Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In July, plenty of world-class DJs turned in world-class sets, offering soundtracks for lazy summer’s days, long nights out, and most anything in between. Brooklyn’s Alien D turned in a rip-roaring set of bass mutations for Truants, and Introspekt went deep on “”dub 2-step” in her latest radio session; Osheyack sprinted through a session of quick-and-precise drum workouts, and Villella looked towards cheeky tech-house and four-four rollers. King Doudou offered up a riotous mix, somersaulting between Latin dance-music idioms and gut-punch drum lines; Job Jobse lassoed three hours of trance-music belters. Tornado Wallace and Sybil, in a pair of festival recordings, explored minimal, disorienting, and outright joyous techno-et-cetera cuts.
Elsewhere, Tokyo house-music collective CYK turned in six hours of head-spinning DJing, flipping between new wave, hip-hop, and, of course, plenty of house music; DJ Healthy followed it up with a dancefloor set for the head-trippers. Xica Soul dumped a season’s worth of sunshine onto the dancefloor, and Physical Therapy cranked the tempo on a pile of garage records, splitting the difference between garage and hardcore along the way. Amelia Holt dug into spindly jazz and techno tools in a lights-out live session, and Lil Mofo & OG Militant B showed off their enviable collections of wigged-out dancehall records. SEL.6 and Tre Oh Fie, in a pair of sets, showed off the sheer range of Florida’s dance-music traditions; in their offering for the inimitable inis.eto series, Laura Mackie turned in a set that sounds like a dancefloor half-remembered.
It’s not all so rough-and-tumble, though. J.A.Z. & Evie offered up plenty of sun-baked downtempo and Ibizan electronics; elsewhere, Tommasi & Molly Lewis explored Golden-age exotica, lounge, and jazz records. The always-unpredictable Pretty Sneaky explored vintage library music, soundtracks, and zonked-out who-knows-what rock music, and Jake Muir dipped a label’s catalog in sludge. Tarotplane turned in an extended meditation on ambient techno and zero-gravity trance, and Nono Gigsta turned in one of this year’s most disorienting offerings yet, tracing out an entire universe with skull-cracking bass, weightless jazz, nature documentaries, hard rock, and a heap of stardust.
Here are some of the best DJ sets July had to offer.
In the opening seconds of Truancy Volume 332, Alien D.—a.k.a. Brooklyn DJ & producer Daniel Creahan—queues up “Ymir,” a piano-bass-drums head-tripper from hypnotica-jazz trio Dawn of Midi. It’s a telling selection. It isn’t exactly dance music, but it could work if aimed at a curious enough crowd; its groove, which is equal parts insistent, spare, and metronomic, feels more Villalobos than Evans. This isn’t to say that Creahan spends the rest of the mix chasing the ghosts of nu-jazz or minimal techno, but the track’s sideways approach to the dancefloor is indicative. For all the styles and approaches that Creahan pulls out of his bag on Truancy Volume 332, he maintains a focus on brain-bending club tracks, on tunes where something is slightly askew. This throughline gives him leeway to dive into all sorts of blind alleys: Here, it’s chopped-and-scattered UK funky rollers and tectonic-plate dubstep screamers; there, it’s stutter-stepping minimal techno and fleet-footed electro; elsewhere, it’s heads-down four-four groovers and muscular TB-303 workouts. With nearly every selection here, Creahan toes the line between brain-bending electronics and floor-focused dance music—An impressive balance to strike for 30 minutes, let alone 180-plus.
When Amelia Holt was first in this column, it was for a three-hour back-to-back that ranged from woozy downtempo to firestarting hardcore; her most recent visit to these pages came in the form of mud-encrusted electronics. That range is indicative. Holt, to put it simply, is a maddeningly versatile DJ with equally deep crates. She proved that yet again with an opening set at July’s Nowadays Nonstop. The set, which is tagged as “#jazzzzzzz” on SoundCloud, carries the free-wheeling spirit of a great free-improv performance. This is, in part, directly thanks to Holt’s selections, which include a great deal of no-shit jazz records—Electro-fusion records that wouldn’t sound out of place at the Headhunters sessions, slo-mo funk with saxophones noodling atop, ‘90s jazz-rap turntablism. But Holt’s selections are only part of the story: The real magic of Nowadays is how Holt, ever so slowly, weaves between styles, moving from ambient to jazz to electro-funk techno to heart-racing dancefloor tracks without so much as a scuffed blend.
