Midweek Mixes (05/03/24)
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.
DJ Voices - Live @ Nowadays New Year's Nonstop (01/01/24)
DJ Voices used her set at Nowadays' NYD nonstop party to make a statement in solidarity with Palestine, as the Israeli government and army continued its destruction of Gaza and its people. Today, after two more months of incessant bombardment, forced displacement and weaponised deprivation, the statement remains as relevant as it did on the 1st of January.
A selection of recorded voices, some prepared especially and others taken from primary sources, are deployed throughout the set to evoke the cognitive dissonance of 'business as usual' while tens of thousands of people are being killed, to insist on the importance of speaking out despite the repercussions, or simply to reproduce the words of a Palestinian girl asserting her right to live — and die — on Palestinian soil. While these spoken word elements state, explicitly, and occasionally patronisingly, the positions DJ Voices wants the listener to consider, the music — both the selection and its sequencing — implicitly, and in my opinion more persuasively, serves as an argument for those very same positions, an argument that's all the more powerful for being largely wordless. That probably sounds high-flown, but listen to the set and I think you'll understand what I mean.
I found myself pondering the creative choices that go into making a statement like this on what would likely otherwise be an uncomplicated night of fun at the club — especially on New Year's Eve. Lean too far into it and you risk alienating people to the point that your message is misunderstood or even rejected. But sanitise it too much and the whole point of the statement — to snap people out of their mindless pleasure for a moment and ask them to acknowledge horror, and consider what to do about it — could easily be lost. What dose of derailing reality will go just far enough, and how should it be delivered? And what measure of straightforward hedonism might be needed to keep the wary on board? Can this balancing act itself be fertile creative territory, a source of personal expression and collective catharsis? Can real rage — not blind, but pointed — work on a dancefloor?
Obviously there is a more fundamental question about whether a DJ set or any other form of art can even say something meaningful, appropriate, productive about an ongoing genocide and our response to it, or lack thereof. One of the quotes DJ Voices includes in her set takes up this theme:
This must be our constant betrayal, to know now that the lyric is not as valuable as the polemic. That the sonnet must give way to the photocopied and wheatpasted list of companies and individuals with financial ties to the genocide. That political thought is not only an option for artists but a duty, an obligation and a fundamental necessity. That it supersedes the line break, the marginalia, the invocation of the muse. Better to know what we’re saying and why, and to say it with force, like a stone hurled from the river that reaches the sea.
The longer article that this quotation comes from, by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, argues that writing (or any art making) during a war must aim to be inherently unsettling if it is to "gather others up with us" and generate momentum for change, rather than let the reader (or listener) off the hook as a temporary, passive witness. Creative work that engages with "horrible truths" can be a kind of rehearsal for the more material work, offering "a space to try out strategies, think through contradictions, remind us of our own agency". You'd struggle to write a more concise statement of intent for what DJ Voices sought to achieve and, in my opinion, achieved, with her set at Nowadays on New Year's Eve.
Then there's a further question about how appropriate it is to subject a deeply-felt statement like this one to the same kind of analysis I might apply to any passing guest mix on NTS. This is not exactly "Guaranteed to brighten up your week" territory. But I think deeply-felt art deserves deeply-felt criticism. And besides, I just can't help myself: the craft (with a small 'c') on display is too good to go unremarked.
To illustrate: at 15 minutes DJ Voices mixes in Art.Indust's 'Go Well' on a halfbeat and, whether intentional or not, the off-time barrage and gnarly Detroit-influenced electronics act as a rude awakening, aimed, surely, at that very same Art Industry. The "mmmm, it does go well" refrain takes on an increasingly risible 'This Is Fine' tone as she then loops a stuttering, dissonant measure from the middle of the track and layers Chris Korda's 'Six Billion Humans' over the top:
The world revolves around me
What I want
I want a cigarette, a beer, a baby, a new car
Throw it away
Six billion humans can't be wrong
One world
One shit
Beyond the technical feat of this transition (which continues into a three-deck blend with the following tune), by playing Korda's track this way DJ Voices pushes its satire from merely cloying into something genuinely nightmarish. As if that wasn't enough, Korda's commoditised "baby" literally starts crying just as she mixes out into Absolute's 'Unarmed And Extremely Dangerous'. The implication in this juxtaposition is precise, and devastating.
And that's just one example from the first 20 minutes of the set. Similar devices crop up throughout, from the building up of conventional euphoria only for it to be undercut by fractured dissonance, to the inclusion of a range of conspicuous vocals — 'King Of My Castle', 'Let Go My Ego', 'Tekno La Droga' — that land on a spectrum from profound to corny depending on my mood whenever I listen. (These allusions should also be read in the light of the professional dispute DJ Voices has been going through with Nowadays since mid-December — read more about that on her blog, here.)
I'll only shout out one more moment, both for its sheer audacity and for how it neatly captures something about what DJ Voices set out to achieve here. Around two and a quarter hours in she drops an edit of 'Homicide' by 70s band 999, from a new EP by Simic under the alias Accessories To Murder (subtle this particular selection is not). After the dense pressure of the preceding sequence this punk moment acts, rather bizarrely considering the theme, as a kind of light relief. But if that was a surprise, then the next move is even more so: a ludicrously cheesy 1993 breakbeat cover of 'Rapture' by Blondie, its mawkish 'Let No Man Put Asunder' bassline and rave stabs key-matched to the outgoing 'Homicide' for maximum impact, and complete with a modulated chord progression in the hook that, taken out of context, must surely heighten the carefree euphoria of the original lyrics, but which taken in context, that is, in the light of the longer rhetorical arc of this denunciatory howl of a set, only serves to sour those same lyrics into something positively, excruciatingly grotesque:
Toe to toe
Dancing very close
Barely breathing
Almost comatose
Wall to wall
People hypnotized
And they're stepping lightly
Hang each night in raptureBack to back
Sacroiliac
Spineless movement
And a wild attack
Face to face
Sightless solitude
And it's finger popping
Twenty-four hour shopping in rapture
Full tracklist on DJ Voices' Instagram here.