Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
Let’s get right into it—to be blunt, March was stacked.
BEIGE and Salar Ansari, performing live from Detroit, turned in a session of low-and-slow house music, and Vladimir Ivkovic cranked the tempo down ever further in a wigged-out session from Tokyo. Colored Craig offered up a survey of sun-blasted house and disco for Bar Part Time, and Fredfades pulled off a similar trick with an eye towards the rave-music lifers. Over in France, Parisian techno don Antigone blasted through nearly eight hours of techno in an alleged swan song, and Beatrice M. & Trois-Quarts Taxi System slipped between all sorts of nu-school club-music psychedelia. yumi, a one-of-one NYC selector, cooked up a session of footwork-flavored rug-pulls, and Seattle’s ‘nohup’ vaulted between wigged-out house and techno and who-knows-what-else.
Anna Morgan’s tape for Heads Know is fuel for the finger-gunners in the audience, and NAP’s recent dispatch from Nowadays shows the Mexico City selector in top form as he sprints between cumbia, trance, and techno rollers. sddp’s mix for Sorry Records uses a pile of R&B acapellas as a springboard towards euphoria; Dj Wiggles reaches a similar destination by looking towards contemporary UK techno, dubstep, and dub tools. Over on NTS, Mumbai MC BamBoy grabbed an armful of folk musics and military-grade drums for a hair-raising session; on Radio Flouka, Athens selector kvadosh cooked up a set of hallucinatory and hefty dembow. Elsewhere still, Kenyon Sound, a critical outpost for new-school grime, put out a pair of blood-boilers from Manchester’s Subbuteo and Istanbul’s DJCESET, and house-music mastermind Finn dug deep into the annals of Detroit dance music.
In Bucharest, Liar and Matei showed off the sheer sonic range possible in listening-bar sets—anything-at-all for one, miles-deep house for the other. Richard Akingbehin turned in a session of meditative and blissed-out dub records in a set for pi pi pi, and DJ Mistry turned in a truly brain-bending festival set, bottling lightning a hundred times in a row. In a pair of recent mixes, Time Is Away wove quadruple helices with folk musics, spoken word, IDM, and modern-classical compositions; elsewhere, Tokyo’s iiiiju found the middle ground between ambient music, post-minimalism, and country records. Lastly, contemporary electronic-music experimentalist Lyra Pramuk cracked open a time capsule from the 2300s for Resident Advisor, and DJ Screendoor, live from Oregon, offered up a truly jaw-dropping twelve-plus hours of house and techno.
Here are some of the best DJ sets March had to offer.
In her DJ sets, Anna Morgan seems to have a pretty straightforward M.O.: crack the amps in half. This is, of course, hardly new to HEADS KNOW, a critical (and appropriately named) mix and party series operated by Brooklyn’s Arielle Lana; the series’s curation is wide-ranging but almost uniformly heavy-hitting. Heads Know Tape 028, Morgan’s entry in the series, is among its strongest to date: firestarting club tools are the order of the hour here, running across the globe from Chicago to London and back again, with plenty of stops along the east coast for good measure. Jump around on the tape and you’ll find all manner of contemporary dance-music sounds—junglist breaks and lickety-split footwork and chopped-up horn sections and steamrolling dubstep by way of Baltimore and so, so much more—but Morgan’s selections are bound together by a focus on sheer vim; no matter the particulars, she’s aiming towards the kind of dancefloor euphoria that so many DJs gesture towards. On Heads Know Tape 028, Morgan rockets between high-energy club sounds and soaks the decks in sweat.
The appeal of The Last Dance @ essaim is, fundamentally, pretty simple: how about seven hours of techno? The most immediate comparison point for The Last Dance—a mammoth techno-et-cetera session that allegedly doubled as Antigone’s swan song—might be Funk Assault’s RA.960, another mammoth all-nighter techno-et-cetera DJ set. That comparison isn’t one to make lightly, given RA.960 was one of last year’s finest four-four sets, but it’s hard to avoid thanks to the sheer jubilee on display here. Throughout The Last Dance, Antigone takes a remarkably dexterous approach to techno, blending all sorts of flavors together into something that feels half its length thanks to its sheer volume of shoulder-rollers. There’s shuffling hardgroove, slamming Detroit tracks, dubbed-out head-spinners, heads-down minimal, lighters-up tech-house flips—anything goes as long as it’s got enough kick drums. If this is truly Antigone’s last time behind the decks, it’s a fine way to go out.
