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Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In May, plenty of the world’s finest selectors turned in critical sessions. PLO Man, an undersung minimal dance-music don who may just prefer it that way, turned in a masterclass of zero-gravity techno for Resident Advisor, and hardcore mainstay gyrofield offered up a session of lights-out drum-and-bass. The publication had a bit of a banner month, truth be told: Oakland dance-music mastermind bastiengoat sent them a barnburning session of circa-now US club tracks, and German DJ Binh rounded out the quartet with three hours of pumping house and techno recorded live in New York. DJ Fart in the Club’s recent NTS set found her tunneling deep on hands-up trance and techno, while Samson A.K’s latest tape shows a left-field dance-music don going deep on club scorchers.
Brooklyn DJ Amelia Holt turned in a can’t-miss one-two-three punch here, going deep on trip-hop, tech, and hip-hop, with Benedikt Frey joining in for the last one and offering up his own vision of rap. livwutang wrapped heartstrings around the kick drums for her latest exploration of dubstep idioms; elsewhere, Piezo and Simo Cell vaulted between all manner of dancefloor skull-crackers in a riotous back-to-back. CCL, among the strongest DJs in the world several years running, continued their winning streak in a forest-covered closing set, while Djfacmuzica offered up a real head-scratcher of a listening-bar session. (Both releases, in their own way, are built upon dream-logic architectures.) Lastly, Mackenzie & Pessimist blasted through wormhole techno and head-spinning hardcore.
Here are some of the best DJ sets May had to offer.
In the past few years, Amelia Holt has quietly emerged as one of the States’s finest DJs, which is no small feat in such a crowded field. With rural Podcast 016, Soma Festival 2024, and her team-up with Benedikt Frey—another column favorite—she’s added three more gems to her crown.
First up: rural Podcast 016, on which Holt works with a kind of dream logic, weaving her way between sleazed-up trip-hop, featherweight jungle, and psyched-out guitar-pop records. Most remarkable, here, is how quickly (and elegantly) she trips from one idiom to the next: half an hour in, it’s reminiscent of a mid-’90s action-flick, with wrist-snapping breaks underpinning just-so emcee work; just ten minutes later, she’s working with tablas and gravel-encrusted voices and fog-blasted synths; then, it’s just a short jump to a bit of vintage hardcore. The set’s packed with the kind of acrobatics that would make most DJs blush, but, here, the jumps seem entirely beside the point. Instead, it’s about the way Holt wraps heartstrings around each drum break, making for something that’s emotive and strangely melancholic in equal measure.
If the middle chunk of rural Podcast 016 is more your speed, though—if you’re keen to hear Holt looking more squarely at the dancefloor rather than glancing past it—then Soma Festival 2024 may be more up your alley. Here, Holt trades in the breaks for something a bit proggier, leaning on techno that feels a bit like trance—or, perhaps, trance that feels a bit like techno. Either way, the effect is the same: elation found between the drum breaks, a long-form stretch towards the stars fueled by four-fours and shoulder-rolling synth blasts. For all this set’s focus on long-form rollers, there’s plenty of highlights keeping things thrilling from moment to moment, but they’re often in timbre and tone rather than obvious tunes: moments when the drums turn to rubber, or when the synths start to feel like field recordings, or when whirlwinds of snares suddenly turn into what just might be an Amen break. It’s in this contrast—steady rhythms and flow, ever-changing specifics—where Soma Festival 2024 turns quietly psychedelic.
Lastly, it’s worth looking towards a tape, of sorts, that she did alongside Benedikt Frey—if nothing else, to show her range (again). The tape’s liner notes say that each DJ supplies a bit of their “influences from the rap game,” but, let’s be real—that can mean just about anything. In Holt’s case, it’s a full-on dive into ‘90s hip-hop, all dust-covered drums and carefully written rhymes. It’s got too many deep cuts to be a scene survey, exactly, but it’s clear that’s not what she’s interested in — this is about finding a great groove and kicking back. Benedikt Frey’s side, by contrast, is something quite different. The first six minutes are dedicated entirely to a blood-and-nails speech, an impassioned call-to-arms focused on the value of human life, and labor, and love. It’s one heck of a way to set the table, and Frey spends the rest of the set capitalizing on the aesthetic set out from the jump: humanistic, intimate, a bit grimy. In practice, that means just about everything—bleary-eyed trip-hop, ambient music for MIDI choirs and pan flutes, and, of course, plenty of vein-bursting rap cuts. It’s undoubtedly more kitchen-sink than Holt’s side, but that’s part of the fun of it.
