February 23, 2023

Midweek Mix (23/02/23)

A run-down of some of the mixes and radio shows that have been soundtracking my existence – from the box-fresh to the tried-and-tested – all guaranteed to brighten up your week.

A Midweek Mix special this week: a recording of Midland’s 4-hour warm-up set for Group Therapy, on the opening night of new club Den Anden Side in Copenhagen last December. Held just after World AIDS Day, the event raised funds for local organisation AIDS-fondet and its Ungegruppen programme for young people living with HIV. Midland writes: “This was my love letter to everyone we lost to AIDS and a chance to play some of my most cherished records.”

As I hope I’ve made it clear over the past couple of years writing these columns, I love DJing as an art form and find it endlessly inspiring when I hear another DJ pushing their craft, making a statement and giving us something more than just a good time — while, of course, still giving us a good time. Sure, I routinely share mixes that are simply a selection of great tunes put together well, but on occasion something comes up that goes beyond that and makes me want to dig in deeper. (You can read previous examples of this here, here, here and here.)

This is one such instance, so if you want an essay, here you go! But before reading this summary, I would encourage you to put aside some time to discover the mix for yourselves — because there’s so much to discover.

Midland @ Group Therapy, Copenhagen (03/12/22)

Arthur Russell was ostensibly singing about a love affair — a “brief infatuation” — yet, following that opening monologue from David Wojnarowicz, ‘Just A Blip’ at first sounds like a wishful response to the fatigue, uncertainty, fear and despair that characterised the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, both on a personal level — today’s compulsion, today’s fatigue, today’s new symptoms might be “just a blip” — and on a community level, as groups of gay men began to realise the numbers of friends of friends, and then close friends, who were falling ill. But then Russell’s innocuous delivery of lines like “My big feeling/As hard as it goes/You take it from me” undercuts the pathos with innuendo, reminding us of the humanity behind the illness: the infatuation, the desire, the love.

Shortly after we hear Larry Kramer discussing the founding of ACT-UP:

Denial followed by acknowledgement, then action, and the consequent dilemmas of collective organising, of inclusion across differences, and of self-acceptance as the route to collective determination: clips of Audre Lorde, Marlon Riggs and James Baldwin sustain this narrative through the first half of the set, gradually interwoven with other voices talking about the growing ball/vogue scene, informal communities of marginalised people coming together through the collective joy found in music and dance. The inclusion of these excerpts is a well-judged and delicately executed way of remembering and celebrating these figures and communities, and it’s also a form of education. Yet while their voices and narratives are powerful by themselves, in the context of this recording it’s their juxtaposition with the music being played, and the overlapping allusions between the two, that give the set its creative and emotional weight.

The first two hours are a lyrical exploration of love, lust, longing and loss in music from the mid 70s through the early 90s and up to today. Arthur’s adolescent desire on ‘Just A Blip’ contrasts with the grown-up grief of Kate Bush’s delicate but despairing ‘Watching You Watching Me’, and both desire and grief are also conducted through the bridging point of ‘Algo Grandioso’ by Mabe Fratti, another cellist: “Cae la pared/Quieres recoger/Las cosas que amas”. We return to sex with Fern Kinney’s ‘Baby Let Me Kiss You’, which finds its echo not long after in ‘Thief Of Love’ by Patrick Cowley, the coy come-on now a confident cruise. Grace Jones and Blancmange continue this thread with ‘Pull Up To The Bumper’, an exemplar of leaving just enough to the imagination, and ‘Feel Me’, yet another illustration of Blancmange’s surreally paranoid genius: “Put your hands in the pocket/The pocket of a friend/What do you feel?/Tell me now/Before a word was spoken/My heart was broken”. Then there’s both Animotion and Kylie, perhaps unlikely bedfellows but who both mix seduction and obsession with the same secret ingredient: camp.

On the less carnal end of the spectrum, Madonna sings of total immersion in love on ‘Secret’; Kelela, on ‘Bluff’, of the moment of holding on, or not, when things are falling apart; and on ‘Damages’, Tems, of moving on. The key match from Madonna into Tems is just one of a handful of inspired harmonic mixes throughout this set, and soon after there’s another: Pet Shop Boys are the ultimate idealists on ‘Love Comes Quickly’ (though one always wonders how ironic they’re being), and Midland draws out Shep Pettibone’s already epic remix further through an extended key-matched transition into Marcello Giordani’s edit of ‘Il Mondo Da Una Nuvola’.