Beatrice M. & Trois-Quarts Taxi System, on the other hand, are just getting started. The producers’ stars have been rocketing in the past few years thanks to a bulletproof list of heady techno, dubstep, and who-knows club sounds, so it was only a matter of time before they met up behind the decks. For their turn at essaim, they go deep on wigged-out techno, stretching the sound into all sorts of unusual shapes. It takes a full twenty minutes for anything resembling proper percussion to land here, and when it does, it’s kicks that sound like a trudge through thigh-deep mud. From there on, essaim is the sound of Beatrice M. & Trois-Quarts Taxi System sharpening their steel, moving from craggy to corrugated and deepening the trance along the way: what starts as a survey of deep-space ambience eventually finds its way to brain-bending acid techno, blood-curdling grime, dub-techno skin-crawlers, and so much more. This one’s for the dancefloor scientists.
Cultivation of Mind begins gently: a vocalist traces an elliptical melody atop a bed of hand-drums, flutes, and synthesizers; tinny backing vocals chime in from another room. This is par for the course for BamBoy, a rapper and radio host from Mumbai who uses his NTS slot to highlight India’s musical histories. But it doesn’t take long for this episode of Cultivation of Mind to become something else entirely—give BamBoy fifteen minutes and he’ll turn folk-music idioms into a windstorm. The joy of this session comes in that sort of momentum-building; to listen to it is to hear a snowball turn to an avalanche. As Cultivation of Mind runs on, what starts as a session of hand-drums and folk-music tunes gets cluttered up with DJ drops, chopped-up whistles and screams and hollers, semi trucks filled with marching bands, and a million other kinds of joyful noise. The result is both hyper-specific and electrifying.
Look, it’s personal catnip, but can you blame me? A recently published excerpt from BEIGE & Salar Ansari’s set at Marble Bar promises #sleaze and #drug chug—a recipe for something that’s both low-slung and tripped-out if there ever was one. Fortunately, Sunrise Set makes good on that promise: here, BEIGE and Ansari go deep on slo-mo house music and wigged-out synthpop records. The core of the set lies in jazzy four-fours, each kick arriving alongside a barely-there guitar loop or sparkling synth line, but they chase that dragon into all sorts of playful territories, too: acid-flecked new wave, hand-drum octets, sci-fi-flavored electro-disco, a healthy dose of funk, and plenty more. This is a dance music imagined as a slow, surreal, and sensual thing: body music tilted towards the stars, each beat nudging dancers ever closer together even as it offers a path towards full-on psychedelia.
If you’re looking for a looser take on house, though, here’s an idea: book a flight from Detroit to San Francisco. In February, Colored Craig—”one of LA’s best kept secrets”—went long at Bar Part Time, a west-coast wine bar that doubles as a critical outpost for downtempo, house, and new-school lounge music. (Astute readers may recall that their flagship mix series, “B.P.T. Radio,” makes frequent appearances in these pages.) Live @ B.P.T. is house music imagined as a fast-track to jubilee: an overstuffed Rolodex packed with heartbroken vocalists; a few armfuls of snares, kicks, and vintage synths; and a Discogs dive’s worth of dollar-bin disco singles. Live @ B.P.T. opens with a mixture of heartache and joy, synthetic string sections soaring above chunky piano-house rhythms; it’s playful and stomping and emotive in equal measure. It’s a minor miracle that Craig is able to keep that alchemy up for nearly four hours, but he manages it nevertheless, stuffing the decks with glitter along the way.
Lastly, if you’re keen to keep the party going, here’s one more spot for the itinerary. A few years ago, Oslo DJ Fredfades hit the decks at Madrid club and “music cult” Tombolo, turning in just over two hours of vintage house-music pumpers. Here, Fredfades keeps his gaze locked on the dancefloor, cranking on both volume and intensity without sacrificing a hi-NRG kind of joy. At points, that means whip-cracking MIDI piano stompers; elsewhere, it’s acid-soaked breakbeats or pan-flute synth-pop or moonlit new-wave or sassy techno tracks. No matter the specifics, Fredfades mixes with acuity and panache, performing backflips on the decks as he keeps the party rolling. In its best moments, it promises to go on forever.
