Welcome to the first installment of a new column for the Pitch, where I'll be running down the best DJ mixes to have crossed my desk in the month prior. Wrapping up January 2016, we've got all manner of headcleaners, just the thing to get you started on the right track for the New Year. That means rumbling electro-acoustic rarities from Autechre, wildly syncopated Afro-Portuguese batida from Nídia Minaj, a Bowie tribute from Optimo's JD Twitch, and more.
Kassem Mosse – 2016COMEDOWN
Workshop label staple Kassem Mosse posted this 48-minute fever dream on the morning of January 1, while plenty of New Year's Eve parties in his native Germany were still going on. (Hell, Berghain wouldn't end up closing down until somewhere around midday on Monday, January 4.) How thoughtful—here was a comedown mix for fatigued clubbers to collapse into upon returning home. But beware: few warm fuzzies lie within. Opening with spectral drones and skulking 808 patterns, the mix traverses melancholic singing, Tangerine Dream-influenced arpeggio squiggles, squalling synth free jazz, patient sub-bass-and-xylophone studies, crash cymbal explosions, and a beautiful prepared-piano piece, John Cage's "Music for Marcel Duchamp," performed by Boris Berman. (To preserve the element of surprise, I don't want to say too much more about the tracklisting, which remains unpublished, but it turns out that Shazam knows more than you might expect about some of these selections, at least one of which you can, cough, ahem, get for yourself.) A headfuck of the gentlest sort, with or without hangover. (Download here.)
Autechre @ NTS Radio
It's always a treat when Autechre take to the decks, and this hour-long set for NTS Radio shows why. Ten minutes in, there's a moment of surprising elegance, even gravitas, with strings and horns that are faintly reminiscent of John Carpenter's soundtrack to The Thing—not at all the kind of thing I'd expected from an Autechre set. (It turns out to be Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke, and Peter Rehberg's Diamonds Are Forever-sampling "Fenn O'Berg Theme," which, in retrospect, makes perfect sense.) Delia Derbyshire's unsettling "Sea"—in which people reminisce about dreams of drowning over watery FM synths—amps up the unease. At 31 minutes there are foghorn-like tones and, faintly, seagulls; even if you don't know the song, you can guess that it must be Throbbing Gristle's "Beachy Head." They must have water on their minds, because much of the mix's electronic dribble and squelch has an unmistakably liquid quality, and later, toward the end, the BBC Sound Effects Library makes the theme explicit. In a context like this, Fred Frith's "Hollow Music" is startling in the purity of its acoustic guitar tone, though it's soon turned to the atonal mulch that serves as the set's baseline. Rumbling and crackling, Autechre revel in electronic sound at its most exhilaratingly abstract, and this hour—a stiff drink with just enough sugar mixed in—makes the perfect single serving. Listen on your lunch break, and return to work feeling delightfully askew.
Veronica Vasicka – Beats in Space #817
Before I caught Veronica Vasicka spinning at Primavera Sound last year, I knew her primarily as the head of Minimal Wave, a label dedicated to the chillier side of early '80s synthpop. At Primavera, though, she set aside coldwave in favor of stark, severe techno, and that's the sound that tends to dominate this recent set for Tim Sweeney's Beats in Space radio show. She starts off with a handful of icy, tape-hissing Minimal Wave cuts, but mostly she sticks to heavier, current-day cuts from her Cititrax sublabel: bleep-riddled techno with a heavy EBM influence and a sour disposition, leavened by the occasional snippet of melody-drenched euphoria. (The track around 30 minutes in is particularly spine-tingling, and so is the gnarlier cut that follows, at about the 35-minute mark.) She drops a DVA Damas tune from the Downwards label and a Borusiade from Cómeme, but the emphasis is on forthcoming Cititrax material, making this an excellent place to get up to speed with the label's plans for 2016. (Stream/download here.)
1432 R – December 2015
Washington, D.C.'s 1432 R label may have a nondescript name—as addresses go, it's the kind of house number you could walk back and forth in front of for like 10 minutes without noticing the correct door—but their sound is unmistakable for the way it mixes up lumpy machine beats with quavering synths and gooey samples, caked in resin, that sound like they've been scraped out of the grooves of moldering records. This mix for RVNG of mostly (all?) unreleased material comes from regulars like Mikael Seifu, Dawit Eklund, and Ethiopian Records as well as new-to-me names like RBCHMBRS and Zem Su Yung; music journo Sami Yenigun also turns up with two tracks, and if they're the ones I think they are (the tracklisting's a little tough to decipher; the whole thing floats by like a dream), he's got a real way with squirrelly, idiosyncratic house grooves. The hour-long set highlights both their overdriven machine funk—just get a load of the tortured, blown-out conga rhythm that comes grinding into earshot around the 13-minute mark—and also their knack for twisting up spiritual jazz into blissed-out boom-bap formations. The influence of Pal Joey and Pepe Bradock hangs over the mix, but for the most part this crew is just doing their own weird thing, and amazingly so. From RBCHMBRS' misty-eyed beat that opens the record to Zem Su Yung's jazzbo new age outro, there are vast worlds to get lost in here. (Listen here.)
