Midweek Mix (24/11/21)
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.
It’s been a slow news week because I was travelling - first to Bristol to play four hours for Velvet Velour and his party Niceness, then to deepest Cheshire for a wedding, and on to Manchester to catch up with good friend Nick Kagame. Yesterday I wanted to post the next track in the Track-By-Track: Ghostcast series but youtube won’t let me due to copyright infringement, so I’m going to have to think of an alternative medium.
The party in Bristol was a lot of fun but a little fraught, at least at first, due to a shoddy set up. The sound guy - apparently someone who’s worked for Houghton, though you wouldn’t know it - seemed non-plussed by the fact that one of the decks was feeding back massively, probably because he’d put the huge fuck-off sub right next to that side of the booth. There wasn’t much to be done about it, so both Liam and I adapted and played with one turntable and two CDJs for the whole night. It was a bit of an intellectual challenge thinking how to fill four hours with my bag and a not-full USB (I’d deleted a load of stuff off it earlier that week), but once I got that puzzle straight in my head I had a fabulous time.
The crowd seemed to wax and wane but there was a core crew who went with me on every left turn. Personal highlights were the De Grandi remix of ‘Amadoda’ by Sho Madjozi (I know Nick plays this - or the original - too), a first outing for Anz’s ‘Inna Circle’ (which SLAYS), and then near the end the peculiarly pristine ‘3350 Beach Electronic’ by Splitradix, a tune I’d spent the whole night wanting to build up to and very satisfyingly did. Oh and a warning to anyone coming to see me over the coming months, Stacey Pullen’s remix of ‘Wiggin’ is now firmly back in my bag after several years on the shelf, and will be getting played at Every. Damn. Party.
Anyway, here’s what I listened to on repeat on various trains and buses around the UK, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, cos it’s just that good.
The moon has always been my weakness when it comes to superstition. I don’t believe in gods or ghosts. I don’t have much time for astrology. And I enjoy tarot more for the performance than for the advice it might provide. But the moon is different.
When I was 19 and on my first ever mushroom trip, I remember realising that the moon moves across the sky during the night - a fact I obviously already knew, but for some reason (well, for an obvious reason) was newly fascinating to me that evening. A few years later at Glade Festival, in a 2am acid haze at our campsite, we debated a light that was glowing below the horizon: was it a small town? Or maybe one of those mega Tescos? Or perhaps the sun rising, inexplicably, in the middle of the night? Of course it was the moon which finally emerged from behind the hills, giant and reassuring and giving us the energy we required to return to the festival fray. Later still there was that time at a rooftop rave, one of many in G’s old flat in Oxford, when I went outside and saw my first - and to this day only - moon ring.
To this day I always imagine something special will happen on a full moon. Usually these fantasies involve meeting the man of my dreams or, more prosaically, having a particularly fun night out. Of course nine times out of ten absolutely nothing special happens on a full moon, but the odd times that it does, it’s all the evidence I need to believe in the moon’s special powers. And now I have a regular full moon ritual to encourage that much sought-after lunar magic: Discosódoma’s Moon Gazing series, a podcast in the form of a monthly ode to the moon.
The latest installment, from Chris Cruse, is moon music par excellence. It has just the right combination of esotericism and eroticism (yes the moon is sexy - just think about all those werewolves!), juxtaposing the literally cosmic - e.g. Asha Puthli’s ‘Space Talk’ - with the moodily seductive vibes one expects from an auspiciously moonlit night - Hi-Bias’s ‘More, More, More’ played on 33 (read my track-by-track entry on this here) and Alexander O’Neal’s ‘All True Man’ say it all.
There’s some seriously celestial lateral thinking in the sequencing: P Nut’s vocal on System Olympia’s ‘Falling In Love’ is a welcome injection of contemporary sass into the primarily vintage flow, while later on Aphex Twin’s ethereal ‘Ageispolis’ emerges in key out of a stomping post-disco instrumental like music straight from the heavens. There’s even room for a section from the entirely too-much Cool Summer Mix of Janet’s ‘Nasty’, a track for which I have a real soft spot, but that is so big it really is amazing that it fits in so well (for my part, since including it in my first For Chulazos Only mix, I don’t think I’ve ever had the courage to play it again).
If it’s not clear already, I think this mix is fabulous from start to finish. It would have been a worthy soundtrack to any of the moon-related scenarios I listed earlier, though what comes to mind more now when listening is not a trip or a rave but a moonlit walk, perhaps ending with a big sexy hug.