It’s not all that common to open a festival set with eleven minutes of voicemails, but Soma Festival 2024 might just convince you it ought to be. The session shows DJ Mistry tracing a fairly typical live-set arc of ambient to pumpers and back again, but they complicate it every step of the way, stepping a bit further into the unknown with each new blend. The result is, frankly, spellbinding: two hours of left-field dance music that sits somewhere between fourth-world disorientation and the here-and-now, offering plenty of fuel for the head-trippers and sweat-soaked ravers alike. Scan around, and you’ll find—who knows? This thing is truly all over the place: ambient-trap retoolings sit next to field recordings, which butt against static-encrusted techno records; dreamy-eyed trip-hop dissolves into outré-space dub; close-harmony psych-pop and cragged dubstep and spoken-word rock-and-roll make for strangely complementary bedfellows. On Soma Festival 2024, DJ Mistry takes a truly everything-goes approach to the dancefloor, taking a trust fall straight into a black hole.
DJ Screendoor cuts a quiet figure; he’s been spinning records for nearly thirty years, but his presentation, from mix titles on down, belies none of that; his material is low-key but handled with a veteran’s grace. The same could be said of live-at-club-shaniko, an out-and-out masterclass of techno, house, and minimal-whatever dance-music idioms ripped live from a cabin in the Pacific Northwest. Here, Screendoor goes deep on all manner of heads-down grooves, flipping between elliptical minimal techno, chunky gospel-house flips, static-soaked R&B bootlegs, androidian disco, barely-there electro, and so, so, so much more. To unbury the hook, though, it’s worth saying it straight: this is over twelve hours long, so any effort to pick out a specific moment feels beside the point. This is a titanic monument to the million shades of euphoria possible in a well-pitched club night, a long-form exploration of dimly lit dancefloor rhythms. To be blunt, it’s spectacular: this is some of the strongest straight-ahead dancefloor mixing you’re likely to hear all year, a truly marathon session that has hardly a scuffed blend and whose veins course with neon throughout.
In recent years, Dj Wiggles has turned from a relatively unknown quantity to one of London’s fastest-rising selectors. It’s not hard to see why: the kinetic founder totes enviously deep crates, routinely reaching for all sorts of who-knows IDs at the forefront of contemporary UK dance music. That’s the order of the hour on subglow/Live 4, which starts out with hair-raising dubstep and breaks before slowly dissolving into a whirlpool of dub, curdled new-age, and barely-there beats. (For those keeping score, that’s also the fourth from this mix series to hit the column.) Cranking the energy up and maintaining interest is one thing; tuning it down is altogether different, and it’s an order of magnitude trickier. Formalism won’t make something hit on the floor, of course—it takes dancefloor bombs to do that. Fortunately, Wiggles has those in spades, whether that’s oddball new-wave rockers, spine-cracking dubstep, or light-speed breakstep. It’s a seriously impressive trick pulled off with a wink.
It’s worth saying it straight: Finn is a veritable dance-music historian, the kind of selector whose crates are both dead serious and miles deep. When he was last in this column, it was for a session of house-music tearjerkers; back in 2022, it was for a rough-and-rowdy back-to-back that saw him throwing a party with the best of them; now, it’s for two hours of ghetto house and electro. His entry in the NTS Guide To series—which seems to have few parameters beyond a focus on deep-rather-than-wide selections—goes whole hog on Databass Records, a ghettotech label that featured all sorts of critical names in the style. The resulting two hours are appropriately raunchy and rowdy, a car-crash of rickety drum machines, sample flips, and busted microphones. The lineup doubles as a who’s-who of ghettotech, but Finn keeps it from turning into a straight-up history lesson thanks to clean blends and a focus on sheer electricity. Crank the volume on this one and start sweating.
This column has spilled a lot of ink talking about the rise of listening bars, so it’s worth keeping it tight: DJing can be anything, and when you’re not wholly indebted to the dancefloor, an entirely different universe of possibilities opens up. The folks behind BAR TON surely understand this. The Romanian venue—“not a bar, not a listening bar, not a day club and definitely not a nightclub”—has played host to all sorts of CDJ wizardry over the years, and, here, we’ve got three new offerings, each of which provide a different window on the possibilities contained in low-key, slow, and out-there mixing.
First, there’s H2B. For their session, the duo start out by reaching towards all sorts of slow-and-low home-listening sounds—unplaceable folk music, lounge-lizard synth-pop, stained-glass R&B—but, eventually, ease their way into a heads-down house-music session, tunneling ever deeper into souled-out grooves along the way. The other two sessions on display here take one half of that and run: Matei goes deep on a survey of playful and funky and blissed-out house records with a few sidebars into jazz fusion, stretching out one long groove that promises eternities, and Liar turns out something far more disorienting, scrambling their USBs for a mix that moves between classical Romanticism, high-tide surf-rock, tear-soaked vocal jazz, snarling Miley Cirus retoolings, nu-age trap, and a hundred other ideas for good measure. It’s a truly everything-goes set, and not everything works, but that’s part of the fun.