The most impressive thing about bastiangoat’s latest mix, a recent entry in Resident Advisor’s podcast series, may be the difference between looking at it on paper and listening to it play out. It’s not like it reads wildly disjointed—techno, breaks, bass, club-ready rap cuts—but it’s still awfully commendable for how well he moves between tracks, threading a million styles of rough-and-ready club fare into something that reads as one. This is, of course, standard fare for the producer-slash-DJ at this point, as is the mood—jubilant, defiantly genre-agnostic, raunchy and rowdy. But it’s a joy all the same: the sound of RA.990 is the sound of no-shit club heaters, whether that’s electro-ballroom, chopped-and-scattered hip-hop and acidic breaks, Baltimore club slowly melting into shoulder-rolling techno, or static-encrusted jungle dissolving into walls of bass. RA.990 sounds a bit like the entire States’s club scene right now (save, perhaps, Colorado and Portland), and that’s half the fun: this is both hyper-focused and all over the place, an hour of bottled lightning thrown onto the decks.
RA.989, released the week earlier, is just as impressive—although for somewhat differing reasons. Here, the Berlin-via-Düsseldorf selector spends three hours doing cartwheels on the Nowadays decks, turning in a session of confetti-cannon techno and sweat-soaked house. Highlights abound: a blast of chunky techno with just-barely-on-the-beat synth noodling just south of the two-hour mark; a rubbernecking dive from bass-heavy minimalism into jittery electro-funk half an hour prior; the opening salvo of rubbery and playful deep-house cuts; a bit of chiptune experimentalism where he won’t stop messing with the tempo; the late-session dive into sort-of synth-pop. (Seriously, just scan around on this thing—the batting average is off the charts.) Binh’s long been revered in certain dance-music circles for his bottomless crates and for his dancefloor alchemy; RA.989 shows precisely why he’s earned that reputation.
The cat’s well and truly out of the bag at this point, but it’s worth saying it straight: CCL is among the finest working DJs on the planet. But: why, exactly? They’ve got miles-deep crates, sure; yeah, they’ve got a deep knowledge of dance music’s histories, and they’ve got a keen ear for hearing what might flip a dancefloor inside out. But, to be frank, none of that is particularly new; this is stuff that’s been the standard in many club-music circles for decades. No, the thing that makes CCL’s sets so reliably killer is a bit tougher to define. Maybe it’s the blends—not the technical skill behind them, mind, but the sheer vim and sense of play needed to pull them off in the first place. Again and again in their best sets, CCL bends nu-school drum workouts into Möbius strips, making something both tripped-out and club-ready; if pressed to triangulate their sound, you might get something at the intersection of trip-hop, dubstep, and heads-down techno.
But: let’s put an end to the consternation. To put it (somewhat) simply, Sustain-Release Year Ten is another victory lap in a long line of them, a real head-spinner of a dancefloor session that’s equal parts rowdy, sensual, and joyous. Here, it’s abyssal dubstep tools paired with vertiginous ambience; there, it’s straight-up ambient-dub smashed into gqommed-up hip-hop; later, it’s second-line two-step dissolving into brain-bending R&B. The miracle of the thing is that none of these moves come off as flexes, or even as strange at all. CCL spends the two hours of Sustain-Release Year Ten stuffing the decks with vapor, taking a dream-logic approach to blends, linking tracks not by BPM or genre but by tone, color, weight, or texture. The result is a set that rewards both body listening and headphone excavation—it’s easy to intellectualize this stuff (guilty as charged), but, at the end of the day, this is music meant to be soaked in sweat. This one’s for the stargazers.
