno and contemporary electronics, pulling off all sorts of moments that read odd on paper but click into place in the moment: DJ Sneak & Jesse Perez’s hip-house slammer “Back & Forth” into Janaret’s “Echoes,” a pointillistic trance belter if there ever was one; a peak-time excursion straight into barnstorming hand-drum tools and click-and-rattle electro workouts; vintage deep house crash-landing onto gurgling minimal-techno rollers. It really feels like just about anything can happen here, as long as it’s aimed to surprise the lifelong ravers and carries a bit of skip in its step.
As DJ N***a Fox, Rogério Brandão uses drums as stepping stones, creating paths between continents, traditions, and histories in the process. The Lisbon-via-Luanda producer’s music is quick, precise, and riotous, jumping back and forth between all sorts of drum musics: fleet-footed kuduro and blistering tarraxinha, minimalistic Afro-house and white-hot batida. Climate of Fear, ripped live from the decks last October, affords Brandão plenty of space to go wide—the recording runs a few seconds north of three hours—but he doesn’t waste a second, pumping the room full of percussion-forward cuts that are minimalistic and firestarting at once: snares and hand-drums and kicks racing circles around each other until the whole thing turns to an out-and-out whirlwind, offering one-of-a-kind disorientation to any dancer brave enough to get in the middle of it all. Seen from one angle, Climate of Fear is a terrifically informative set—it offers a peek at a world of dance-music traditions that most DJs in the West don’t touch for long—but to give it such a strict classification is to do it a disservice. More than anything else, the appeal of Climate of Fear is the sound of a world-class selector setting the amps alight.
It might be the middle of winter, but who says you can’t pull out the lawn chairs? On Proto Mix 001, Tokyo’s Jeepsooni offers a winding soundtrack for kicking back, reaching into her crates and pulling up a seemingly endless range of Balearic-beat rollers, yacht-rock dollar-bin gems, and sand-encrusted house records. It’s a real slow-burner of a session, which sees the DJ moving between rickety and lush records with ease, each track sounding a bit more sun-soaked than the last: no-BPM electro-balladry, sassy saxophone licks, funked-up sort-of-new-wave. B.P.T. Radio 095, released on Bar Part Time’s critical mix series roughly a week later, is, blessedly, more of the same, albeit with one critical twist: here, Jeepsooni’s cranked up the BPM ever so slightly, stashing a disco ball in the cooler and building a dancefloor out of beach towels. Hi-NRG rhythms and a nonstop sense of play are the order of the hour here. It’s synthpop laced with flamenco guitars and just-so horn stabs; it’s MIDI-blasted Euro-disco; it’s Miami-meets-Chicago drum workouts. No matter which set you grab, you’ll find a masterclass in carefully engineered pop music and joyful-noise synth workouts mixed to a tee, full of left hooks delivered with a wink.
k means has spent the past several years practicing a highly particular form of club-night disorientation. What happens, many of their best mixes ask, if you suspend footwork over a black hole? The result is, more often than not, both impish and vertiginous, full of why-not flips, stomach-churning basslines, and out-and-out barnburners. On Unsound Podcast 106, recorded live at Unsound 2023, they pull off a similar trick, whipping up nearly two hours of high-speed experimentalism. That said, they’re clearly doing something a bit different here. The set’s opening minutes, which see the Bristol DJ moving from eight-bit psychedelia to static-encrusted almost-funk, should serve as sign enough: this is less about genre workouts than it is about brain-bending percussion selections. Those drums—earth-cracking one moment, barely there the next, and always hyper-precise—serve as the throughline for the set, which sees k means sprinting between all sorts of out-there club-night fuel: elliptical minimal techno, skittering juke, billion-ton hard drum, slo-mo bashment, Baltimore-meets-Chicago brain-busters, and just about anything primed to turn a dancefloor on its side. What might seem like an everything-goes session reads wholly coherently thanks to k means’s unerring focus on drum-led delirium. This is the sound of a critical left-field dance-music DJ cranking things up a notch.
It’s tough to pin down the sound of modern dance music, but that’s half the fun. Kia Sydney—a critical new-school name who, disorientingly enough, is a Melbourne mainstay—would know. As the boss of Animalia and Cirrus, she’s spent years broadcasting a million different visions of the stuff via column-favorite mix series: drum-and-bass and techno and house and ambient and trance and—you get the gist. Her own sets have a similarly wide-eyed approach to dance music’s umpteen histories, glancing towards plenty of styles without getting fully sucked into any of them. It’s an impressive trick—playful and cheeky; historically minded without being overtly laudatory—and it makes just about anything she does worth hunting down.