There’s a real pleasure in long mixes: In letting grooves stretch out, in treating genres as an ocean rather than a pond, in measuring moments by minutes rather than seconds. The folks behind CYK, a “House music collective” based out of Tokyo, clearly understand this. On 050, They go deep, wide, and playful, turning in over seven hours of dancefloor confetti. Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how clearly it holds together. If you jump between spots in the set, you’re likely to find similar ideas at play: Chunky house-music workouts, with some combination of slamming kicks, why-not brass solos, delightfully cheap MIDI toplines, and funky tom-and-snare accompaniment. That said, there’s plenty of highlights, of course—Breakbeat-funk screamers, slicked-back city pop, a few tracks that split the difference between lickety-split amapiano and white-hot UK funky; a stomach-churning “My Neck” flip three hours deep; piles of bargain-bin new-wave records; and what’s got to be an “I Feel Love” deep-tech reimagining.
The following week, the CYK crew followed it up with another killer long(-ish) session. 051 features Brooklyn-via-Yokohama selector DJ Healthy, an essential name in new-school house and techno. (Astute readers may recall that he’s been in these pages a few times, including in an interview from this time last year.) Previous column favorites have included rip-roaring drum-and-bass and all manner of low-end slammers; here, he’s in full-on house-music mode, walking a tightrope between bubbly grooves and chest-rattling kicks; it’s grounded and ebullient at once. Impressively, he manages this balancing act for over three hours, vaulting between minimal-tech head-spinners, zero-gravity tech-trance, shuffle-and-skip house tools, and barely-there dancefloor minimalism all the while. It helps, of course, that DJ Healthy’s been doing this for quite some time, and he moves with a veteran’s grace; this is the kind of set that could keep the folks at MixesDB (2) going for years thanks to its sheer range of selections, but it’s mixed so cleanly that it’s tough to even guess how many tracks he grabbed from his USBs. To put it simply: 051 is new-school house and techno mixed to perfection.
In just a few years, Introspekt has built a reputation as a critical new-school UK garage musician. That’s no accident. In her work, the Queens-via-L.A. selector and producer has demonstrated a seemingly preternatural understanding of the stuff—The shuffle-and-swing drums, the miles-deep basslines, the fine line between amp-busters and laid-back grooves. Recently, though, she’s ever-so-slightly shifted her gaze, looking towards the intersections of 2-step and dubstep: Heavyweight material that nevertheless moves with plenty of skip in its step. On a recent mix for Foundation FM, she went deep on the style, cooking up an hour of wigged-out heaters, all chest-rattling basslines and feather-light drum lines. On paper, it’s something of a time capsule, but she mixes quickly and carefully enough to blow off any dust that might have accrued in the past few decades. (Either way, who said a little historicism is a bad thing?) Throughout Dub 2-Step, Introspekt pulls off canny blend after canny blend, vaulting between screw-face drum lines, abyssal bass-synth gurgles, and whip-cracking grooves with ease.
If DJing is, in part, a way of documenting histories—Of outlining and reframing traditions, of jumping between timelines by way of careful track selections—It’s worth remembering that history is often a bit fuzzy, its finer edges sanded away or blurred out. On their remarkable inis:eto entry, Laura Mackie underlines this idea, conjuring an hour of music that sounds like a dancefloor half-remembered: Ramshackle house music, sepia-toned minimal-techno workouts, zero-gravity dub, barely-there drum machines beating underneath new-age ambiance. Throughout the session, Markie straddles the line between a masterfully executed warm-up set and something for the early-morning drive home. It’s full of subtle and slow blends; Mackie opts for a quiet and patient kind of delirium here, reaching for tracks that echo dancefloor idioms but, more often than not, move slightly left of center. The liner notes for the session describe Mackie’s style as “Gun to the head house / techno existentialism.” If that’s the case, then, on inis:eto, Mackie fills the chamber with smoke before pulling the trigger.