At this point, inis:eto—an every-now-and-then mix series operated out of Japan—is a column favorite. Past entries have included rough-spun folk music, bleary-eyed IDM, groggy house records, foggy ambient techno, and slow-motion drone, but, to be frank, it’s worth cave-diving straight into their archive; you’re bound to find plenty of gems. The series is bound less by sound than it is by approach; its best material is uniformly meditative, exploratory, and disorienting. The same could be said for the latest entry, which comes courtesy of Kyoto’s iiiiju. Here, they take a delightfully free-form approach to downtempo mixing, dunking modern-classical idioms in a vat of fog, writing ballads for busted keyboards, and finding an intersection between dreamy post-minimalism and bad-trip country music. If that all sounds incongruous on first pass, that’s entirely reasonable. But, somehow, iiiiju holds it all together, keeping their focus squarely on deep-trip disorientation, binding their selections together by a shared focus on dream-logic and head-spinners. Psychedelia, it turns out, can sound like just about anything.
It’s hardly a secret, but it’s worth saying it straight: one of the joys of dembow lies in its mutability. You can, it turns out, put that rhythm under just about anything; most of the time, it works. For a recent special on Paris’s Radio Flouka, Athens DJ and producer kvadosh goes full-bore on out-there dembow rhythms, reaching strictly for their sub-100 BPM folder and tossing the listener into parts unknown along the way. Obskuro 005 takes a supposed straightjacket of a set—there can’t be that many sounds in slo-mo dembow, right?—and turns it into an hour that begs for five more, flitting between psyched-out cumbia, scraped-metal reggaetón, and no-BPM sludge-ups that sound like something you’d find in a Bobby Beethoven set. Here, kvadosh underlines the sheer range of emotive and textural possibilities contained in contemporary dembow, pushing the limits of the sound until it’s downright psychedelic.
Thirteen minutes into RA.979, amidst a windstorm of pan flutes and rubberized synthesizers and floor toms the size of your living room, a vocalist pipes up: “Do you remember when we were dust? When we were mud? Do you remember when we were stars?” That collision—of grit and deep space, of the here-and-now and far-flung futures—is central to the set, which sees a critical figure in far-out electronics swinging for the fences, putting together a mix that functions less like a standard (“standard”) DJ set and more like a blast of sound collagery: temporal-collapse choral music and busted MIDI synthesizers turning to full-on Katamari balls, black-hole folk music and dishwashers falling down flights of stairs, choirs of screaming saxophones and tidal waves of cymbals and sheer noise. The muchness of it all seems to be the point: this is music that blurs the line between disorientation and escapism, building an entirely new world out of found sounds and formerly familiar idioms. In the interview that accompanies the mix, Pramuk describes electronic music as “a continuum of possibility”—here, she springs down that path and disappears deep into left field.
NAP, a.k.a. Mexico City-based DJ and producer Daniel Rincón, has been a critical name in dance music’s slightly-left-field for years at this point. It’s easy to suss out why: when he’s behind the decks, Rincón is as comfortable with deep-fried cumbia as he is with vertiginous dubstep, as liable to rip a dub-techno brain-bender as he is to pull out a stack of fog-blasted ambient records. His latest long-form mix, ripped live from the Nowadays decks last December, sees him looking towards the higher-energy side of his crates, and the resultant three hours shows a world-class selector in top form, rocketing between lighters-up reggaetón, sassed-out dub-techno, rubberized synthpop, stomp-and-clatter UK garage, firestarting cumbia and innumerable flavors of trance—often all at once. In energy alone, it recalls both last year’s critical dembow-et-cetera session from Honcho Campout and his psyched-out turn behind the liquidtime decks a few months back. pi/live sounds like neither of those sets, of course, but it is animated by the same exploratory spirit—and, with crates as deep as Rincón’s, that’s more than enough.
