Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
To be blunt, October was stacked, so let’s get into it. Honey Dijon, an undersung house-music historian, offered up a killer set of vintage rollers for DJ-Kicks, and Carlos Souffront dug into old-school electro for There Is No Planet Earth. Atrice, Zürich’s resident everything-goes selectors, dug into a million styles of new-school dubstep, techno, and IDM, and Tokyo’s KWARP went wilder still: drum-and-bass, grime, two-step, and corrugated noise. Kiernan Laveaux, one of the East Coast’s finest DJs, cooked up two zonked-out dancefloor sessions, grabbing everything from head-busting techno to fourth-world ambience in the process; elsewhere, Bambi & Beatrice M. turned in a set that traced the long tail of dub into deep space. Nídia dug into contemporary batida and kuduro in a killer set for Resident Advisor; in the weeks that followed, Slipmatt explored 35 years of rough-and-rowdy hardcore, DITA spilled sunshine onto the decks, and Funk Assault turned in a gobsmacking ten hours of techno.
In New York, Doula turned in a truly everything-goes mix of dancefloor fuel for the inimitable Sorry Records; over in New Jersey, LOIF rocketed between all manner of new-school techno, IDM, and dubstep tools. DJ K offered a primer on beat bruxaria for Boiler Room, and Mike Servito & Jeffrey Sfire went long on countless permutations of house, disco, and techno. Cal-C’s entry in Bar Part Time’s mix series is a survey of dropped-top dance music; Myles Mac & DJ Possum once again zeroed in on Ibizan house and downtempo; and upsammy turned her gaze towards lickety-split IDM, techno, and trance at a festival in Portugal. Objekt turned in a characteristically wild-eyed session at WHOLE, going deep on stuff suited for neither headphones nor the club (or perhaps both); for their NTS residency, Self and Other assembled a meditation upon historiography, memory, and histories.
Here are some of the best DJ sets October had to offer.
Especially nowadays, as BPMs at club nights continue to creep upwards, it’s not uncommon to hear DJs playing fast and loose with styles and sounds, blending a hundred tracks at a million miles an hour. It’s a risky approach, to be sure—try enough things in a short enough time and it might come out as a bit of a mush—but, when kitchen-sink DJing hits, there’s little else like it. Here, we’ve got two different sets built around that livewire energy: the first, a two-hour melter from Atrice, a critical Zürich duo who sit at the intersection of nu-school hardcore, bass-blasted dubstep, and IDM; the second, a high-velocity brain-bender from Kyoto-born electronic-music experimentalist KWARP.
Atrice have been making noise in Zürich’s left-field dance-music scene for roughly half a decade now, and with good reason: their sound, like so much great new-school dance music, pulls from umpteen histories without being too reverential to them, turning all sorts of familiar idioms inside out in the hunt for a great groove. Groove Podcast 434 shows the duo at perhaps their wildest yet. At just under two hours and just over fifty tracks, it’s a hefty session (at least in a studio-mix context), but the time absolutely zips by thanks to the duo’s unerring focus on rapid-fire hardcore; this thing is a maelstrom of amp-cracking drums and skull-busting synthesizers. From a birds’-eye view, the set works as a matryoshka doll of high-energy dance-music rhythms, with two or four or seven grooves to focus on at any given time, each blend landing like a minor miracle thanks to their sheer rhythmic complexity; when you zoom in, though, the set hits like a high-velocity wind tunnel, with any individual moments blowing past fast enough that all you can do is marvel at the sheer force of the thing.
If Atrice’s offering is all about high-speed hardcore collagery, zeroing in on a sound rather than a mood, KWARP’s Hypnotic Groove entry is something like its high-strung cousin. Throughout the set, KWARP rockets between countless aesthetics, speeds, and moods at once, vaulting so many times that the blending itself becomes the glue; here, it seems, the sheer unpredictability of what might land next is the point. In just an hour, Hypnotic Groove Mix #465 offers a kaleidoscope of moods and ideas: duets for kick drums and scraggly noise, hyper-precise drum-and-bass, lickety-split two-step, screw-face dubstep, gut-busting grime retools, lights-out trap—you get the gist. The mix threatens to bust out its own seams with each blend; that tension between total collapse and head-spinning blends, rather than any particular moment, is the main joy.