In the liner notes for B.P.T. Radio 089, J.A.Z.—a.k.a. Bedford DJ John Zahl—says the mix is aimed at the “hardcore dancers who are willing to see things through post-peak.” As much is evidently true; its mix of post-disco sleaze, lounge-lizard rock, and vaguely psychedelic pop records is the kind of stuff that would hit especially hard after a few hours of high-tempo scorchers. At just over three hours, the session isn’t exactly tight, but that sprawl serves to its benefit: Here, Zahl builds a world out of laid-back grooves and rickety rhythms, mixing slowly and trusting aesthetic continuity above all else. Zahl’s commitment to funked-up rollers allows them space for all sorts of left turns: It turns out there’s not much separating weirdo Eurhythmics covers and MIDI-blasted new age, and it’s just a quick jump from greased-up synth funk to proto-B-52’s spoken-word experimentalism. B.P.T. Radio 089 is downtempo and zonked-out in equal measure; it’s the kind of session that would work just as well at 2 a.m. as 11 a.m. the next morning.
If B.P.T. Radio 089 offers an extended come-down session for any would-be ravers, Evie’s Balearic Banana session picks up the dancefloor and drops it into a sandcastle. (In case this change of scenery isn’t apparent from the jump, the Ibizan-soul “Summertime” needle-drop twenty minutes is practically soaked in salt water.) Evie spends the session stuffing the amps with sand, sauntering between all sorts of sun-drenched sounds: Slow-and-low downtempo, sort-of trip-hop, skyscraping guitar solos, jazzed-up deep house, windows-down disco cuts, and a healthy dose of heartbreakers for good measure. That’s not to say the mix is unmoored, though—It’s just focused more on feel than form. As with J.A.Z.’s offering, the focus here is squarely on capital-t Tunes: Songs mixed long and slow, with lushly orchestrated melodies soaring atop dollar-bin drum machines and clouds of synthesizers. As temperatures keep creeping ever higher north of the equator, Balearic Banana’s low-slung grooves are a surefire way to beat the heat.
In his discography, Jake Muir has built a Library of Babel and filled the bookshelves with stardust. His work imagines ambient music as something for dissociation, for curdled intimacies, for worlds gone askew. With his latest work (Muir calls it a “(re)mixtape”), the Berlin DJ and producer turns his gaze towards enmossed, a critical new-school ambient-et-cetera record label. It’s a canny fit—The label’s output, like Muir’s, is dedicated to ambient music, sound art, and deep-space disorientation. On enmixed, Muir dives deep into the uncanny valley, grabbing forty-odd tracks and fiddling with them until their seams are wholly invisible; the result truly feels like one continuous composition, with skin-crawling synthesizers, tidal waves of noise, and liturgical ambience all fighting for space in the murk. It’s telling that Muir’s edited all but two of the tracks here, pitch-shifting and refragmenting and collaging and twisting up a catalog until it feels entirely new. enmixed is at once unsettled, alive, and a bit zonked-out; throughout, Muir traces an ever-changing silhouette through a thick layer of fog.
Around this time last year, Job Jobse released Dagen an Diamant. Its title, which roughly translates to “diamond days,” gave away the game: This was a remarkable blast of floor-focused trance and hands-up techno, a three-hour collection of kicks and synths straining towards elation. It turns out Jobse wasn’t done. Vol. 2 picks up where the first left off to winning effect, splitting the difference between chunky four-fours and lighter-than-air drum programming. Given Jobse’s position as Amsterdam’s preëminent trance-music DJ, this should come as little surprise: He’s spent his career building a ladder from the dancefloor to the clouds, pulling ravers as high in the sky as he can manage. With Dagen Van Diamant Vol. 2, Jobse bottles a clear summer’s day, packing the session with acrobatic synth lines, just-so snare rolls, and slamming kicks—In other words, sun-kissed belter after sun-kissed belter. Trance music, at its best, promises infinities via a wholly sincere optimism, with each kick pushing dancers further towards the clouds; here, Jobse captures that joy and stretches it out for as long as he can manage.