Given all that history, it’s worth saying it straight: RA.973 might just be Kia’s finest (recorded) mix to date. She doesn’t stray far from her usual approach here, but the devil’s in the details: in the just-so blends and the sudden dives into rabbit holes, in the way that tracks wrap around each other until they become more or less indistinguishable. If you scan around the set, you’ll find all sorts of ideas on display—loopy trance and vertiginous ambience, pointillistic techno and amp-scorching drum-and-bass, vintage pop-radio balladry and hand-drum whirlwinds—but Kia holds them all together with a tightly coiled approach to drum programming, looking towards heads-down dancefloor burners the whole way through. It’s, impressively enough, both downcast and playful, full of tracks that could go off at peak time if you pitched them right but would also work for the drive home a few hours later. Dance music is a million different things; on RA.973, one of Australia’s finest DJs takes the form and builds a kaleidoscope.
One of the joys of terrorcore is simple: if you pitch up the bass high enough, this is dance music that might make you feel like you’re going to die. With Dripping 2024, recorded live from the New Jersey woods, Kilbourne—a hardcore lifer and a killer producer in her own right—mounts the CDJs on top of a steamroller, turning in a fast-and-hefty set of distorted kick drums and screaming synthesizers. There’s remarkable nuance to be found between all the blast beats, though. Dripping 2024 is turgid ambient music; it’s billion-ton gabber historicism; it’s light-speed acid techno; it’s scorched-earth rap bootlegging. Mixing stuff this heavy for long can be a bit of a gamble, with sheer length dulling even the toughest drum tones, but Kilbourne is deceptively acrobatic behind the decks, slipping between umpteen forms even as she continuously ratchets up the intensity. The result is a dizzying showcase of hardcore’s power, each blend landing with tooth-cracking intensity and soaking the floor in sweat.
After seven years and 360 episodes, Daisychain is closing up shop. In a lengthy post that accompanies the series’s final set, Alicia Greco, the series’s founder, who spins all sorts of who-knows dance-music idioms as Leesh, goes deep on the restorative power they found in the series: it offered community, support, uplift, and a space for all sorts of DJs to express themselves as they were. It’s a shame to see it go, but, with Daisychain 360, Greco gives it one hell of a send-off, pulling off the impossible by offering a summation of the past seven years: this is a million-limbed thing of a set, a veritable cornucopia of tracky and rollicking and bubbly dance music that never stops shedding its skin. It’s acid-soaked techno and barnstorming hardcore; it’s ambient breakbeat and heart-on-sleeve deep house; it’s rough-and-tumble drum workouts and tech-trance screamers; it’s guns-blazing, melancholy, and, most of all, full-hearted. Again and again, Greco reaches towards tracks that sound like staring straight into the sun, grabbing billion-ton synths and using them to carve a white-hot kind of beauty.
It all comes back to dub, doesn’t it? Dub is the root for a staggering amount of contemporary dance music, whether that’s in studio-forward production techniques, blaring sirens, or rhythmic stylings. If DJing is a kind of live historiography, then it’s worth winding the clock back a bit. On Motorium Podcast 010, Low Pitcher blows the dust off the style and cracks it open, going deep on its less-traveled corners: this is dub imagined as the soundtrack for a bad trip, a barrage of dimly-lit and corroded electronics bound to make even veteran ravers squint just a bit. It might be most accurate to position Motorium Podcast 010 at the intersection of dub and dubstep; for every bit of zonked-out dub experimentalism on display here, there’s a chest-rattling bassline to balance it out. (That is, until the closing fifteen minutes, during which he threatens to dissolve the beats entirely in favor of tooth-chattering ambient-jazz.) It’s that back-and-forth that comes to define the set, which finds Low Pitcher shuttling between reverb-drenched mid-range rollers and billion-ton club-night firestarters. Over the course of its fifty-five minutes, what starts as a genre exercise turns to something far stranger: a re-analysis of a history that seems to flip conventional idioms inside out.
