Mazzy Star at the rave - or why DJs should grow a backbone
Back in June, Four Tet released his allegedly long-awaited Mazzy Star remix Into Dust (Still Falling) to general acclaim and critical fawning.
I was not happy. “Leave. Mazzy Star. Alone.” I trumpeted. “No but seriously, sample what you like but just do it a bit better than this ultimately half-arsed shrug / semi-melodic fart of a track from Four Tet, which applies the same swung tech house beat that Kieran Hebden has used for about 75% of his Four Tet productions since becoming a big stage DJ to some rather obvious clips from Mazzy Star’s divine Into Dust.”
Being definitely not someone to bear a grudge, the same tune has been bugging me all summer. And it was only last week that I realised why I was still so annoyed by it.
Because, yes, the song is pretty weak and uninspired and Four Tet’s beats sound unadventurous. But what really annoyed me was the fact that Four Tet evidently felt that, in order to play some Mazzy Star in his DJ sets, he had to put Fisher Price tech house beats underneath the Californian group’s divine melodies, as if audiences at his gigs just couldn’t stand not to be tickled by goddamn four four drums for the length of one song.
Just play some Mazzy Star dude!
I should say that this argument really isn’t about Four Tet. Kieran Hebden is a gifted producer, with three decades in the game and a number of classic records under his belt. Rounds, his 2003 album, is a personal favourite and Fridge, Kieran Hebden’s old band, are incredible.
Besides, I haven’t seen Four Tet DJ in a long while. It may be that he drops straight-up Mazzy Star classics all the time, unadorned by beats. In which case I apologise for even bringing his name into this.
(In fact, at this year’s Lightning in a Bottle festival Four Tet dropped Nine Inch Nails’ Closer towards the end of his two-hour set, which seems like an amusingly leftfield choice.)
So this argument is not about Four Tet. It’s more about DJs as a whole. And perhaps audiences too.
I don’t go out as much as I would like to. But this summer I have seen a fair amount of DJs at various festivals and clubs and, while some have been excellent, the vast majority struck me as rather unadventurous, their noses stuck deep in the trough of their respective genre, which meant we, the audience, were going to have to listen to straight-up house / techno / drum & bass whatever the time of day and circumstances of the set.
Earlier this summer I arrived at Barcelona festival SoundIt at 430pm, when gates were just opening, to find the vast majority of DJs playing their own thunderous house and techno under a head-cracking sun to audiences of pretty much no one and I wondered what was the point.
Just to be clear: most of these were local DJs and they are excellent at their craft. I would have put them on later in the day, to face the big crowds they merited.
Maybe they felt like they had to play their typical sets. I don’t know. But the results gave me a headache and I wondered why they didn’t do something different, given the circumstances.
You might counter that there are DJs today who play each and everything under the sun, who take the risks all the time, such as the brilliant ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U and DjRUM. But they exist in their own world, shunted off into their eclectic hangar. They are a breed to be handled apart: the eclectic DJ. And I love them. But they represent a small, specialised part of the DJ field.
Is it stupid to be mad at DJs for not playing Mazzy Star? Perhaps.
But I can imagine the arguments that a DJ might give against playing a straight-up Mazzy Star song in their set and they feel pretty weak to me. (And I hope you will excuse some spectacular straw manning of their arguments here.)
I will lose the crowd.
Well, perhaps. But what does it actually mean to lose a crowd. They stop dancing for a few minutes? Well that’s OK. Maybe they needed a breather. Maybe they are just enjoying the song. Maybe this is even a good thing, a moment of contemplation among the dance floor frenetics.
Or maybe you mean that the audience will leave, drifting off to watch some other DJ who hasn’t stopped the identikit beats. That’s not great. But why not make it your job to win them back? The British comedian Stewart Lee apparently sometimes likes to deliberately lose a crowd, just to have the task of winning them back. You could do that!
It is also worth thinking about why you expect to lose the crowd by playing some Mazzy Star.
Is it because you, as a DJ, have encouraged your crowd to expect zero risks? Larry Levan, the patron saint of DJs, used to play songs he liked on repeat, even if they cleared the dance floor, daring the crowd to stay away.
You don’t have to do that. But a little more courage in your conviction wouldn’t harm.
Also, I don’t personally think that playing Mazzy Star means that you would have to lose the crowd, so long as you do it well.
Say, for example, you start with techno. 1) Mix in the Spiritual Life remix of Beth Orton’s Central Reservation, which has a four four beat but is a lot gentler, with an acoustic guitar to the fore.
2) Now slow that down and mix it into one the beat-driven guitar numbers from Rounds, like Hands or Unspoken.
3) Mix that into a more upbeat Mazzy Star song, with drums, like Blue Flower.
4) Then stop that and play Fade Into You, Mazzy Star’s greatest hit, for instant recognition.
5) Then back to the beats, if you must.