Sin Limites announces itself with a blast of MIDI horns, air-raid sirens, and a pile of early-’10s trap drums. It’s clear from the jump, in other words: This won’t be a subtle hour. King Doudou, a.k.a. Lyon-born DJ Hugo Passaquin, has spent the past decade pushing a hypermaximalist version of reggaetón and funk carioca, and, on Sin Limites, he stretches further into the digital detritus, rocketing between umpteen dance-music idioms and offering up screw-face dembow tools. Jump from one spot to the next and you’ll find any number of ideas—Deep-fried digital cumbia, finger-gun breakbeat experimentalism, acid-drenched dembow-techno, found-sound percussion workouts, Philly-via-Rio steamrollers, something that sounds an awful lot like a “Love Sosa” trance refix. That sheer range makes the mix feel like a minor miracle: An hour of everything-goes music shouldn’t hold together this well. But Passaquin, who seems to have produced everything on display here, clearly understands how to sprint a tightrope; on Sin Limites, he harnesses a live-wire energy to winning effect, turning in an electrifying hour of globe-trotting club tracks. Sin Limites is a celebration of dembow’s possibilities, a glance across several ponds, and a massive flex; and, most importantly, it’s a riot to listen to.
One of the joys of dancehall is among its simplest: If you have a solid enough drum break, you can get away with just about anything on top. On Driver, Tokyo selectors Lil Mofo and OG Militant B lean into the everything-goes nature of great dancehall, tossing it in umpteen directions and trusting even their wildest left hooks to connect. Lil Mofo grabs the A-side, and it’s a belter: Lo-bit and rowdy in equal measure, with a Rolodex of emcees jockeying for position atop a million head-turning riddims—Jaw-harp bassbin heaters, a bit that’s awfully close to ‘90s R&B records, and a baffling-but-jubilant dip into close-harmony country-ragga. OG Militant B goes ever deeper into left field on the flip, using a warehouse’s worth of Bollywood strings, tabla, and electro-funk synthesizers to whip-up an out-and-out headspinner of a dancehall session. No matter how many blind alleys Lil Mofo & OG Militant B explore, though, their rhythms and blends—Smooth and ebullient in equal measure—Keep things moving without a hitch. Driver presents dancehall as a driving, playful, and psychedelic thing.
In a lengthy blog post that accompanies The House of Crocodiles Part 2, Nono Gigsta returns, again and again, to water. It’s a neat metaphor for DJing, and creative acts in general: Creativity as a stream into which the artist dips; or art as a tidal wave; or the earth-shaping import of persistence. Freerotation 2024: The House of Crocodiles Part 2 is many things: A sequel to a six-year-old Freerotation set, a thrown gauntlet of a DJ mix, and one of this year’s finest musical offerings, full stop. But it’s also a veritable typhoon. Here, Nono Gigsta mixes with a clear intuition, writing her own rulebook along the way. This is million-genre DJing without a trace of peacocking; it’s real-time world-building; it’s histories played at a mile a minute. It helps that it’s full of head-spinning moments, too: The tumble of Björk and disorienting jazz records that open the session, a mid-set dive into light-speed ambient-techno, the juke-R&B-dancehall one-two-three that splits the mix down the middle, the extended forays into gut-twisting dubstep. Remarkably, the wilder Nono Gigsta gets here, the more it works—When the mix’s title bubbles up via what sounds like a nature documentary, the drop into AC/DC is both wholly unexpected and, somehow, perfectly sensible. With The House of Crocodiles Part 2, Nono Gigsta pulls off something remarkable, turning on the decks and conjuring a monsoon.