In the liner notes for subglow/Live 2, Beatrice M. puts it simply. “For this one, the key word is: dub.” No kidding. For this session—a real black-hole of a thing, a slo-mo pile-up of bottomless beats and a million tons of reverb—Bambi and Beatrice M. invert the structure, and mood, of a typical festival set, moving from relatively uptempo fare to far sludgier material, dropping the tempo by nearly a third in the process. They soundtrack this gradual descent with a focus on dubby and disorienting dance music: reverb-soaked techno, deep-space low-end heaters, barely-there two-step. It’s one hell of a trick, and it makes for a set with a potent gravitational pull; in its best moments, it seems to work in two tempi at once, landing solidly both for the at-home headphone crew and the dancefloor it was originally broadcast to. Perhaps most impressively, this is a back-to-back: a space where you might expect some friction between two DJs who, most of the time, work in pretty different modes. But subglow/Live 2, commendably, feels like Bambi & Beatrice M. pull off a real mind-meld, tapping into something slinky, out-there, and just a bit alien.
Talk about an unreliable narrator! For B.P.T. Radio 092, Cal-C returns to Bar Part Time’s decks and proceeds to drop four-plus hours of wigged-out dancefloor bombs and rickety rollers, saying the whole time that the mix is a mess. That self-effacing quality proves something of a throughline; combine that with the occasional Modern Art DJ drop and a million different styles of joyful-noise dance music and you’ve got a recipe for low-stakes and high-voltage grins. Never mind what Cal-C insinuates, though. B.P.T. Radio 092 is a tour de force of low-key shufflers presented with a wink, full of imaginative blends, casual psychedelia, and miles-deep grooves: lighters-up bhangra and zero-bit electro, sleazed-out yacht rock and dropped-top hip-hop, sun-soaked house records and twitchy electro-disco. Throughout the session, Cal-C is continuously surprising and playful, zigging where a more straight-ahead DJ might zag, sprinting between styles even as they make it sound as natural as a trip to the record store.
Carlos Souffront is a real DJ’s DJ; he’s got a hefty C.V. behind the decks and an equally impressive knowledge of dance music’s million histories; when he’s in session, you’re as likely to get a killer hour of anything-goes tracks as a miles-deep exploration of one niche. In his set for the perennially great and wonderfully retro There Is No Planet Earth, Souffront leans into the latter mode. There Is No Elektro Music Department is exactly what the tin implies: it’s an hour of guns-blazing electro tracks, all hyper-minimal drums drenched in acid and no-bit synthesizers locked in an unending race. At points, it’s practically Villalobosian, with just a few drums banging on and sounding like they could loop forever; elsewhere, it’s downright rapturous, a barrage of sci-fi keyboards, each key landing like a fist-sized chunk of hail. Mixing stuff this minimal is a real tightrope act: if a blend lands off by an eighth note, it’s liable to tank the whole thing. But Souffront, of course, is too patient and careful to let that happen, bobbing and weaving between histories without so much as a missed moment. Elektro Music is a celebration of a highly particular strain of dance music: rickety, jubilant, and liable to fall apart at any second.
There’s a telling line in Delano Smith’s “The Message for the DJ.” Atop a little more than a shuffling drum kit and a zero-bit synth line, guest vocalist Diamond Dancer suggests infinities: “I’m a house head forever, at least until I die.” DITA pulls that track up early in RA.959, and that line’s ideas—devotion to groove, a full-bodied commitment to enjoying the here-and-now without discarding the future—ring true throughout the set. Here, DITA sets her sights squarely on the dancefloor, alternating between oddball club cuts and glitter bombs, zigging and zagging between rollicking hand-drum workouts, miles-deep house records, chunky kick-drum tools and balmy synthesizers. It’s dreamy and physical in equal measure, a moment-to-moment actualization of the restorative power of house music. (It’s by no means all house tracks, but never mind the details.) Even as DITA slips between idioms and histories here, she holds everything together thanks to a canny ear for a smooth blend and an unerring focus on club-night euphoria.
In the liner notes for SORRYMIX37, Doula makes the understatement of the year: “I love a bit of drama in my sets.” You could guess as much from just about any spot on the recording, which was ripped from the decks at New York’s Bossa Nova Civic Club in early September: maybe it’s the blast of high-octane techno that gallops into the mix after a bit of gut-wrenching screams; maybe it’s the light-speed juke-slash-electro-slash-sort-of-drone that lands an hour in; maybe it’s the spot where Doula moves from screwface jungle to slow-and-low jazz-funk. SORRYMIX37 is one of those wildly impressive sets where sheer energy is more than enough: here, Doula taps into something different, flipping between styles like a deck of Tarot cards, somehow turning everything into hardcore dance music, regardless of its original context. Jump from moment to moment in the set and you’ll encounter any number of idioms, but Doula’s focus on everything-goes grooves and quick-and-precise rhythms is more than enough to bind everything together.
