Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In November, plenty of DJs offered up material for the head-trippers and all-nighters alike. Seattle mainstay Sharlese explored all manners of pop-music wrecking balls, and Peter Van Hoesen & Wata Igarashi went long on deep-space techno. Amelia Holt and Yumi, two critical names mixing out of NYC, coated their amps in moss and mud for a can’t-miss two hours, and Illsee went murkier still, looking towards the sounds of breaks and rock-and-roll on NTS. Joker and Kiernan Laveaux turned in two head-turning RA mixes, albeit in very different ways—the first using purple sound and dubstep as springboards to dancefloor deliria, the other working as something of a cosmic collage. DDWY explored rickety and tongue-in-cheek dollar-bin cuts for Bar Part Time, and upsammy grabbed armfuls of fast-and-precise hardcore and techno records.
Elsewhere, Michael Tanner, in the latest edition of his Cantus Orbis project, dug into ten centuries of medieval drone and folk music, and Jonny From Space teamed up with Jacob Park for a session of creeped-out ambience. DJ DEADNAME dug into the everything-goes sounds of modern dance music for a recently unearthed live set, and CCL attempted to bottle mist for a radio session. Bell Towers and DJ Antepop both went long at listening bars, exploring the more laid-back corners of their crates in the process; elsewhere, rominimal don Petre Inspirescu grabbed a truckload of folk records for a session at Romania’s BAR TON. Physical Therapy, a chameleonic DJ if there ever was one, returned to his Car Culture Remissions series for another round of tearjerkers, and Marius Bø charted a path stretching between new-age ambience, low-slung minimal techno, and the stars above.
Here are some of the best DJ sets November had to offer.
Sometimes, it’s worth coating the dance floor in a bit of sludge. Amelia Holt & Yumi have been slinging zonked-out club tracks for years, whether that’s wiggly dub, who-knows breaks, inside-out techno, or scraggly ambience—anything liable to tip a dancefloor on its side. Last October, in a set from probably-New-York, they went deeper still, turning in two hours of material aimed straight at the head-trippers. It’s cheeky and disorienting in equal measure, shuttling between bleary-eyed drone records and tracky electro, no-BPM techno and syrupy snare-drum workouts, electrifying acid and hi-NRG for the finger-gunners in the crowd. Throughout, they bottle a highly particular mood, even if it’s tough to name: dexterous disorientation? Lo-NRG? This is the sound of two critical NYC DJs going deep down a rabbit hole of their own creation.
A few weeks later, on the other end of the globe, Shanghai DJ Illsee offered up a nice counterpoint, turning the BPMs down even further on the NTS airwaves. This is an hour of electronic music and sort-of-rock-and-roll suited for trudging through waist-deep mud: slow-and-low basslines cutting through staticky walls of sound, billion-limbed percussion tracks played through walkie talkies, bone-chilling coldwave held up against equally icy breakbeats. Throughout, Illsee commits to out-and-out headspinners, alternating between skin-crawlers, mud-encased synth tracks, and bleary-eyed electronics. The effect is not unlike walking past a selection of trick mirrors: Invites is an hour of carefully crafted disorientation.
There’s a real joy to be found in a well-paced listening-bar set: sometimes, you just need a few hours of music more suited for home listening than a dancefloor. On SWAYMIX 011, Berlin-via-Australia DJ Roman Wafers, a.k.a. Bell Towers, offers up a pristine example of the stuff. This one runs a hefty, but by no means insurmountable, five hours; throughout, Wafers mixes patiently and gracefully, bobbing and weaving between laid-back jazz fusion, head-spinning piano études, low-slung rock-and-roll, hair-raising guitar soli, lighter-than-air funk tracks, old-school boom-bap, bargain-bin bossa nova—basically, anything liable to make you sink a few inches deeper into your chair and order another glass of wine. There’s a heck of a range here, even for the length, but Wafers holds it all together thanks to his stylistic focus: this is a long-form session of tracks to kick back to. By the time it’s done, it sounds like it could have gone for another ten.
