This month’s standout mixes traverse trance states, Japanese footwork, and Romanian minimal techno. New York’s DJ Voices and Unscented DJ dig deep into the jazzy garage that poured out of New York and New Jersey discotheques in the early ’90s. Portugal’s Photonz pops the manhole cover on a dank electro underground. Those are just a few of the routes available in an unusually splintered garden of forking paths—read on and listen in.
Kablam – RA.564
The Swedish musician Kablam knows just how to grab your attention: “I keep my dick hanging out of my pants/So I can point out what I want,” is the first thing you hear here, intoned lewdly. It’s a pitched-down snippet of the Knife’s 2003 song “Hanging Out,” and it serves not only as a hat-tip to Kablam’s fellow Swedes but also a marker of her determination to knock down the dance music patriarchy for once and for all. A member of Berlin’s Janus crew of avant-club radicals, Kablam delights in chaos and unease. Beats speed up and slow down; synths and voices break down into fields of shrieking cicadas; a Michael Nyman composition for strings morphs into a throbbing dembow remix of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” of all things. Scattered throughout are moments of sheer audacity and startling beauty, each one a wormhole to a whole new world.
Bing & Ruth – Solid Steel Radio Show 24/2/2017
Bing & Ruth’s David Moore turns in a stellar listening set for Ninja Tune’s Solid Steel series, using the concept of trance states as a jumping-off point to explore sounds as disparate as vintage American blues, gospel, Julianna Barwick’s reverberant vocal fantasias, and Gavin Bryars’ “The Sinking of the Titanic.” The emphasis on repetition is reflective of Bing & Ruth’s own hypnotic work, and it’s easy to see how the haunting atmospheres of some of the music showcased here—like Smoke Dawson’s “The Minotaur,” a 1971 fiddle recording—have influenced the billowing sonic signature of Moore’s ensemble. Among the unexpected treasures: an unreleased piece for processed guitar by Hubble (Ben Greenberg, formerly of Zs), sounding like a wilder Manuel Göttsching; and a lovely David Moore solo piece rescued from a 2007 CDR, which is as direct as Bing & Ruth are diffuse.
Zora Jones – FACT Mix
Sometimes you wonder if Zora Jones doesn’t hear the way that spiders see. Her sounds constantly fracture into splinters, the colorful beats tumbling like baubles in a kaleidoscope. It’s no wonder that she calls her label, which she runs alongside Sinjin Hawke, Fractal Fantasy. In a new mix for FACT she tears the roof off as usual, and it’s gripping from start to finish: spinning footwork rhythms and processed vocal samples go careening into candy-colored trap-rave, hyperactive kalimba sequences, and ultra-vivid IDM. The mix is composed almost exclusively of Jones’ and Hawke’s own work, both solo and in tandem—atop, of course, a bed of bootlegged rap and R&B, the pair’s mischievous stock in trade.
Carsten Jost – NE211
Both at the helm of the Dial label and making his own music, Carsten Jost is a master of atmosphere. He brings that same flair to this set, which he recorded on Christmas night, alone, in the living space in his gallery on Canal Street while “thinking about the stars and the ever-expanding universe and its mysterious power sources.” Following a scene-setting intro from a Harmony Korine short film for Proenza Schouler and a bright-eyed segment from Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar soundtrack, he finally gets to the real goods: deep, minimalist house and Detroit techno delivered in classic Dial fashion. For fans of German dance music from the turn of the century, it’s a treat to hear cuts like Donna Regina’s woozy “Star Ferry (Isolée Remix)” surfacing again. The whole set, in fact, is a highly satisfying deep dive into bittersweet techno, delivered with all of Jost’s usual panache.
DJ Voices & Unscented DJ – Do It the Jazzy Way (Mix for Sisters #35)
It seems fitting to find the New York house icon Pal Joey popping up in the comments on this mix, as it is essentially an extended tribute to the style that Pal Joey pioneered—using drum machines, razor blades, and reel-to-reel tape—on classics like 1989’s “Soho” and “Dance.” The heavily swung drums and rickety MPC snares heard across the set have one foot in the world of early hip-hop, while walking basslines and extended piano solos tip into full-on jazz mode. As DJ Voices (Kristin Malossi) and Unscented DJ (Brandon Wilner) point out in their notes, this early ’90s style of garage house was mostly a New York and New Jersey thing, with a key assist from ever-alert Japanese producers. It’s a stellar mix, full of swing and spark and joy.