In a conversation with this site, Bobby Azarbayejani—a critical Seattle DJ who spins as ‘nohup’—summarized their style by pointing towards a friend of theirs, who “described my DJing as sounding like two people B2Bing and playing completely different styles of music.” In the time since that interview, those four hands have only grown more audacious, reaching ever farther into the cosmos in the search for out-there dance-music hysteria. Osmosis in the Trees 2024, a recent dispatch from the Pacific Northwest DJ, is as good an example of any. It’s Donna Summer records flipped inside out; it’s a metric ton of SNES soundtracks stripped for parts; it’s chopped-and-scattered Baltimore club records; it’s rickety house tracks and electro that feels like it’s about to fall apart. At its best, it’s all of these at once. Is Azarbayejani the finest DJ you’ve never heard of? Perhaps, but that’s a bit reductive. Let’s try again: they’re one of our finest working DJs, full stop.
It’s fitting, in a way, that the next session uploaded to Osmosis’s SoundCloud account is from yumi: even if their styles rarely overlap, they are both inventive, playful, and sly, mixing like they’re digging through a Wile E. Coyote—style bag of TNT. If ‘nohup’ reached for a confetti cannon, though, consider yumi’s set something of a nail bomb. The NYC DJ has traded in sludge and muck for years at this point, and this is no different—Osmosis in the Trees 2024 starts out as a survey of zero-grav electronics, all deep-space pings and bleary-eyed ambience. But it’s not long before the silhouettes start to sharpen, and, suddenly, yumi’s off to the races, speeding between vein-popping footwork, billion-ton dancehall, mile-a-minute drum workouts, and just about anything else liable to crack the dancefloor in half. It’s a remarkable set that, on paper, ought to disintegrate—DJ Rashad and OutKast and James K and D-Styles? But yumi keeps things moving to winning effect, sprinting between umpteen brain-benders along the way.
In the interview that accompanies 8˚C, Berlin-based DJ and Refuge Worldwide co-founder Richard Akingbehin says something that, in retrospect, should have been blindingly obvious: “One of my most used words to describe the feeling of a track is ‘underwater.’” In his music, Akingbehin tends towards the more zoned-out ends of the spectrum, with a particular focus on dub and dub-adjacent sounds. 8˚C, blessedly, is no different: here, he offers up a nearly two-hour-long masterclass of the stuff, flitting between zero-gravity dub techno and deep-space dub seven-inches, each drum arriving drenched in reverb and each vocal sounding like it was pulled up from the deep. It’s the sort of set that’s so low-key that you might miss the wizardry at play: there’s not so much as a scuffed blend here, and he flips between histories and traditions with ease, thumbing stacks of vinyl as he jumps across—or, perhaps, into—oceans. 8˚C is the sound of a dub-music maestro at work.
Scratchclart, as usual, is right. “Imagine brandy jus woke up 1 day an sed hey uk producers am cumin 4u and my royalties,” the UK producer wrote in 2021. He’s got a point: Brandy has left an indelible stamp upon contemporary dance music, whether that’s in her own tracks or in her acapellas, which have graced countless bootlegs, remixes, refixes, edits, re-edits, flips—you get the gist. So, to be frank, doing what sddp does here—ninety-odd minutes of Brandy edits—is practically cheating. (Extra credit for their research, though; in the liner notes, they mention that they ended up sifting through roughly 300 tracks for the set.) Here, they dig into the long tail of Brandy’s influence on club music, unearthing a mountain of bootlegs for a truly riotous session. By choosing to center the session around a singular voice, they’re afforded the flexibility to move into all sorts of territories without losing focus—SORRYMIX39 is hop-and-skip UK garage, it’s fleet-footed UK funky, it’s heads-down house, it’s heart-in-throat jungle, it’s sludged-up chopped-and-screwed. At each turn, though, it’s something much simpler: an out-and-out celebration of heartrending and hair-raising bootlegs and an ode to one of the most sneakily influential figures in dance music.
Kenyon Sound, a critical mix series and label operated out of the United States, has a pretty straightforward mission statement, appended on just about everything they post: #makemoregrime. The series takes a deliriously expansive view of the stuff, honoring its roots while projecting its sound into the future and across the globe. Two recent entries are particularly exemplary of this approach.
First, there’s the entry from Manchester DJ Subbeto, which includes two separate “Topper Top” flips, umpteen tooth-cracking basslines, and downright frigid rapping. Throughout the session, Subbeteo pulls off something impressive, taking a kaleidoscope to grime’s sounds without stepping too far outside its boundaries—this is minimal, riotous, and ice-cold at once, with hyper-precise drum programming and sneers to spare. It’s rich to suggest any hour-long set can work as a survey of a genre as rich as grime, but KSM#103 might not be a bad place to start: there’s MIDI-inflected instrumental passages, screaming sample retoolings, billion-ton UK funky drumlines, fire-breathing MCs, and just about everything else you might associate with the style. KSM#103, like so many sets put out by Kenyon Sound, is both hyper-specific and wide-ranging, a maddeningly energetic session that shows the emotive potential of contemporary grime.