If you want something a bit—just a bit!—more angled towards the dancefloor, though, look no further than DJ Antepop’s offering. Over in Peckham, the London DJ cast the bar into a deep haze, starting things off with no-mo ambience before, ever so slowly, turning it into a heads-down dancefloor. There’s all manner of gems along the way, though: bleary-eyed piano-house and chunky techno cuts, lighter-than-air R&B and a shot of dream-pop-slash-dubstep, pop records that sound beamed in from the late ‘60s and circa-’16 lo-fi house, saxophones stuffed with smog. This set, eventually, reveals itself to be about drums doubling as heartbeats; it is intimate, danceable, and heartrending at once.
In his mixes, Michael Tanner doesn’t so much recontextualize timelines as dissolve them entirely, taking music from bygone centuries and mining it for its most brain-bending beauties. As Cantus Orbis, he’s specifically focused on music from the 5th-15th centuries—a project he’s been at for the past ten years, but what’s a decade in the face of 60 generations? Untitled, originally released as a tape in All Night Flight’s critical cassette series and (for now) available digitally, is a remarkable document of this project: slow-motion drone and bleary-eyed liturgical and folk music, every note stretching towards the cosmos or deep into the earth. The sound of Untitled is the sound of unbridled awe, of minimalistic compositions rendered in such detail that they take on a scale all their own; it is choirs singing through stained glass; it is organs resonating long after the churches that housed them have been torn down. Untitled is, in short, remarkable: it is a document of long-gone psychedelia and a selection of ancient joys and deliria that resonate even today.
CCL has spent the past few years filling their rain barrel. With liquidtime, the every-now-and-again radio show they host with Refuge Worldwide, the DJ has given themselves a handy format, picking tracks that evoke a highly specific mood or substance: what does frost sound like? What about silica dew? Their latest offering in the series—“Mist”—is, fittingly, awfully tough to pin down. By and large, they use dub techno as a jumping-off point here, grabbing waterlogged synthesizers and bass hits that land somewhere deep in the stomach; it’s slow and hefty but still, somehow, lighter than air, with plenty of space in between each beat. In practice, calling this a “dub techno” set feels awfully similar to calling January’s A Night in the Skull Discotheque “dubstep”: it’s not wrong, but it’s hardly the whole picture. This is less a straight-up homage than it is a reconstitution. Here, it’s spooked-out spoken-word dub tracks; there, it’s hardcore drum-break collagery laid atop blissed-out ambience; elsewhere still, it’s fourth-world R&B or rock-and-roll. No matter the specifics, though, each track reaches back towards the same hushed intimacy, each drum sounding like it’s playing from the other side of a concrete wall—or, perhaps, through a preternatural mist.
It’s tough to nail down the exact sound of Bar Part Time’s mix series, but you could do a lot worse than B.P.T. Radio 093. Here, London duo DDWY go all in on wacky and tracky tunes, selecting stuff that could have come out in 1994 or 2024. The mix is delightfully anachronistic, packed with hard lefts into all sorts of quietly outré territories: lo-bit R&B and crunchy electro-disco, text-to-speech serenades and bass-blasted acid techno, spy-flick funk and shoulder-rolling house—and is that “Once in a Lifetime?” It’s tough to guess where B.P.T. Radio 093 will cut or dive or swoop to next, but that’s half the fun; the other half, of course, is the sheer joie de vivre of these selections, which all crackle with an unmissable energy. (The piles of dust don’t hurt, either.) The whole time, DDWY mix cleanly and creatively, sounding like they’ve got million-dollar grins on throughout.
Ask a room full of ravers what modern club music sounds like and you’ll likely get twice as many answers—that’s half the fun of it, after all. On Live at Tossd 003—ripped from the decks at a stacked party in September—NYC-via-NC’s DJ DEADNAME offers up a riotous and wide-ranging vision of the stuff, looking towards a million stripes of polyrhythmic drum music. Taken one way, it’s a who’s-who of contemporary left-field dance music—Simo Cell, Djrum, Identified Patient, Cassius Select—but, at the end of the day, it’s about the sheer vim of it all, the 808s and Amens and TB-303s all melting into one ever-changing mass of energy: livewire techno and white-hot breaks and nerve-wracking trap and so many other idioms crashed into each other until drawing distinctions seems entirely beside the point. With Live at Tossd 003, DJ DEADNAME presents so many visions of contemporary dance music that the sheer range seems to be the point, pulling off rug-pull blends with ease and blasting the dancefloor with confetti along the way.