Not only do you get to play some Mazzy Star - two Mazzy Star songs! - but a section of a DJ set that might sound like a logical progression to you will, for a suitably refreshed crowd, resonate like you summoned the very gods from the heavens or sculpted a deer out of salt.
2) My set is too short for this messing about.
The above transition would last about 15-20 minutes, of which Fade Into You is roughly five. In a hour-long set that is quite a large chunk of your time.
But who wants to play hour-long sets? Ask for longer ones, sets where you can spend 15 minutes playing with a crowd.
You will enjoy it; and your life will be more satisfying.
3) I only have my usual set on the USB.
But you can fit thousands of songs on a USB and hundreds of thousands on a small drive! Surely your record collection has thousands of brilliantly odd songs in it. Add a few of them to your USB!
Weighed against these three possible objections, the rewards of playing Mazzy Star (or something like that - it doesn’t have to be so literal) are huge.
Yes, you might clear the floor. Or, you might create that one moment, that instant where clubbing suddenly becomes divine and you know you’re never going to forget this song as long as you live.
Do you remember when Four Tet played Fade Into You, people will ask in years to come, their breath bated? You could make someone’s year.
There aren’t enough moments like this in clubbing but I remember them, decades on.
I vividly remember when a DJ at Bugged Out in Manchester played Stereolab’s Metronomic Underground; when Jeff Mills dropped the Beastie Boys and Laurent Garnier played The Prodigy’s Charly; and I remember them with a thrill in my heart and a skip in my step.
(I have a friend who claims he once saw Derrick Carter play Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do (I Do it For You) at The End in London and, true or not, I still think of this story decades on.)
Compare that to the average generic house / techno set, which lasts, what?, an hour in the memory.
The question becomes not so much why would you play Mazzy Star in your set as why wouldn’t you?
(Incidentally, I have a long-standing fantasy of dropping Sheryl Crow’s Every Day is a Winding Road at just the right time for peak-time club ecstasy and being born aloft on the shoulders of an adoring crowd. Now that song is a banger.)
Were DJs more adventurous a few decades ago? Or was I just younger?
I really don’t know.
I do know, however, that the one time I saw Four Tet DJ, at Plastic People in London around the early 2000s, he played a brilliantly eclectic set that veered all over the place, from rap to house to dub.
I know, too, that dance music is a far bigger business these days, which might make brand-built DJs particularly risk averse.
And I know that pre-recorded sets - for whatever reason - are utterly bogus and people should be ashamed of using them. (NB this is DEFINITELY not about Four Tet, who I am sure would never use a pre-recorded set.)
Finally, I know that modern DJ technology makes it a lot easier to carry around and play a lot more music, so that should enable more eclectic sets. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to.
Is your record collection boring? Are you boring?
Surely not.
So the next time I go out, I expect to hear some fantastic blends of Mazzy Star, Sheryl Crow and the Beastie Boys, destroying the rave.
And if I don’t, then Four Tet, I am (quite unreasonably) blaming you.
Some Listening
Model / Actriz - Whispers (Verraco remix)
If you haven’t seen Model/Actriz live then do so immediately: their high-camp industrial sleaze is one of the best live shows I have seen in a long while. I would never have thought of putting them together with Verraco but whoever did deserves all the late summer flowers because the Colombian producer does a sterling job of translating the group’s organic dance sound onto the club floor, while losing none of the group’s admirable intensity, courtesy of a prowling, metallurgic bass line and some extremely effective clips of singer Cole Haden beckoning you into the club’s darkest corners.
What would you say in a love letter to jungle, were you asked to pen one? On Luv 4 U, South London’s VXRGO sounds the perfect note, her faultless production combining the sweetest soul vocal with a welcome touch of dancehall, deft beat sorcery and a bottom end that is heavy but strangely delicate. Like much of the best jungle, Luv A U is a work of deft juxtaposition that will leave your feet exhausted and your brain racing.
I.Jordan - Without You (feat. ASHWARYA)
I am a sucker for love songs, in dance music and beyond. And Without You, the first fruits of I.Jordan’s new Free Falling, is an absolute feathered bed and silk pillows gem of loving gush, with the just the right amount of Boards of Canada-ish production wooze to suggest the gorgeous otherworldliness of a new relationship, while ASHWARYA gives it full vocal anthem on the mic. Essential.
Most weekend mornings, when I go out for a morning run there is a group of young party goers sat on the bench near my house sucking on Nitrous Oxide balloons in the early morning sun, while the animals in the nearby Barcelona zoo start to slowly rise.
NOS, the first single from Blawan’s debut album for XK, SickElixir, probably doesn’t have anything to do with that, despite its name (in fact the album channels “grief, family trauma and seismic life shifts”, rather than balloon adventure.) And yet the song feels like the perfect soundtrack to such sun-wobbled, ever-so-slightly sleazy behaviour, the synths fizzing like head-rushing blood, as Blawan whispers sweet rhythmic nothings in the listener’s ear. I have a theory that, for all his weird and wonderful cracked darkness, Blawan is making some of the most forward-looking pop music out there. And NOS only confirms it.