In a 2023 conversation for this web site, NAP, a.k.a. Mexico City’s Daniel Rincón, outlined what might amount to an M.O.: “Utopia might be impossible, but vestiges of it are not.” His DJing—since long before then but certainly in the year-plus since—is built out of the stuff of dreams: low-slung and blissed-out electronics, centuries-old idioms catapulted into the present, and all manner of quiet disorientation. Is it any surprise, then, that Rincón’s latest session sees him going full-on psychedelic? On liquidtime #13, he meets back up with CCL—another DJ whose oeuvre is a universe of blind alleys—and cooks up a slow-motion head-trip: guitar strings coated in a thick layer of dub, barely-there krautrock grooves, steamrolling jazz-fusion, gut-twisting bass clarinet soli, tri-tom workouts that would put most junglists to shame, and so much more. Throughout liquidtime #13, Rincón pulls off a quiet kind of magic, tossing a staggering number of instruments and motifs into a thick fog. Utopianism might be impossible, but it’s worth reaching for it anyways; here, a critical CDMX selector builds a bridge towards the stars.
Minimal techno gets a bad rap. All too often, it gets pigeonholed as two-bar loops stretched out for dozens of minutes, when, in reality, the style can be all sorts of things—understated, funky, alien, disorienting, playful, austere. (Not that there’s anything wrong with eight counts turning into infinity; some of the best dance music ever made is precisely this.) meltdown 67 isn’t exactly minimal techno—it’s got far too many sidebars and excursions for that sort of single-mindedness—but it’s built from the same materials: just-so kick drums, whirring synthesizers, pop-and-crackle percussion. Throughout the session, Peanut treats genre and form like a game of Jenga, carefully stacking idioms on top of each other until the whole thing’s transformed. Here, it’s dubby and wigged-out house music, all mid-range synths ping-ponging atop a steady four-four; there, it’s groggy low-end workouts that might well suck the air out of the room; elsewhere still, it’s joyful-noise microhouse, a cacophony of piano rolls and vocal samples giving way to barely-there drum programming. One particularly rubber-necking moment feels like a ‘70s Hancock record if he grew up listening to motorik. On meltdown 67, Peanut slips between all sorts of forms with aplomb, opting for a vision of dance music that’s both minimal and shoulder-rolling.
Sometimes, all you need is a well-calibrated kick drum, but a killer vocal sample can’t hurt, either. On Live at Bounce House, Russell E. L. Butler—a pillar of North America’s house techno scenes—goes deep on that idea, blanketing the dancefloor with nonstop four-fours, heartrending vocal samples, and a thick layer of dust. This is techno and deep house imagined as joyous, mournful, and sensual traditions; again and again, Butler wraps heartstrings around MPCs. Grabbing highlights seems beside the point in a set that’s blended this carefully, but plenty of moments stand out anyways: a blast of stutter-stepping R&B two hours in, a detour into nocturnal house records right at what must have been peak time, a few dives into acid-soaked electro. The result is funky, ebullient, and heads-down at once, an outpouring of heartfelt beats broadcast over a CDJ.
So: why not book a flight to Germany and keep the party going? For the 13th edition of DJ Fett Burger’s long-running “A Night in the Basement” series, the Norwegian house-music connoisseur invited Berlin’s Jana Falcon for an all-night back-to-back. Given their C.V.s, it should come as little surprise that the resultant session is chaotic and ebullient in equal measure; scan to just about anywhere in the set’s eight hours and you’re bound to hear a mile-a-minute drum break, a diva-house vocal run, a slamming synth loop, or a combination thereof. Where Butler’s set is relatively tight, here, the length almost seems to be the point: by going long, Fett Burger and Jana Falcon are afforded space to pull up well-loved classics and dive into all sorts of blind alleys, firing their confetti cannons at all comers. Here, it’s even tougher to pick out highlights, but here’s a few: a light-speed rendition of DND’s UKG stomper “Diamond Rings,” a brief dive into skull-cracking ballroom-house roughly halfway in, a moment an hour later when a bad-trip organ-house belter cracks open to reveal minimalistic acid. You get the gist: this is three of a million. As Sameheads runs on, DJ Fett Burger and Jana Falcon push each other into ever stranger territories, keeping their eyes on hands-up dancefloor grooves all the while.
If you’re still fiending for more (any why not?) then it’s worth looking back across the Atlantic once again. Last September, Ciel—a quietly clever DJ and a mainstay of Toronto’s club circuit—took over the decks at Ontario’s Best Out of Town and used no-nonsense house and techno to spring towards the stars. Ten minutes in, she grabs Loidis’s “Sugar Snot,” a track that’s both hypermodern and a bit nostalgic, all lickety-split basslines and shuffle-and-slide drum programming. It’s indicative of the following four hours, which see Ciel looking, again and again, towards music that’s jubilant, precise, and playful in equal measure, stuff that feels like it could have come out at most any point in the past two decades. The most impressive trick, though, arrives later still: as the set runs on, Ciel inverts typical live-set construction by cranking the BPM down, moving from UKG rave-ups and hands-up trance to dreamy trip-hop, sludgy downtempo, and starry-eyed rock-and-roll. In that manner, it recalls Bambi & Beatrice M.’s best-in-show B2B from last year, but where that set used dub as a reference point, this one is a bit more amorphous: over time, the order of the hour moves from rave-music slammers to anything sufficiently blissed-out. It’s the most exciting part of a set that hardly lacks for thrills, packed as it is with clever blends, deep pulls, and hair-raising selections. Best Out of Town Year 4 is the sound of a master at work.