Credit where credit’s due. Thirty seconds into RA.962, the latest set from Joker, an outright legend in dubstep circles, the mix blows open: a mixture of fidgety hi-hats, a lo-bit top-end, and a low-end that could level an apartment stack. In case you were under any illusions about what kind of set you were in for, this should toss those aside in just a few bars; if you squint, it sounds like an out-and-out fanfare. The rest of RA.962 is just as riotous; here, Joker offers a wildly wide-ranging vision of dubstep, using the genre as a springboard towards all sorts of manic territories: tooth-busting grime cuts, bass tones liable to set the amps alight, bone-crunching baile funk, a wait-what retooling of “Caravan,” a few breaks that sound like a direct flight to Portland—you get the gist. This is the sound of a titan of contemporary dubstep going wide, deep, and, critically, heavy.
The following week, Kiernan Laveaux teed up her RA podcast with her own kind of opening statement: a bit of narration played on vinyl, chopped and scattered a million times over: “It’s not so impossible, actually.” If Laveaux’s work has a skeleton key, it might just be that—her finest mixes are fueled by this idea. What would a dancefloor look like if it could be anything? What would it sound like? What communities, histories, and traditions might emerge?
If Laveaux were behind the decks, it might be a bit like RA.963, a rapturous vision of dance music as a million things at once, a mountain of yes-ands and dollar-bin vinyl, a celebration of club music’s umpteen possibilities all these years after it all started, whenever that was. RA.963 is aquatic jazz fusion and storming techno tools; it’s the B-52’s tossed into a warehouse; it’s haunted-house R&B and drum-kit soli played from the bottom of a well; it’s livewire Detroit electronics and zonked-out psychedelia; it’s punk as hell and deeply joyous. On paper, it’s a minor miracle that any of it works, but, in practice, Laveaux’s unwavering focus on sheer jubilee holds everything together, her tendency towards eye-catching blends only underlining the wild-eyed energy on display in her selections. Kiernan Laveaux is one of the States’s finest DJs; on RA.963, she proves her chops yet again by going into increasingly delirious directions. “It’s not so impossible,” indeed.
Jonny From Space, a.k.a. Jonathan Trujillo, is one of Miami’s finest purveyors of deeply felt electronics, and Jacob Park is a critical name in Detroit’s club-music scene; if they were to meet up, you could expect just about anything. But the title gives away the game here. aftherzaftherzaftherz is stuff tilted for the drive home from the drive home, or the party after the party after the party: for when you can’t handle another four-four kick. Here, Trujillo and Park go deep on stomach-churning ambience and the widest possible definition of “folk music,” conjuring a black hole and filling it with gurgling synthesizers, slowly strummed acoustic guitars, and bleary-eyed drum programming. It’s a truly delirious session bound less by genre than by sheer psychedelia; here, there’s no meaningful difference between tumbleweed-covered vistas and exploding suns, and why not slot creeped-out spoken word next to ambient techno or minutes-long hardware experimentation? aftherzaftherzaftherz may seem like it’s built for chilling out, but this is really a session for glassy stares and dissociation. As they move from track to track, Trujillo and Park slowly turn their back-to-back into a skin-crawler for the ages.
If you need a bit of a break after that, though, why not book a flight from Detroit to Norway? Marius Bø, a critical trance-et-cetera DJ and a co-founder of Ute, went long at this year’s Monument Festival, using his USBs to summon a wormhole of downtempo, ambient, and minimal-techno idioms. The set’s sort-of-lengthy runtime—it goes a few seconds past three hours—works to its benefit; here, Bø stretches out, working with nu-age ambient music for quite a while before anything approaching percussion enters the frame. From there, though, it’s lights out: Bø spends the bulk of Monument Festival 2024 exploring deep-space dance music, the kind of stuff suited for both the front-row ravers and the headphone purists, stuff with miles-deep grooves and just enough psychedelia (which is so say: quite a bit). Here, synthesizers sound like drops of rain, hailstorms, stones tumbling down a hill—it’s lush and serene, playful and wigged-out, playful and aimed right at Eden.