The very premise of RA.960—the longest-ever edition of Resident Advisor’s long-running mix series—is a thrown gauntlet: Ten hours of techno. Are you in or out?
The key, here, lies in the name. Funk Assault, a.k.a. Alarico and Chlär, have built their reputation on extended sets packed with muscular and playful techno; their vision of the stuff is dynamic and rowdy, with frequent textural and sonic change-ups keeping things moving even as four-four kicks promise infinities underneath. It is, in other words, a barrage of shoulder-rollers and head-spinners that never leaves the dancefloor. With RA.960—ripped from the decks at an all-nighter earlier this year—the duo make good on this kaleidoscopic vision, making for a session that won’t stop shedding its skin. The throughlines, here, are as simple as they are potent: an unerring focus on forward momentum, an unending barrage of kick drums, and plenty of million-limbed percussion lines on top. Scan from moment to moment and you’ll catch just about anything that could fall under that umbrella, whether that’s rough-and-raunchy ghetto house, million-ton “Ha Dance” flips, no-shit ballroom, almost-bassline, disorienting minimal, old-school hardgroove, or lighters-up hardcore. But none of those tracks are the point: RA.960 is about the sheer power that comes with a carefully curated and unrelenting groove.
Back in 2017, house-music superstar and all-around multi-hyphenate Honey Dijon defined house music simply: “Just finding a great loop.” Seven years and approximately seven hundred dance-music generations later, Dijon landed a spot on the lauded DJ-Kicks mix series; and, lo and behold, it’s full of great loops. The bulk of the set posits house music as a space for unadulterated and sepia-tinged joy, with plenty of tracks that sound pulled straight out of the genre’s mid-’90s heyday: acid-disco chuggers, funky rhythm sections and chunky piano slammers, just-so horn stabs and sweat-soaked tom drums. It’s a breezy and jubilant affair; with the (wonderful) exception of Johnny Dangerous’s spooked-out low-end stomper “Dear Father in Heaven (Mr. Marvin’s House of Dreams Mix,” DJ-Kicks is a collection of odes to a packed dancefloor, with a revolving door of vocalists and MPC wizards keeping things hot throughout. It takes the utopianism of house music seriously, expanding the genre’s tent until it’s tough to imagine needing anything else. It helps that it just kicks, too; this is wheels-up house music mixed with undeniable grace, every blend landing with a wink.
At this point, Kiernan Laveaux is becoming something of a column favorite, but it’s for good reason: right now, nobody does psychedelia quite like her. Both Encapsulated Joy 004 and Making Time 2024 were ripped from dancefloor sessions, so it should come as little surprise that these sets feature plenty of chest-pounding beats, but these sets are less about four-fours than they are about black holes: about realizing those worn-out ideas of dancefloor-as-utopia, where a million futures and histories double back in on themselves to form something that feels radically new. On Encapsulated Joy 004, Laveaux cooks up a slow-and-low set of dancefloor chuggers, slipping between alien techno, reverb-drenched nu-jazz, nervy rock-and-roll, and a mountain of kick drums. It’s as delirious as it is direct, somehow both riotous and queasy. Making Time ∞ 2024, by comparison, makes an already exploratory set look downright staid: here, she moves from zero-gravity ambience and dubbed-out head-spinners to amp-busting techno and blissed-out deep house, making an implicit argument that all of it can work as dance music along the way. In either case, the appeal of all these left-field sounds is surprisingly simple: this is Kiernan Laveaux taking a crowd to outer space yet again, using deep and zonked-out sounds to drop ravers into another dimension.
Declan Vadasz has been on a bit of a tear for the past few years. The Melbourne-based DJ-producer, who makes music as LOIF, walks a tightrope between head-trip euphoria and out-and-out dancefloor barnburners; his music is playful, wiggly, and disorienting at once, haunted by the ghosts of techno, dubstep, and trance but never quite beholden to any of them. Dripping 2024 sees the DJ in full-on club-music mode, going deep and audacious in equal measure. This is, in other words, three hours of peak-time burners from someone whose approach is never quite so straightforward. So: the sound of Dripping 2024 is static-encrusted dub-two-step; it’s chest-rattling techno that seems to move in three tempi at once; it’s dub rollers that won’t stop pitch-shifting; it’s light-speed and acid-drenched drum-and-bass. Throughout the session, LOIF tunnels into all sorts of corners of contemporary dance music before pulling the rug out again and again, taking familiar idioms and turning them just a bit askew. Dripping 2024 is something miraculous: a session filled with Dutch angles and finger-guns in equal measure.