DJCESET’s contribution to the series, released the following week, makes KSM#103 look lightweight by comparison: this is the kind of electronic music that might make you run straight through a brick wall. If KSM#103 was about exploring the million facets of grime production, this is about narrowing in one just one—sheer heft—and seeing just how far it goes. Here, DJCESET takes grime idioms and dunks them in a vat of molten lead, cranking up the bass and offering up an hour of skull-crackers. Here, it’s screw-faced raps on top of bass blasts aimed at leveling apartment stacks; elsewhere, it’s quick-and-hefty drum programming running laps underneath Arabic pop numbers and wild-eyed spinbacks; elsewhere still, it’s walls of kicks and serrated-metal synthesizers that feel ripped straight out of a vintage Skrillex track. KSM#104 is both dexterous and maddeningly specific; it is a tangling of grime and umpteen other shades of contemporary electronics, all tilted towards one idea throughout. If you’re looking to snap rebar in half, you could do a lot worse.
In a recently published conversation with this site, Elaine Tierney—one-half of Time Is Away—bottled clouds. Speaking about her own thought process, centuries-old texts, and Time Is Away at once, she offered up as neat a summary as could be expected: “I like circles, not straight lines.” Two recent mixes from the duo—each with an allegedly straight-ahead focus—follow that idea to a tee; they are as elliptical as they are wide-ranging, full of whisper-quiet left turns and half-muttered incantations.
First, there’s West of West. Jack Rollo, the other member of the duo, wrote of the mix: “We had no idea of the date and accidentally made a St. Patrick’s day episode.” That assessment tracks; here, the duo weave observations about ghosts and vacant homes and dust-covered histories into a tapestry of world-weary classical music and broken-down ambience. It’s both unsettling and strangely beautiful, each selection deepening the delirium even as the spoken-word recitations get ever more emotionally precise. Here, the set is a bleary and disorienting collage of field recordings and blissed-out jazz; there, it’s star-spackled folk music; elsewhere still, it’s eighth-world drones and abyssal string sections. The result is a program that would, impressively enough, work equally well at the witching hour or the early morning.
With Lake—the third entry in a trilogy they started last year with Mountain and Garden—they look towards Lac Léman (a.k.a. Lake Geneva), which they lived alongside for several months during a 2024 La Becque residency. This one is, allegedly, even more straightforward than West of West: an ode to a body of water. But, even here, they stretch that idea into all sorts of unforeseen territories. This is a decidedly downtempo affair, populated with flickering drones that move like low tide and drums that echo like so many ripples along the surface, but there’s plenty of sun, too: in one particularly striking segment, Time Is Away reach towards synth tones that feel ripped straight out of Music Has the Right to Children, pairing each sepia-tinged chord with a bit of orchestral-percussion clattering. Elsewhere, it’s just as mellow-and-mysterious, an out-and-out opus of zero-gravity modern-classical idioms, whispered folk musics, and barely-legible songwriting. Again: circles, not straight lines.
In an Art of DJing feature for Resident Advisor, a few years back, Vladimir Ivkovic laid his approach bare: “I think that slower tempos leave people more space to figure out what else is happening that isn’t commanding how they have to behave in a given moment.” Ivkovic has spent his career exploring that idea, slowing down and stretching out into ever odder territories with each new recording. He tends towards selections that sound like they’ve been dunked in a mixture of molasses and stardust, each errant bit of percussion or slammed synthesizer pushing the listener a bit further into the dark. Live at Picnic People Panic is, joyously, no different. It starts out relatively straightforward, with Ivkovic shimmying between wiggly electro, acid, and new-beat stompers, but it’s not long before he’s gumming up the works, slowly dropping the BPM and finding his way into much stranger soundbanks: billion-ton techno shufflers held against soaring string sections, NASA dispatches crashing into searing trip-hop flips, alien lounge music and no-BPM cumbia and crackling coldwave. It’s rare for this kind of kitchen-sink mixing to land as cleanly as it does here, but this is pretty standard for Ivkovic, a truly remarkable DJ who routinely treats the decks like an alchemist’s workstation.
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