Just take a look at the name. “Breaks to fuck to” promises intimacy and intensity in equal measure—a tricky balance, perhaps, but certainly not for Slunty. The DJ better known as Pontiac Streator—a chameleonic producer whose work stretches from left-field garage to brain-bending ambience and back again—has spent his career zooming in on that precise intersection, making disorienting electronic-music maelstroms that nevertheless tug at the heartstrings. He pulls off a similar trick here, making good on that implicit promise by grabbing armfuls of heartfelt drum-and-bass. Slunty spends Breaks_2_Fuck_2 blurring the lines between tearjerkers and bassbin blasters: barely-there Amen breaks rattling away underneath lovelorn balladry, full-bore snare-drum avalanches crashing into synthesizers pulled out of a lullaby, abyssal low-ends gurgling underneath rattling percussion sections and melodies that sound like they’ve been ripped from some deep-fried plugg track. It’s a bit of a flex, one hell of a workout, a celebration of the million emotional shades of drum-and-bass, each track—and feeling—blended into something that’s both sweltering and restorative.
Since the release of SDM001 in 2018, Hamburg techno duo Space Drum Meditation have been chasing a highly particular vision of the style: loopy and a bit psychedelic, with every chest-shaking four-four booming through a moss-covered amplifier. As their months turned into years, their vision only got more out-there, and it’s all the stronger for it. Their latest mix, a ninety-minute heads-down session recorded for Truants, is deep and lithe in equal measure, a slow-motion pile-up of kick drums, tom drums, gurgling synthesizers, bleary-eyed woodwind soli, and birdcalls. They mix it so deftly that you’d be forgiven for missing the trees for the forest here, taking things from cragged ambience to white-hot club fuel and back again. It’s a curious style taken to an extreme—is it hardgroove? Mulch house? Ambient techno? It’s hard to tell, precisely, but such pedantry misses the point: here, Space Drum Meditation are offering a guided tour through unknown territories, each new silhouette more confounding than the one before.
When Sunju Hargun has graced these pages in the past, it’s been for something very specific: mixes that sit at the intersection of trance and ambient, stuff that manages to be both “dance music” and headphone material. But rural 2024 is something different: if previous sets went fifty-fifty on that split, this is ten-ninety. Trance still undoubtedly echoes through Hargun’s approach here, but it’s the genre’s slow-building nature, not its sounds or styles, that reverberate the longest. Instead, this is a set of slow-motion dub, dub techno, and drone; listening to it feels like trudging through thigh-deep mud while staring at the stars, the low-end carrying an undeniable heft that’s countered by a glistening high-end. Focusing on this duality affords Hargun space to shuttle between all sorts of low-BPM head-spinners: barely-there dub MCing, techno with vines stuffed between the drum pads, reverb-soaked ambient-R&B, flutes suspended underneath astral ambience, dub basslines that never seem to lock into a steady key, let alone BPM. Never mind the differences in genre: Sunju Hargun has always been a masterful worldbuilder, one who knows how to twist a bass tone until it sounds like stardust. On rural 2024, he pulls off that magic trick again.
Incredible things are happening on cassette tapes. This has been true since the format sprung up in the ‘60s, of course, but it’s worth saying it straight: right now, some of the most impressive DJ mixes coming out are limited-edition tapes. In January, three of the finest sets fell into this pattern.
First: there’s Tom Val’s Untitled, the latest gem from All Night Flight’s consistently remarkable tape series. DJing—or at least one version of it—is, by its very nature, a kind of collagery: an attempt to stitch together histories, to trace commonalities between traditions, to bring differences into relief. Untitled makes good on these promises by taking an expansive look towards one of the oldest, and broadest, of categories: folk music. The Paris selector mixes with patience here; there is no need to rush centuries of dust, after all. He spends the first half of the session digging into all manner of vocal folk-music traditions—Occitan soli and Corsican polyphony, dimly-lit French balladry and ash-scented lullabies soundtracked by acoustic-guitars. The flip takes that slow tumble of histories and accelerates, flipping between film-noir jazz cuts, dissonant modern classical selections, scraggly field recordings, and so much more. Either side is disorienting in its own way; taken as a pair, they serve as a reminder of the sheer weight of history. With Untitled, Tom Val excavates entire centuries, dusts them off, and carefully reorganizes their artifacts.