In his work, Eli Osheyack builds towers of drums and collapses them in on themselves. His music is both transgressive and wildly inventive, keeping an eye towards the nightclub even as he threatens to take it apart at its very foundations. (The contours of Osheyack’s approach, as well as his predilections towards hip-hop and brain-bending drum workouts, recall Bobby Beethoven—No mean feat, given Beethoven is one of the most striking DJs alive.) With NR Sound Mix 048, Osheyack makes the case for his kitchen-sink approach yet again, cooking up a lean fifty minutes of dancefloor head-turners and vaulting between a seemingly unending array of styles and sounds. Both on paper and in practice, it’s a bit of a miracle that it holds together: More often than not, Osheyack chooses to blend by slamming the gas and turning a hard left, dropping from tranced-up 2-step into heavyweight techno or toppling over a pile of tom drums in favor of earth-shaking gqom. Osheyack’s interest in club-music white-knucklers holds it all together, though—This is quick and hefty drum music played with an unmissable grin, sounding both riotous and devilish at once.
Physical Therapy, a.k.a. East-Coast dance-music mainstay Daniel Fisher, loves a theme. As much is evident from his NTS residency: Scroll through and you’ll find specials devoted to witch house, “slow acid,” fidget house, hardgroove techno—And, critically, “slow garage.” (That last set, in particular, is worth digging into: It’s one of 2022’s finest, full stop.) With Fast Garage, he cranks the BPM back up to 100% and keeps going, pitching up all sorts of deep-cut garage records in the pursuit of quick-and-precise euphorias. It’s telling that he opens things with 2 Wisemen’s “Hardcore Garage”; in its best moments, Fast Garage feels like an intersection of mid-’90s hardcore-breaks mischief and late-’90s windows-down garage tunes. Pitching these records up is no mere gimmick, and Fisher’s clearly calibrated his selections for the tempo: When he flicks up the BPM on skull-cracking basslines, he reveals the acrobatics it took to put them together; the vocal tracks take on a chipmunk-soul quality, which makes for a sharp and effective contrast with the bassbin-rattling low-end; and the drum lines turn to a full-on sprint without losing any of their to-the-millisecond precision.
If you’ll forgive the rare dip into the archives here, this one’s worth highlighting. Seven years and twice as many lifetimes ago, Pretty Sneaky crept onto Berlin’s electronic-music scene with a series of low-profile twelve-inches, triangulating the space between barely-there breaks, dubstep, and techno. It was a really impressive run, and it felt like they could have kept it up forever. But what fun is that? Even then, Pretty Sneaky’s music was a bit ghostly, with each kicked drum and rolled snare sounding animated by histories; since those early LPs, they’ve dug ever deeper into the history books, enrobing themselves in spirits and setting aside any questions about “dance music” in the process. Case in point: This Reminds Me of a Sound. This remarkable tape, released on the reliably great Berceuse Heroique several weeks ago, is, formally, worlds apart from those early LPs, even if it shares their sense of zonked-out wonder. Across roughly ninety minutes, the tape snakes between galaxies: Full-bore krautrock to skin-crawling spoken word, from rickety synth jams to static-encrusted sort-of-new-wave, from neo-noir drum-machine trickery to new-age electro-noodling. Much like their Crack mix from a few years back, it’s both tricky to pin down and wholly unique, filled with blind leaps into dollar bins and black holes.
Despite the Internet’s wires stretching out underneath oceans and tangling up traditions, dance music is still a stubbornly regional thing; club-music lingua francas are as tied to zip codes as they are timelines. Dig deep enough into any one area and you’ll find a million histories, with deep roots stretching in all sorts of directions. Florida’s dance-music scene is as good an example of this as any. While the state has a bit of a reputation as a haven for bottle-service nightclubs, it houses an entire universe of dance-music idioms: There’s Miami bass, of course, but there’s also wiggly IDM, sub-busting freestyle, zero-gravity electro, and million-limbed breaks.