The central hour of the set sees a move towards the dancefloors of clubs of the late 80s and early 90s, specifically the arrival of Chicago house and the New York ball and voguing scene depicted in 1990’s Paris Is Burning. Pop-underground house crossovers (Dee-Lite, Malcolm McLaren) echo their disco forebears (MFSB); Sha-Lor and Daphne sing, again almost childishly, of love. I have a fond memory of the moment Alex Kassian played ‘When You Love Someone’ at 8am in Panoramabar last August, but as the beautiful keys and vocal of that record play out here, Midland layers in the next track, all dense, dissonant moodiness, making for an unsettling contrast.

It’s not the first time this has happened — earlier, both Fern Kinney and Kylie had occasionally threatened to dissipate into the FX mist; and Shep’s remix of PSBs comes with spooky dissonant moments already built-in — and I find myself wondering if this layering and use of effects is a reminder to us that nothing is permanent, that with joy comes pain, and that these things usually exist simultaneously, one underlying the other and vice versa.

This transition also feels like a turning point in the mix, from the ups and downs of relationships in the outside world to the inward-looking space both of the club and of the mind and ego of the dancer. No coincidence, then, that Roland Clark appears soon after to put that feeling into words:

I’m generally a cynic when it comes to vocals about house music, and lord knows ‘I Get Deep’ gets its fair share of airtime. (In fact it appeared in one of last week’s Midweek Mixes!) But, since the record is itself an attempt to capture the experience of transcendence through a deep appreciation of house music (something this particular edit plays with even further by splicing in single bars of some of the genre’s foundation stones: Hercules, Adonis, Cultural Vibe and so on), within the context of the story of this set its inclusion feels both earned and on point. The vocal ends and, with a rush of snares and cymbals and a spinback, the music explodes into the next record with the blissfully chaotic feeling of coming up, hard. It’s what I’d call a MOMENT.

The rest of the set harnesses this wild energy into a vibe that for me links my ideas of gay clubs I never went to — Sound Factory, Trade — with what was happening musically during my formative years in London in the late 00s, and on to queer raves happening today. In fact, as I listen, it feels like there is always a permeable membrane between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’, whenever those happen to be: Fern Kinney pops up again for a quick blast of ‘Groove Me’ during Rok’s hi-NRG/house hybrid ‘Silky’; broken UK bass music interfaces with latin house and “He’s The Greatest Dancer”; many of the trackier selections ride close to the facile tramlines of today’s trancey-tribaly-poppy trends without ever falling into them; and The Knife’s Silent Shout from 2006 proves once again what an enduring milestone it has turned out to be for me and gays my age. The meanings of The Knife’s songs have always been slippery, but it’s no surprise that, in this setting, the lyrics to ‘Silent Shout’ instantly speak to Midland’s stated theme of the people lost to AIDS and the implicit theme of making space for people’s voices to be heard.

The arrival of the Sister Sledge sample and the sequence that follows — including a good minute’s worth in which “He takes all the bass out of the song/And all you hear is highs and it’s like/Oh, shit!” (per Roland Clark) — is possibly the most audacious in a string of WTF moments during this final stretch, with Midland selecting and mixing tracks in a way that seems intent on breaking our ability to keep tabs on what’s going on. At one point there’s even a passing appearance from Toad slipping on a banana.

The effect is delirious, ferocious, cathartic and, intentionally or not, expresses an emotion that up to this point has been voiced only by James Baldwin: rage. One of the acid tracks then seems to give up partway through, slowing down, deflated, before revving up again into another explosion of pure tech house pressure. Finally, when Midland unexpectedly brings in Madonna’s ‘Burning Up’ (another fantastic key-matched mix), the preceding context gives the lyrics a new edge that belies their sprightly delivery, helping us realise that this is not such an innocent song after all.

Then it ends, and that’s it: four hours of emotions from across the spectrum, bundled up in those human contradictions that we — or at least most of us — find hard to express in our day to day interactions, but can occasionally be quite good at putting into song and groove. Midland builds those emotions and contradictions into a multifacted narrative that, for those who were lucky enough to be there on the dancefloor, must have been a remarkable trip — a kind of affirmation of being alive.