Secondly, there’s Cowboys Don’t Cry, the latest entry in Berceuse Heroique’s essential mix series, which has already seen entries from column favorites like Ghost Phone, Vladimir Ivkovic, Bruce, Pretty Sneaky, and Significant Other. Most of the best Berceuse Heroique tapes are united not by genre or idiom but instead by something far less tactile: a shared interest in bleary-eyed electronics and fourth-world-building. On Cowboys Don’t Cry, Bristol’s fka boursin constructs a universe out of radio static and dirt, making something that flits between gentle ambience, slow-burn chamber-jazz, sullen country-pop balladry, barely-there downtempo, and anything else liable to make listeners float a few inches off the ground. It is both beguiling and beautiful, full of minor miracles played at a whisper: who knew android R&B would sit comfortably next to spare spiritual-jazz drum soli, or that thick-blanket deep house could lead so comfortably into field recordings of foreign pop-radio hits? These sorts of left turns ultimately come to define the tape; throughout, fka boursin scatters a million colors of stardust onto the decks, slowly swirling them together until the blend takes on a sheen all its own.
Lastly, over at London’s one-of-one tape-et-cetera depot The Trilogy Tapes, Julien Dechery & Ivan Liechti looked towards the more heartfelt ends of indie rock. The tape, with its careful balance of lush instrumentation and brittle vocal deliveries, betrays Dechery and Liechti’s histories: the former co-curated Sky Girl, a compilation of obscure indie-rock records that become something of a cult classic, while the latter can be found in the liner notes of Ghost Riders, which did something similar with zonked-out garage rock and vintage pop cuts. It’s no small thing, then, to say that Peekaboo sits nicely alongside each of those. This is heart-on-sleeve rock music played underneath a heavy raincloud; it is both plainspoken and heart-wrenching. Not unlike Tom Val’s tape for All Night Flight, it plays more like a mixtape than a conventional DJ set, but that’s perfectly fine; the emotional throughlines are more than strong enough to hold it all together. On Peekaboo, Dechery and Liechti build a collage of forlorn string sections, dreamy melodies, and busted drum kits; the result feels like a well-worn, and well-loved, photo album.
At some point in the past few years, anything by upsammy became appointment listening. In her music, she stretches a tightrope between meditative electronics and dancefloor blasters, often sprinting back and forth between the two until they’re more or less indistinguishable. If you had to pick one, RA.970 might lean more towards the latter, but a this-or-that approach chafes against upsammy’s M.O. It’s drum-and-bliss; it’s abyssal jungle; it’s IDM with its neck tilted towards the stars. More than anything else, though, the set is a case study in the power of slow-boil mixing. The set isn’t downtempo, exactly—recent upsammy sets rarely are—but it’s also light on its feet, with snares and synths racing laps while the low-end fights to keep up. As a result, it’s both speedy and blissed-out, suited equally for raving and head-tripping; by the time she lets the Amen breaks rain down, it feels like a heavy cloud finally breaking open.
The liner notes say it all in just a few words: “Everything can happen in the realm of paranormal.” Vladimir Ivkovic would know; if his DJ sets are any indication, he’s been living there for years. The Düsseldorf selector has, slowly but surely, developed a highly particular style: his sets are frequently slow, loopy, and psychedelic, and they tend to run long, offering DJ and dancer alike plenty of space to stretch out and explore uncharted territories. In his sets, familiar records are pitched down, flipped inside out, or recontextualized so many times over that they are wholly unrecognizable, but his stuff is hardly about peacocking or cheeky flips: everything works in service of a mood that’s equal parts turgid and tripped-out. So it is on Draaimolen Festival 2024, which found Ivkovic playing for an audio engineer in the middle of the forest before the whole thing turned into an impromptu back-to-back with Barcelona’s ISAbella. It’s worth diving in blind here, but to spoil the fun just a bit: this captures Ivkovic (and ISAbella) in a particularly wild-eyed mood, diving between all sorts of outré dancefloor cuts, whether that’s stomach-churning acid pitched down to a deep gurgle, MIDI-string house burners, dial-up electro, or fiery courtroom testimonials delivered atop heavyweight guitar loops. Here, as ever, Ivkovic & ISAbella grab the CDJs and pilot them towards the stars.
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