Nídia Minaj – FADER Mix
Nídia Minaj released her debut record on Lisbon's Príncipe Discos label last year, when she was just 18. Like her label-mates DJ Marfox and DJ Nigga Fox, she specializes in batida, a head-spinning electronic music genre inspired by the rhythms of Portuguese-speaking countries in West Africa. From the sound of "19th Birthday," a new tune posted to her SoundCloud earlier this month, she's also beginning to explore the slower, deeper rhythms of Afro-house, but this 37-minute set for FADER is resolutely, neck-snappingly uptempo. Snares rattle, guiros shriek, and looped voices cut wraithlike rugs in the margins. Good luck figuring out what most of these songs are, though if you listen closely, you'll occasionally hear branded idents for some of the artists—Minaj, and I think Lilocox, too—laced through the beats. There are occasional scraps of what sound like older, repurposed recordings in here too, like a snippet of singing and whistling that comes careening through around the 14-minute mark, sounding almost like an African response to dancehall reggae. Despite the heavy compression and rapid shifts in energy, there's something mesmerizing about the mix; you emerge from it feeling like you've spent half an hour in a wind tunnel—dancing or meditating, it's up to you.
Courtesy – Crack Magazine Mix
From the opening claps and concussive kick drum that open the mix, you know it's going to be a bruiser. Born in Greenland and based in Copenhagen, Courtesy—Najaaraq Nicoline Vestbirk—has a residency at the techno-centric club Culture Box, and her fondness for the dark side of dance music is on full display in this mix for Crack Magazine. She takes in the lo-fi acid of Patricia's "Just Visiting," the breakbeat nostalgia of Paul Trafford's "Rubicun III," the pitter-pat patience of the Automatic Message's "Perihelion," and the live-wire brutalism of Rrose's "Vellum"; along the way, she digs out an EBM-influenced Detroit techno cut from 1991. Her style of mixing is full-on: She shoulders right into her blends, nudging her records when the beat lags and emphasizing the edge-of-your-seat intensity of the transitions. Those moments where you feel things drifting out of sync, only to be wrestled forcefully back into place, give the set the kind of life and spirit you simply don't get with automated beatmatching. By the time it all wraps up, bass flapping like a shredded screen door, you feel not just invigorated but cleansed.
Bicep – White Light Mix
Northern Ireland's Bicep had one of last year's biggest house tracks in the form of "Just," a hypnotic, bleepy single that turned up on all sorts of year-end lists. (Credit its never-ending vocal loop—"I'm just insane"—for reeling in party people; credit its earwormy riff for its staying power.) This mix, however, couldn't be more different. For the most part, it avoids beats entirely, in favor of burbling ambient music and IDM. It opens with Tight Pants' Edgar Froese-sampling "Side Again for Your Love" and stretches out to indulge in languid epics from Spacetime Continuum, Autechre, and User48736353001, aka Aphex Twin. There's nothing particularly fancy about the mixing; tracks are played out in full, with minimal overlap. But if you're looking to get horizontal, these levitating arpeggios are just the trick. (Download here.)
JD Twitch – Strung Out on Lasers and Slash Back Blazers Bowie Mix
We couldn't very well end this month without a Bowie tribute, could we? We could not. Here, Optimo's JD Twitch puts together a DJ set in homage to the man—nothing special, just "one hour of Bowie songs I have played in discotheques over the years," as he puts it. It opens in appropriately elegiac fashion with Low's "Warszawa," one of the electronic highlights of Bowie's catalog, launches into the euphoric funk of "Sound and Vision," and doesn't look back. "Fame" gets a splash of dub delay; "Sorrow" gets us slow-dancing; "Fashion" elicits some killer robot moves. Further along the line, there's an actual dub reggae remix of "Major Tom." And just when you think "Five Years" is going to leave you blubbering in a pool of tears on the dancefloor, he wraps it all up the only way possible. Ashes to ashes, indeed.