Generally, if you tune into a peak-time club set, you can have a decent idea, or at least a decent few ideas, about what you’re going to expect. Same thing for opening sessions. Listening bars, on the other hand, are more or less the wild west, and that’s the fun. Previous sets covered in this column have included dream-pop trap explorations; high-drama classical records, dancehall-drill, and all manner of who-knows-whats. Put Djfacmuzica’s recent TON show in the latter category. Dream-state orchestral jazz records bleeding into trap a capellas? Go for it. Heavyweight jungle dissolving into curdled Memphis rap? Why not? Robotic meditation self-help CDs? Sermons from the “First International Church of Toyota?” Post-post-post-minimalism and Orange Milk sound collagery? What the hell, sure. Not all of it works, but watching the sparks fly is part of the joy here. TON is about that friction, about creating a kind of dream-state out of a billion obviously disparate parts, about arguing that not everything has to flow obviously, easily, or logically. Eventually, almost despite itself, the set does start to cohere, turning into the soundtrack for a bad dream or a great trip, flitting between all sorts of psychedelia.
When DJ Fart in the Club was last in this column, it was for 12.7˚, a two-hour sprint through all sorts of club-night stylings: techno, garage, dubstep, house—basically, anything anchored by a solid four-four. Live From Nowadays NYC, a recent excerpt ripped live from New York, serves as, more or less, a continuation of that set, but that’s hardly something worth complaining about. Here, the Berlin DJ grabs all manner of shoulder-rollers, pulling up material liable to light up a dancefloor even as she turns it inside out. If there’s an obvious genre focus on Nowadays, it’s tripped-out tech-house, but it’s so much more than that, too: it’s candy-coated UKG and vein-freezing dubstep and turn-of-the-century hardgroove and so, so much more. This is function-first DJing, full of no-nonsense blends and minimal peacocking, but that’s hardly an indictment; instead, consider this first-rate peak-time fuel, mixed to a tee and delivered with a wink.
One of the joys of drum-and-bass is among its simplest: it is both highly particular and wildly expansive; in the genre, breaks and bass form the bones of structure that offers would-be sonic architects countless possibilities. Kiana Li, a.k.a. Hong Kong-born selector gyrofield, catapults the genre down all sorts of blind alleys and through half-built hallways: every other track she puts together offers yet another possibility for the style. RA.987, her entry in Resident Advisor’s flagship mix series, is accordingly wild-eyed; it sees the producer taking idioms and stretching them until they come close to breaking. The anchor, here, is lickety-split dance-music, all fast-and-precise drums and bone-rattling kicks, but, beyond that, it’s rabbit holes all the way down: acid-soaked dub records, breakbeat that feels like it was ripped straight out of the Headhunters sessions, screwed-up footwork, techno that moves in three tempi at once, screaming dubstep tools and so, so much more. It’s a riotous session full of brain-bending blends that, somehow, never feels like a flex—instead, it’s just (“just”) a sprint through wigged-out dancefloor sounds delivered from an obvious lifer of the stuff.
In recent years, livwutang has emerged as one of the States’s finest selectors, one who frequently uses her time behind the decks to explore the cracks between genres and histories but whose tastes leave plenty of room for floor-fillers. naffcast007, the latest broadcast from the New York-via-Seattle DJ, sees her going deep on spaced-out dubstep and head-in-the-clouds techno. Her blends are, as usual, on point—consistently clean and a bit surprising—but the real joy lies in the mood she cultivates here, a tightrope stretched between joy and melancholy. In that way, it recalls the best ‘90s trance records even as she works with wildly different source material: chuggy techno cuts, shuffle-and-skip house tracks, piles (and piles, and piles) of spooked-out dubstep, and an eleventh-hour dream-pop curveball. Regardless of the particular mode she’s working in, though, livwutang is consistently stunning here, jumping between umpteen styles while holding onto the emotive thread that makes the whole thing tick. This one’s for crying inside the bassbins.