Petre Inspirescu: Clubberia 284
Few genres are more widely derided these days than late ’00s minimal, a sound that most of the dance music scene tends to treat with all the chagrin of a bad high school haircut. In Romania, though, minimal techno remains not just on trend but all-powerful, with the [a:rpia:r] crew (Rhadoo, Petre Inspirescu, and Raresh) taking the trippy percolations Ricardo Villalobos introduced with Thé Au Harem D'Archimède and stretching them into even more psychedelic mutations, in which elastic sound design and elliptical rhythms are paramount. This two-hour set, recorded at Tokyo’s Dommune club last November, makes for the rare occasion to get to hear Inspirescu outside of some insane hour of the morning. But it might just make you feel like you’ve been up all night: It rolls like fat globules dancing in colored water, like ball bearings on a slippery floor, like an electrical storm filtered through a sieve. It’s a long road with a barely perceptible incline, but if you’re less interested in hooks or melodies than the all-enveloping groove, there’s reason to travel it. And about 93 minutes in, there’s a passage of almost startling beauty—one that might make you wonder why anyone wrote off minimal in the first place.
Foodman – NTS Radio, 21st March 2017
The Japanese footwork producer Foodman’s recent set for NTS Radio has a highly unusual effect: For those not well versed in Japanese culture, at least, it replicates the sensation of traveling in a foreign land, where everything feels faintly bewildering, in the most invigorating way. Foodman’s own productions are strange, staccato affairs brimming with empty space, and his mix here begins in the same way. From there he goes, well, everywhere: pulsing ambient tracks with breathy Japanese-language vocals; the Japanese rapper Dotama spitting over pointillist beats and clarinet; the flutes and tablas of Talvin Singh’s 1998 track “Traveller,” in all their Fourth World excess. Along the way there’s something that sounds like calisthenics instructions set to waltz piano, and toward the end he dips into Japanese indie rock before switching gears once again, closing with his own “Ure Piii.” It’s a lot to wrap your head around, but if you’re looking for an hourlong trip far outside your usual stomping grounds, this is just the ticket.
Tobias. – @ Mind Off x Re:Birth, Tokyo – 17.1.17
There’s a straight line from the sort of techno that Tobias Freund was making 20-odd years ago and what he’s doing today. Then as now, he has always emphasized throbbing pulses, linear constructions, and psychoactive frequencies. This recent live set from Tokyo captures him at his most electrifying, with tightly coiled arpeggios wrapped around hyper-efficient drum programming and cut-up vocal fragments.
Wilted Woman – Bandcloud Guest Mix – March 2017
How far-out can you get in 30 minutes? When you’re Wilted Woman, an American producer and Berlin Community Radio resident DJ, the answer is: pretty damned far. She kicks off with a happy hardcore remix of Nena’s immortal “99 Red Balloons,” plunges into chopped-and-screwed German electro-pop, and then feints left into some kind of gummed-up industrial dub overlaid with harsh noise. Ten minutes in, a woman declaims over percolating disco-punk beats, “Ich hab’ kein Geld/Mein Hund ist alles was ich hab’” (“I have no money/I only have my dog”). An extended passage of vintage-sounding electro-pop, acid, and DJ Richard’s bleached-bone techno puts us back on firmer ground until she pulls the rug out again with the disorienting finale. We're left with more questions than answers, wanting to know much more about Wilted Woman’s blurry world.
Photonz – DW Podcast 24
Portugal’s Photonz tends to deal in knife-edged techno, but on this set for France’s Dimensional Waves, he sounds even deadlier than usual. Setting aside his fascination with early trance music, he zeroes in on the whipcrack syncopations of classic electro, and the results are spell-binding. Gurgling analog synths, white-hot drum machines, and clammy metallic atmospheres conjure throwback vibes halfway between Bronx B-boying and Rotterdam raves, sounding as volatile as a tapped electrical transformer in a vacant lot.
And check out last month’s Best Mixes column for even more tunes.