This month's roundup of the best DJ mixes skirts convention, taking in backwards beats, sets full of locked grooves, and even a father/son collaboration. It's heavy on doomy ambient and industrial textures, but a welcome dose of Balearic beats and an unabashed throwback to 1996—including, yes, Daft Punk—balance out all that pitched-down dread. Let's dig in, and if you're still left wanting more, be sure to check out last month's Best Mixes column.
Rabit – C2C Mix
Texas' Rabit continues to define his own style of Southern gothic with 36 murky minutes of sheer terror. Queasy strings, seagulls, and teletype ticker give way to industrial drones and tape warble. Meek Mill's "Jump Out the Face" and Gangsta Boo's "Meet the Devil" get slowed to a narcotic crawl over a barrage of feedback that could give Prurient himself pause. Later, after an even slower, slurrier H-town anthem, Coil's "Fire of the Mind" makes an unexpected appearance to ask, over still more of the mix's omnipresent grinding and squealing, "Does death come alone or with eager reinforcements?" This short, heavy set is a powerful dose of druggy menace shot through with a glimmer of redemption.
Edward & Arno Schaefer – Uncanny Valley Podcast 037
Here's a scenario you don't see too often. Edward, the krautrock-influenced house producer and Giegling regular, teams up with his father, Arno Schaefer, a Frankfurt-era DJ in the '90s. They don't say much about how this collaborative mix came together, but its charms speak for themselves. They start off with a backpack-rap throwback that I can't identify, keep the tempo slow with some Dabrye, and then settle into a lovely stretch of ambient, all hissing white noise and rubbed crystal rims, and gentle IDM (Arovane, maybe?) and wispy sunrise techno. Small, silvery sounds predominate in the mix's first half, where the unshowy mixing doubles as a kind of sleight of hand. Lulled by soft repetition, you may occasionally find yourself looking up and realizing that things sound quite different than they did a few minutes ago, and wondering how you got here. (See, for instance, Dana Bryant's "Heat," a relic of Afro-centric early-'90s spoken word, set to congas, played at -8, so that it's as muggy as the Southern climate it describes.) The second half of the mix does away with blends in favor of odd, and oddly suitable, juxtapositions: jazz fusion (Weather Report's "Black Market"), gloopy progressive rock (Cluster's Dem Wanderer"), glossy reggae (Pablo Moses' "Let's Face It"), and, most surprisingly, an uncategorizable synth-pop jam, "All of My Senses," from Hüsker Dü's Grant Hart. Rather than the typical journey-by-DJ conceit, the set unrolls like an idle trip on a streetcar in a semi-familiar city: a patchwork of blurry images, memories, and scraps of color and light.
Violet – Venus Rising #8 (Chris & Cosey Special)
I wrote about the Portuguese producer and DJ Violet a year ago when she and a group of collaborators covered Underground Resistance's "Transition" to commemorate International Women's Day. The London-based musician uses her Rádio Quântica show Venus Rising to celebrate women in music year-round. This recent installment is dedicated to the work of Cosey Fanni Tutti, of Throbbing Gristle, Chris and Cosey, and Carter Tutti Void. It opens with the drones and eerie Baltic melodies of "Such Is Life," off an expanded reissue of 1983's Time to Tell EP, and moves into the patient arpeggios and spoken word of "The Secret Touch," off the same release, before tumbling into rumbling post-punk techno, winsome synth-pop, meditative ballads, a Robert Wyatt collab, a Carl Craig remix, Throbbing Gristle cuts, ambient swirls, and more. This isn't a DJ set; tracks play out in full, and there isn't much in the way of mixing. Violet speaks a few times, too, identifying tracks and discussing what Cosey Fanni Tutti's work has meant to her. But for a two-hour immersion in the work of an electronic-music titan, you really couldn't ask for more.
Natural Magic – I Believe It's Magic 1/26/16
There's something to be said for mixes that don't come with a tracklisting attached. Sure, "When you play it, say it," and all that, but the blind mix makes you listen differently. You are at once less and more attentive. On the one hand, you're free to sit back and let the music wash over you without expectations. You also find yourself parsing its fine points more closely—getting inside its flow, trying to tease out track from track, figuring out whether the magic is in the songwriting, the selection, or the blends. Portland duo Natural Magic seduce you right from the beginning here with an stunningly beautiful piece of ambient guitar music from Washington, D.C.'s Dura; that sets up an hour of shimmering synths, sound effects (loon cries, running water), slow-motion disco, marimba, chanting, and chugging vintage drum machines. The first half is drifting and beatless, and pulse of the second half never rises above 105 beats per minute. The idea seems to be a sort of New Age spin on the slow-motion style the Belgians called New Beat, and the overall effect feels both invigorating and healing.