On one level, the appeal of CORN01 is pretty simple: how about two and a half hours of stomach-churners? Mackenzie, whose Noods Radio sets are, instructively, frequently tagged as “Chug,” opens things up with a blast of of folk-horror ambient, field recordings, and John Carpenter-style synth workouts before, eventually, finally, finding his way towards the drums: Gothic electro, brainfog breakbeats, barely-there acid, steamrolling drone-techno. At its best, it feels like both a warmup set and a peak-timer at the same time, all bleary-eyed atmospherics of the former and heads-down floor-crushers of the latter. Pessimist grabs the baton with panache, launching headlong into a maelstrom of breakbeats, depth-charge synthesizers, and all manner of hardcore-continuum screamers. Most impressive, here, is how he plays with tempo, jumping between all sorts of BPMs without letting the energy levels flag one bit. On CORN01, two critical names on the Bristol dance-music circuit conjure up a pair of wormholes, imagining club music as a vertiginous and delirious thing.
Back-to-back sets, from the premise on down, are all about alchemy: about what happens when two hands turn to four and selectors’ tastes crash into each other. Sometimes, it’s a matter of going deep rather than wide, about tunneling ever deeper into a highly particular sound; other times, it’s all about rubbernecking, white-hot U-turns, and endless rug-pulls. (There’s plenty in between those poles, too, of course.) At their most rambunctious, Piezo and Simo Cell can already sound like they’re going head-to-head with themselves, so it should only follow that a team-up between the two is even wilder. Lost Music Festival 2024 is a two-hour sprint that feels half that, a survey of million-limbed club musics split equally between dancefloor utilitarianism and why-not cliff-dives: sweat-soaked juke and gritted-teeth drill records, east-coast club belters and lickety-split techno, sort-of-tongue-in-cheek soul tunes and straight-up chiptune cuts, and plenty more besides that. It’s a minor miracle it all holds together, but it tracks—both figures are technically superb DJs who blend with a devilish grin.
Minimal dance music is a funny thing. Spend enough time on Beatport and you’re bound to run across all manner of poorly conceived iterations of the stuff: kick drums laid out with surgical precision that feel appropriately sterile; just-so synth loops that stretch for the stars but land a bit further towards the earth; tracks that turn three minutes into twenty rather than the other way around. But there’s real beauty in it, too, even if it’s tough to articulate what, precisely, separates the wheat from the chaff. PLO Man — a critical minimal-et-cetera DJ whose online presence is about as hushed as you’d expect — seems to understand this. His entry in Resident Advisor’s podcast series shows him both leaning into minimal dance-music idioms and complicating them a bit, tangling up lean and funky drum-machine workouts while leaving plenty of space for left turns.
The real star of the show, here, is PLO Man’s quiet mastery of flow. Nothing on RA.988 is going to blow your head off by itself, but there’s all sorts of moments that just might anyways: the mid-session drop into Moodymann’s “Freeki Mutha F cker,” to grab one of a million head-spinners, proposes a vision for techno that’s sexy and voyeuristic and a bit creeped-out, all chain-smoked vocals and eyes on the street and funked-up basslines; then, PLO Man slides into a track he co-produced, muffling the bassline and turning the drums to rubber. Either track is already a bit delirious by itself; here, they land like out-and-out smoke bombs. RA.988 is full of bits like this: selections whose hazy edges and careful drum programming fit together perfectly. To be blunt, it’s a masterclass in minimal.
Call it a hat trick. London producer & selector Samson A.K has put out three tapes at this point, and they’re all gas. First, there was a session of wigged-out dancehall for MAL Recordings; then, a set of blast-freezer ambience for Berceuse Heroique; now, this. Ideal State finds Samson sitting between those two poles, cooking up something that’s suited equally for smoke machines and strobe lights. It’s hardly a surprise that these are all original productions; while the tape flits between myriad styles, they’re all bound together by a shared interest in pitch-black dance-music idioms. The first half of the tape is properly acrobatic stuff, shuttling between billion-ton gqom, acidic grime retoolings, drum tracks that might as well be beamed in from ‘90s Birmingham, and all sorts of heavyweight club numbers. The back half is heftier still: ramshackle busted-amp kind-of-techno slamming into reverb-soaked house cuts, death-ambient dub dissolving into piles of steamrolling kicks, minimalistic sort-of-east-coast experimentalism. On Ideal State, a veritable dance-music don dims the lights and stuffs the amps with barbed wire.
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