With SORRYMIX32—A set ripped from a “Tribute to Florida” club night in Brooklyn—SEL.6, a critical member of Miami’s new school, went deep on the state’s umpteen sounds to winning effect, mixing lickety-split dance music with an equally quick hand. Throughout, she keeps one eye on the dancefloor, leaning towards high-energy rollers of all stripes: SNES-era techno, guns-blazing Jersey club, billion-ton synth workouts, rollicking sort-of-garage, steamrolling electro mutations, techno-breaks steamrollers, crash-your-car freestyle records, lighters-up house anthems. Like plenty of the best Miami stuff, this sounds like it could have come out in 1994 or 2024—Almost. Even with all the old(er)-school sounds, SEL.6’s everything-at-once approach firmly roots this in newer-school DJing. Either way, though, SORRYMIX32 is just a ton of fun: It’s a celebration of dance-music histories, a glance towards its futures, and two hours of pumpers.
All that said, though, we’re nowhere near done with Florida here. Tre Oh Fie has built an enviable career in jook music, a high-energy spin on hip-hop that emerged from house parties in Tampa Bay in the 2000s. With SYSTEM Mix 111, he goes deep on the style, throwing rapid-fire drums on top of an entire universe of pop-radio hits. Those edits are what ultimately define the set thanks to sheer volume: To grab a few of a million, there’s a dreamy take on Fergie’s “Glamorous” that fuses slo-mo psychedelia with fleet-footed kick drum programming, a flip of Lipps Inc.’s “Funky Town” that cranks up the BPM and throws few MCs on top, a hair-raising chop-and-shuffle take on Robin S.’s “Show Me Love,” a take on Lathun’s critical Miami-bass number “Freak It” that turns the whole thing into a second-line steamroller—You get the gist. No matter the specifics, though, Tre Oh Fie maintains his focus on out-and-out dancefloor bombs. (In addition to a genre survey, the mix doubles as a barrage of inventive and wildly playful drum programming.) SYSTEM Mix 111, like the genre it’s based on, is disorienting, blistering, and riotous in equal measure.
It’s worth saying it straight. Since its debut last March, the Zikzak mix series has become a critical space for headphone-music purists. For the past dozen entries in the series, and for roughly thrice as many hours, Tarotplane, a.k.a. Baltimore selector PJ Dorsey, has taken miles-deep dives into foot-wide pools: “American Visionary Music,” Japanese progressive rock, Scandinavian psychedelia. Dorsey’s mixes run closer to carefully assembled timelines than any sort of triple-deck wizardry, but that’s hardly a problem; it just results in mixes whose glacial pace befit their hefty length. On Zikzak 12, Dorsey finds another vein to mine and strikes gold yet again, pulling up roughly three hours of lighter-than-air trance records and groggy ambient-techno. Given the source material and the Zikzak track record, it should come as little surprise that this is a session aimed squarely at the head-trippers. Even when it picks up the pace—The third hour, in particular, is unusually uptempo for a Zikzak entry—It still sounds ripped from a dream. Zikzak 12 is an homage to a highly particular strand of dance music: One that splits the difference between head-in-the-clouds techno, dreamy ambience, and alien trance records. Here, for a blissed-out three hours, the drums hit the heart rather than the chest and everything arrives soaked in sunlight.
On an Internet filled with bottomless feeds of new mixes, radio shows, and limited-release tapes, making a residency feel one-of-one is a rare achievement indeed. That said: Whatever that accomplishment takes, Tommasi’s got it. In his monthly NTS show, Iceland’s Thomas Stankiewicz has built a universe out of classical music, warped-vinyl jazz, and bone-chilling ambience. His selections, more often than not, sound cast in amber; the age, and the wrinkles, and the cracks, are the point. For his latest special, Tommasi made a canny, if unexpected, choice and dialed up Molly Lewis. Lewis, a professional whistler whose On the Lips is one of this year’s finest LPs, has built her career upon a similar idea: At its best, her music recalls the lighter-than-air lounge music that filled popular imagination roughly seventy-five years ago. On 14th July 2024, the two pair up for a session of bossa nova, jazz, and exotica, with plenty of moments that sound like they’d soundtrack a Golden-Age Hollywood flick. It’s hard to tell who selects what, or to what extent they even blend anything, but enough lush string arrangements will melt away any of those questions. The session—Emotive, joyous, and plaintive in equal measure—Is a time capsule stuffed with velvet.