One of the greatest joys of techno is also one of its purest: if you spend enough time listening to four-four kicks, the genre promises, you’ll slip between the bassbins and tumble into infinity. Here, Peter Van Hoesen and Wata Igarashi go deep on that idea, offering up nearly six hours of hypnotic, elliptical, and starry-eyed techno, pushing each other into ever more psychedelic corners without losing sight of the dancefloor. (The venue in question, Ho Chi Mihn City’s The Observatory, couldn’t be a more fitting spot for the recording of such a space-borne set.) The approach here, fundamentally, doesn’t change all that much—the bulk of Live at The Observatory is made up of heads-down four-fours and some kind of mid-range chug on top—but Hoesen and Igarashi make gold out of the slightest shifts in form, using a bit of industrial-din synth noise here, a clattering tom-drum there, or a dial-up high-end elsewhere still to suggest a wildly exploratory vision of techno. Here, two modern masterminds of contemporary techno take top-notch dancefloor material and catapult it into the stars.
Here’s a funny twist of fate. Last time Petre Inspirescu—a critical name in stripped-back tech-house, minimal techno, and all manner of austere electronics—was in this column, it was for his set at Romania’s BAR TON: two and a half hours of liturgical organ soli, gothic choral music, and Old-Testament drama. Caricias de Amor sees Inspirescu working the same decks as he did then; fittingly, it’s another left turn. If not minimal techno, and if not ancient religious music, why not flamenco? Caricias de Amor—Songs of Love—is a remarkable thing: a deep dive into a world of whirlwinding guitars and torrential handclaps, something that is intimate, playful, and joyous at once. Inspirescu covers a lot of ground here; he mixes loosely, letting songs play out and trusting his selections to carry the hour (or, in this case, hour forty-five). It works: here, he suggests infinities with little more than a handful of guitars, wrapping nylon and heartstrings alike around the CDJs.
One of the joys of Daniel Fisher’s work as Physical Therapy is its million facets: whether you know him for sludging up UK garage, rocketing between who-knows dancefloor idioms, or modeling trucker caps, there’s almost certainly another side to him that you’ve not yet heard. With his Car Culture Remissions series, Fisher reaches into his crates and pulls out a fistful of heartache. This is a project dedicated to deeply felt emotions and tough-to-pin pains; it is about love, but, more critically, vulnerability, and the inevitable intimacies that result from opening yourself to someone else. In this sense, Car Culture Remissions Vol. 5 is more of the same, but it’s such a specific approach that it’s tough to complain too much: tear-jerking pop-music acapellas suspended over zero-gravity ambience; spoken word ripped from answering machines; recognizable tunes from decades gone by covered or flipped inside out; and a seemingly bottomless well of melancholy. This one’s for the rainy mornings.
The appeal of Wetcast 03 is, ultimately, pretty simple: big beats, bigger riffs, and even bigger moods. Here, a critical Seattle mainstay goes deep on umpteen permutations of dancefloor-wrecking pop music, weaving her way between ice-cold synthpop records, glitter-bomb freestyle, jittery synth workouts, joyful-noise electro-disco, and so much more, keeping one ear trained squarely on the dancefloor the whole time. (It’s telling that the recording includes crowd noise—the kind of thing that, when done right, helps underline the sheer joy of a recording.) Sharlese blends cannily here, leaning on metronomic low-end thumps as a clean way in and out of most anything, making the ninety minutes fly by without a hitch, but she’s smart enough to know when to stay out of the way, too: she never lets a slick blend take priority over a solid riff. Pop music and DJing have both long promised utopias, using vinyl records and bulletproof bridges as stepping stones to something entirely new, or at least wildly playful; here, Sharlese is kind enough to offer a path towards that idea, cooking up a session of unquenchable joy.
In a club-music environment dominated by hard-and-fast sounds, Thessa Torsing’s work frequently lands like nothing less than a miracle. As upsammy, Torsing tosses IDM and ambient music deep into the uncanny valley, making music that is at once emotionally unsettled and a bit serene. As a DJ, though, she does more or less precisely the opposite: she finds her way back out, grabbing her pitons and filling the CDJs with vertiginous dance music, taking light-speed drum workouts and cranking them up faster and faster and faster until there’s nothing to do but pull the plug. It’s one hell of a trick, and she’s only getting better. In a recent set from Puglia’s Polifonic Festival, Torsing goes for nearly two hours, whipping up a maelstrom of bone-chilling synth cuts, no-shit hardcore, screaming acid techno, and so much more, moving quickly and with unerring precision. Think of this as IDM retooled for warehouse raves, or, maybe, jungle tossed into a wormhole; exacting, eerie, and riotous in equal measure.
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