At this point, if you spy a new set from Myles Mac & DJ Possum, you ought to know what you’ve signed up for. With MDC.300 included, the pair have linked up for at least five long-form mixes; if you queued these up back-to-back, you’ve got a soundtrack that could run from dawn to dusk, a million blissed-out beats landing like so many beams of sunlight. The trust of their mixes, so far, has been simple and effective: stutter-stepping and sun-kissed grooves that recall psychedelic downtempo, old-school house, and rollicking hip-hop; it’s carefree stuff mixed with obvious grace, a seemingly bottomless crate stuffed with sand and salt. It’s said with the utmost love, then: MDC.300 is more of the same. Here, Melbourne’s dance-music dream team go back to the well, cooking up two and a half hours of low-key rollers. Here, it’s chunky house cuts, with diva vocals floating atop stomping kicks; there, it’s zero-gravity almost-garage buoyed by pillowy synthesizers; elsewhere still, it’s acidic and acrobatic techno tracks. With MDC.300, two of dance music’s reigning archivists go deep yet again, cracking open a time capsule and finding a mountain of confetti.
That said, if you want something a bit heavier and just as joyous, you could do a lot worse than booking a ticket to New York. The Bunker Podcast 233 is a lot of things: it’s a five-hour back-to-back from two of the States’ finest; it’s an ode to the unabashed power of funked-up house music; and, put simply, it’s a riot. Here, Mike Servito & Jeffrey Sfire go deep, wide, and playful, piling four-fours and anthemic vocal runs atop the CDJs until they’ve erected a monument from the decks. If you scan around the set, you’ll find a throughline pretty quickly: it’s a mountain of house and techno records; it’s often physical, sometimes ecstatic, and sometimes raunchy. But there’s a million shades within that, of course, and they make good on that idea, diving into all sorts of bargain bins along the way. The Bunker Podcast 233 is rickety and old-school house cuts, sure, but it’s also hardgroove techno with a million-dollar grin, and acid-soaked electro, and souled-out disco, and chopped-and-scattered vocal cuts, and bass-blasted drum workouts. It’s a heck of a lot of fun, in other words: a universe built out of vintage dancefloor thumpers, their sheer joy and momentum making every beat land with heart-pumping immediacy.
It’s worth saying it straight. For exploratory ravers with their ear to the ground, Principe can’t be beat. Since its foundation in 2011, the Lisbon label has turned into a critical space for the local dance-music scene, with a sound that’s minimal and dexterous in equal measure: hand-drums and MIDI synthesizers circling each other in a tightly sound spiral, the rhythms of one element coaxing new forms out of the other. Nídia, one of the label’s finest affiliates, shines on RA.957, which sees the Bordeaux-via-Portugal producer digging deep into the Principe crates and finding an hour of head-spinners. RA.957 is a barrage of hyper-precise drum workouts and metallic synths cutting against the sky. In construction and attitude alike, it brings to mind the best of contemporary gqom, another dance-music style built upon austere electronics, and just-so polyrhythmic spirals. As RA.957 runs on, Nídia’s focus on pared-back delirium only deepens, allowing her to push the set into all sorts of wild-eyed territories, tumbling up a million drums three at a time as she twists their rhythms in on themselves again and again.
It’s not as though Nídia has a monopoly on trim-but-riotous drum music, though. If you’re looking for a radically different take on that construction, you could do a whole lot worse than pulling up DJ K’s recent Boiler Room session. The DJ and producer is best known for his take on beat bruxaria, an offshoot of Brazilian funk music that translates to, more or less, “witchcraft beat.” Like so much of Brazilian funk, it’s minimal and heavyweight in equal measure; each beat is just a few ideas turned up to fifteen, whether that’s a million-ton bass synth, a snare drum stuffed with broken metal, or an ear-splitting top-line designed to send ravers into a frenzy. On Boiler Room LA, DJ K goes deep on the style, shuffling between all sorts of heavyweight club sounds without complicating the mix too much, trusting the sheer weight of his selections to carry the day. It works. Boiler Room LA is a masterclass of contemporary funk, a full-on blast of brain-bending sonic architecture: air-raid sirens looped against just-so vocal chops, buzzsaw synthesizers turning the room claustrophobic in a fraction of a second, high-pitched whistles turned into drums as DJ K rolls out the tubular bells.