Nina – Unsound 2015
Clubgoers arriving early to Krakow's Hotel Forum for the Friday programming at last October's Unsound festival may have been in for a shock. Friday nights are typically reserved for high-impact club music—techno, footwork, batida, and the like—yet at 9 p.m., all three of the venue's rooms were devoted to ambient music. While the Phantom played "Baltic Beat"—an Eastern European response to Balearic—and Grzegorz Tyszkiewicz laid down a blistering tribute to the late noise musician Zbigniew Karkowski, the DJ known simply as Nina, a resident of Hamburg's beloved Golden Pudel club, was in the main room playing one of the most immersive, enveloping sets heard all week. "Steel-wool ambient," I scribbled in my notebook in response to the scraping, rustling drones; now that the set has been made available for streaming, I think the description holds. Highlights include Delia Derbyshire's desolate "Sea," in which interviewees recount dreams of drowning; a harrowing Peder Mannerfelt track in which a HAL-like voice intones apocalyptic warnings ("Blood—blood—blood—barren—barren—barren"); and a gnarly Wolf Eyes jam that grinds like a visit to the dentist. Ultimately, though, individual moments matter less than the drifting flow of the whole, which is exquisite. Draw the blinds, turn out the lights, put it on, and let the outside world melt away.
Mosca NTS Show – 3rd February 2016 (STL Special)
One of vinyl culture's most curious features is surely the locked groove: Instead of the typical spiral, the music is cut in a perfect circle, resulting in an infinite loop. Adding to their charm is the fact that no other format offers a comparable function. But these wax cul-de-sacs are quixotic little things. What, after all, do you do with them? The UK DJ Mosca has stepped up to the challenge with his latest mix, in which he gathers together several dozen locked grooves from STL, aka Stephan Laubner, a techno producer who typically includes a few such loops on almost all his records. Utilizing two turntables, a rotary mixer with on-board EQ, and a Roland Space Echo, Mosca turns in an incredible two-hour mix of subtly evolving, constantly shifting beats and textures. The proof is in the pacing: If you heard the mix without knowing the backstory, chances are you'd never guess that it was made entirely out of static, one-bar loops. Spanning dub techno, deep house, and scratchy beat tracks, the mix takes minimalist dance music at its most meditative and stretches it across a remarkably wide canvas.
Inga Mauer – Radio Cómeme: Soviet Bon Voyage 07
Den Haag's Inga Mauer pays tribute to her native Russia with an hour-long Radio Cómeme mix of Russian and Ukrainian goth, New Wave, and electronic music from the '80s and '90s, as well as what might be a few contemporary cuts in a similar vein. (Discogs identifies a few of the titles on her tracklisting as being 2015 releases; to a non-Russian reader, it's tough to figure out too much about this stuff.) She covers a lot of ground, with a mixing style that favors juxtapositions over blends, with the occasional burst of soft chaos to glue it all together. The opener's flanged electric guitars and ethereal vocals give way to throbbing industrial drones; a song around 15 minutes in gives me Clan of Xymox flashbacks, and that's followed by a dubby techno pulse smothered in the sound of a stylus dragging across a felt slipmat. We get New Wave disco, gloomy ambient acid, and a tremendous piece by Шесть Мертвых Болгар (Six Dead Bulgarians, apparently) that sounds like the death throes of an interstellar starship accompanied by its automated evacuation warning.
To listeners unacquainted with the Soviet and post-Soviet underground, the set suggests that the spirit of exchange was in the air: The closing song sounds a lot like an Eastern European Alexander Robotnick, while the Six Dead Bulgarians tune preceding it suggests an early Detroit techno cut heard down the line of a really spotty international phone connection. It's an object lesson in an era, not all that distant but rapidly fading from view, when information wasn't at everyone's fingertips.
Madteo – Xaw Teert$
Once upon a time, there was no more mysterious rock 'n' roll phenomenon than backmasking—that is, a backwards snippet of speech woven into a musical recording. Long before the advent of software like Audacity and Ableton, the only way to access the mysteries encoded within was to put the record on a turntable platter and spin the record backwards by hand, carefully. For decades, school kids parsed the fine points of these hidden messages, debating whether or not, say, Slayer really wanted us to pledge fealty to Satan, and groups like the PMRC, predictably, freaked out. (Still more bands lampooned the hullabaloo; see, for instance, the B-52's' message in "Detour Thru Your Mind": "I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you're playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle.")
Now, the Italian experimental house oddball Madteo takes the concept to a new extreme, turning in an hour-long DJ mix of house and disco in reverse. Spoiler alert: He didn't actually mix it by putting his CDJs in reverse-play mode. So file it under novelty, but even though the results aren't always pretty to listen to, the slow, steady shoop-shoop-shoop of all those backwards snares, peppered by writhing, wraithlike gurgles, turns out to be strangely hypnotic. You're unlikely to recognize much without dropping the mix into software and flipping it—which I highly recommend, by the way, because he's not messing around with these funk, freestyle, and hip-house selections, and the mixing is tight and joyful in a way that you'll never guess from the backwards gambit. Still, even backwards, no one can miss the telltale "Owt Sekat Ti" whoops of its closing bars.
Joakim – 1996
You know what was a dope year? Nineteen-ninety-six was a dope year. Nothing fancy here in Joakim's survey of that year's dance music (part of an ongoing series he's doing for Testpressing.org), just classic after classic after classic, mixed seamlessly: Boards of Canada's "Hi Scores," Daft Punk's "Da Funk," Motorbass' "Ezio," Maurizio's "M6," Those Guys' "Love Love Love," Blaze's "Lovelee Dae," Green Velvet's ever-mental "I'm Losing My Mind," Aux 88's "Electrotechno," and more. The flow zig-zags a bit, but it's hard to argue with the selections, and you couldn't ask for a better closing track than Roy Davis Jr.'s timeless "Gabriel." Keep this one around for Friday afternoons, and any other time you could use a little jolt of feel-good. (Stream/download here.)