Overmono & High Contrast - If We Ever
As drum & bass headed ever further up its own technically-refined, darker-than-thou backside in the early 2000s, High Contrast provided a rare ray of ultraviolet life, his productions brimming with soft touches, soulful looks and the sheer glory of being young and alive, (See, for example, the absolutely ageless Racing Green.) If We Ever is one such classic and, if the 2007 original certainly didn’t need an update, then the metallic refix that Overmono have given it is certainly welcome, adding serious technological weight to the piano-led ecstasy of the original, the perfect mid point between the two artists’ work.
Sienna & Tom Middleton - YNTOO (92 Mix)
AnjunaDeep on Line Noise? It’s not what I was expecting either. But this collab. between Global Communication’s Tom Middleton and Sienna rings all of my 90s-Future-Sound-of-London bells. Which makes it the retro-future sound of London, maybe. From its snatch of vocal melody to its rolling breakbeat and hazily clean edges, YNTOO is a potent reminder of one of the sounds that made me fall in love with dance music in the first place.
As a card-carrying musical nerd, there are few things I like more than discovering a new genre, even if the genre in question was done and dusted by the time I started Primary School. This was the case with techno kayō, a genre of music that emerged in japan in the late 1970s, which combined the pop-based ideas of Kayōkyoku with new drum machine and synthesiser technology, giving it all a very Japanese edge.
The result was like a rockier, more cosmopolitan take on Kraftwerk, where you’re never that far from either a candied pop vocal, 80s-style funk guitar or some outright electronic weirdness, a mixture that is simultaneously familiar and deliciously off. Yellow Magic Orchestra are the best known example of the genre - but a new album from Rush Hour Records, lovingly compiled by Dubby, owner of Tokyo’s Ondas record shop, and Rush Hour co-founder Antal, which bears the logical name Techno Kayō vol. 1 - Japanese Techno Pop 1981 - 1989 digs a lot deeper turning up gems like, ラスト·バトル (Last battle) a semi-apocalyptic Miami Vice banger from Kazuo Otani that reminds me a little of Model 500 at their most worrying.
When I die, I think I would like to slip this mortal coil to the astral tinkle of harp-led ambient jazz, a desire that has become a lot easier to imagine over the last few years thanks to the likes of Floating Points, Nala Sinephro and now Flur, a London three piece of exquisite, intimate power.
Maybe there will come a time when tickled harp, chord drift and echoing percussion becomes over-exposed in the musical consciousness. But as Flur demonstrate on Nightdiver, a highlight of their terribly-named debut album Plunge, that time is very much not now, especially if you’re feeling run a bit ragged by the return to work.
In a recent (excellent) Tone Glow interview, DjRUM talks about the easy associations we have of certain instruments snd sounds. “If you put the tiniest snippet of saxophone - a scotch bonnet! - [on a techno track], people will describe it as jazzy. “Jazzy techno.”… Same thing with jungle: a tiny pinch of jungle and, all of a sudden, it’s jungley.”
One of the things I love about woodwind is that it doesn’t really have these associations, being a tool less used in electronic music. Which is a long-winded way to introduce Industrial Wind Quartet, a new album from Irish producer ZOiD, which comprises “9 wind quartet pieces written and arranged by me for Wind Quartet (Clarinet/Bass Clarinet, Bassoon, French Horn and Flute)”, as well as various remixes.
In a way, the album sounds exactly like the name suggests, mixing rattling industrial beats and the elegant curves of wind instruments. At the same time, the overall sound is so unexpected, the juxtaposition of two elements that certainly can go together but very rarely do, that Industrial Wind Quartet is a perfectly refreshing listen of unexpected delight. And, as Day Eight, which opens the album shows, ZOiD is great with a melody too.
Things I’ve Done
Time for a summer podcast catch up. Over the last few weeks I have been slowly uploading the Line Noise podcasts we recorded live at Primavera Sound 2025 - which seems like a Jurassic age ago but is only really three months - to the main feed. You may have missed them, so I present to you:
Line Noise 228 - Confidence Man at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 227 - The Dare at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 226 - mad miran at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 225 - Barker at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 224 - Kittin at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 223 - Sabres of Paradise at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 221 - SHERELLE at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 218 - Mor Elian at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 217 - Danny L Harle live at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 216 - Simo Cell live at Primavera Sound 2025
Line Noise 215 - Kelly Lee Owens at Primavera Sound 2025
The Playlists
Apple Music users! You can now access my two main playlists of new music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.
So please do follow them. This is thanks to the new Apple Music tool that allows you to import Spotify playlists, if you’re interested.
Please do keep your opinions coming in about where I should host these playlists. For the moment, they are both also on Spotify: The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest. But I personally use Apple Music.