The cover art for Objekt’s set from WHOLE, eventually, starts to seem like a joke. “AMBIENT,” it says, in hot-pink italics, right at the top. The reality is anything but. It’s not peak-time club fare, exactly, but it’s not like GCOM & Qebrus’s “XO Transmission #1”—a space-age blender of a track, a veritable maelstrom of hyper-digitized drums and avalanching static—is suited for chilling out, either. On WHOLE, Objekt eschews both traditional ambient music and straightforward club fare, looking instead towards the deepest and strangest ends of contemporary electronics. Take that bit with “XO Transmission #1”: once that track wraps up, he pulls out “Infinito,” a black hole of choral music by Moritz Von Oswald, and overlays it with Gerard Hoffnung’s “The Bricklayer’s Story,” which is, functionally, a stand-up comedy excerpt. It’s an utterly disorienting moment in a set full of them, and its sheer audacity is enough to grab you by the lapels. Throughout the session, Objekt constructs an alien logic that makes things like that feel not only logical, but inevitable; from there, it’s anything goes, as long as it’s deep, wigged-out, and a bit unexpected. “Ambient,” indeed.
Prayer of All That Is We sees Self and Other returning, again and again, to a central question: how does representation influence memory? It’s there, early on, when the session features a monologue about the disorientation of a modern pilgrimage to Mecca, where cameras and WhatsApp messages have replaced sketchbooks and letters; it is explicit when they speak of how the camera has changed the import, and meaning, of paintings and religious artwork; it is there when a man speaks about gay dance-music scenes as though he were paging through a photojournal. Prayer of All That Is We is bound up in historiography; it exists between centuries, never content to let a time period speak for itself, always looking for greater and more complex contextualization. The music that accompanies these words is equally disorienting: traffic jams and eons-old choral music and rickety house and bleary ambience, all jumbled together until it’s obvious that the shuffling is the point. In one of the set’s monologues, a man says simply: “The days of pilgrimage are over.” If that is the case—if anything can be accessed from any place, at any time, in any context—Self and Other seem to respond by asking: what can a contemporary study of histories and devotions look like?
The appeal of RA.958 is delightfully simple. Here, a hardcore lifer cracks open a time capsule of rough-and-rowdy dance music and empties its contents onto the decks. RA.958’s tracklist reads like a real who’s-who of old-school house, techno, and hardcore: Nightmares on Wax and Joey Beltram, 2 Bad Mice and Stardust, Armando and Frank de Wulf. Slipmatt describes the mix as “a journey through my 35 years of house,” but it’s so much more than that. Rickety synthesizers and stomping percussion lines, it turns out, know no genre bounds, so Slipmatt ends up chasing them down all sorts of blind alleys, folding together the sounds of new beat, EBM, hardcore breaks, and electro house until any distinctions feels completely beside the point. The point, it turns out, is blindingly obvious: get out there and dance. To that end, RA.958 works beautifully; Slipmatt takes care to blend the obvious hits with forgotten gems, making for a mix that functions as a sweat-soaked history lesson. The play is the point, but so’s the dust.
This has been true for a while, but Waking Life ‘24 underlines it: bar for bar, track for track, style for style, Thessa Torsing is one of the strongest DJs working. As upsammy, she produces immensely complex IDM and techno, each track glittering with countless tiny details but never coming off as a production flex; instead, her best material is downright kaleidoscopic, rewarding new listens by virtue of sheer depth. On Waking Life ‘24, she brings this approach to Portugal, blasting ravers with two hours of outright iridescent dancefloor cuts. Here, she turns her eyes towards techno and electro, prizing mile-a-minute drum programming above all else; the result is a million-limbed thing: percussion with a real ebb and flow and serrated synthesizers, every track cutting in a few directions at once and offering umpteen possibilities for the next blend. It’s a tremendously unpredictable hour—upsammy’s as liable to hit the gas as she is to swerve into electro-minimalism, or perhaps both—but each blend feels entirely natural in the moment. Waking Life ‘24 shows upsammy deep in her element, blending out-there club tools with a steely-eyed intensity but leaving plenty of room for exploration in the process.
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