Berlin-via-Australia selector Tornado Wallace has spent the past decade-plus building a reputation for inside-out dance music. In his music, Wallace twists dancefloors into Möbius strips, making Peter Eisenmann-style house records: Formal choices twisted around each until the familiar becomes downright psychedelic. On Gop Tun Festival 2024, he pulls off that bit of aesthetic acrobatics yet again, turning in two and a half hours of dancefloor shape-shifters, pulling up a seemingly endless array of sounds and styles along the way. The mix is dominated by whip-cracking house and techno, filled with rug-pulls and feints that go down smoothly thanks to his careful mixing: Sudden dives into minimal-techno delirium, shuffle-and-skip tom-drum workouts, a few extended sections dominated by proggy synth tracks. (In one of the set’s most satisfying sidebars, Wallace dives down a blind alley only to find a pile of lighters-up trance records.) For all Wallace’s experience in left-field dance music, Gop Tun Festival 2024 is refreshingly straight-ahead. Here, he grabs a million kick drums, an ocean of bleary-eyed synth lines, and a single undulating groove, inviting listeners to dive in and get lost.
Elsewhere, London DJ Sybil explored slightly different modes to a similarly winning effect. Mostra 2024, recorded live in the Barcelona summer, is a collection of tightly-wound club-music rhythms, all elliptical synthesizers coiled around neck-snapping kicks; it’s minimal and muscular stuff, suggesting infinities with just a few ideas at a time. Where Tornado Wallace’s set used its length to jump between all sorts of forms, Mostra 2024 goes long in the name of sheer depth: These are tracks that feel like a dive into a black hole, with deep-space bass rumbles and synth gurgles sounding like passing satellites. With each passing blend, Sybil opts to move into ever headier territories, reaching into her bag and pulling out piles of heart-in-throat kick drums, hi-fi IDM wigglers, and electro-minimalism of the highest order. In the mix’s liner notes, Sybil pitched this session as “warm and groovy,” but there’s an undeniable chill lingering on the edge of their selections here. Not to say that’s a bad thing at all: This is dance music imagined as stuff for stargazing, with a million shades of black lurking in the background.
Given he’s one of the heads behind Truants—A critical dance-music blog whose titular mix series frequently appears on this very column—Riccardo Villella has long since proven his dance-music bona fides. That said, he’s got a formidable C.V. beyond that, too. Case in point: His DJ mixes, which frequently zero in on techno-trance euphoria to winning effect. His recent set for Madrid’s Tombolo, on which he takes those ideas straight to the stars, is perhaps his finest yet. Here, he reaches into his crates and pulls out a tremendous range of shoulder-rollers: Chunky tech-house stompers, acid-drenched trance tracks, hardcore drum-break wizardry that wouldn’t sound out of place in a ‘92 warehouse set, sun-blasted garage, full-on techno slammers. It’s as wide-ranging as it is aesthetically unified; even as the top-lines change out and the drums skip between umpteen dance-music histories, Villella’s focus on heads-down dancefloor tools and out-and-out euphoria never lets up.
The appeal of Multi Multi Mix Vol. 9 is simple: Want something that sounds like a clear summer’s day? Here, Los Angeles mainstay Xica Soul jumps between umpteen styles of house-music elation—Chunky, playful, and all-around ebullient. Steady four-fours keep the thing moving, but the ever-changing high-end pushes it over the top; it’s driving and cheeky at once, with rock-solid grooves defined by slamming kicks and funky drum programming. Here, it’s piano-house stompers that wouldn’t sound out of place on a compilation from ‘92; there, it’s MIDI-keyboard diva-house belters dipped in a vat of acid; elsewhere still, it’s an intersection of late-eighties Miami bass and house that wouldn’t sound out of place in the Paradise Garage. The result is something that’s both aesthetically precise and wide-ranging; even as Xica Soul keeps shifting textures and sliding between styles, she keeps her eyes on the dancefloor, looking towards house music’s countless histories and flooding any would-be ravers with a blast of sunlight.
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