Midweek Mixes (06/09/23)
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.
Midweek Mixes has suffered somewhat over the summer months, not because I haven’t been listening to things, but because the things I’ve been listening to are not mixes I could just write a short paragraph about. I find that as I get deeper into my own relationship with DJing, and with myself, I find more to relate to in others and in their DJing. I haven’t written about my summer in North America so far because it’s difficult to find the time to do these significant experiences justice. But one solution I’ve come up with is to kind of merge these different strands of this newsletter together, so today you’ll get a small glimpse into my Honcho Campout experience through the lens of two mixes by artists who performed there.
I worked on the Artist Liaison team at the festival, which gave me the privilege of accompanying several DJs and performers as they did their thing. Not all the mixes I’ll cover in future weeks will be by artists I worked with (or even by Campout artists in general) but you can expect there to be a bit of a theme as I think about and process some of the memories and ideas-for-the-future that have stuck with me since my August trip.
Colored Craig kicks off his RA mix with Kerri Chandler’s ‘Mommy What’s A Record?’ from 2010, a track whose opening anecdote lays out — cleverly, charmingly and perhaps a little ruefully — what Craig is all about. In a world where the love for and skill of playing vinyl is, essentially, dying out, Craig plays records and only records. And in a world where clubs in general seem to see less and less actual dancing going on, he dances to those records while he plays them. He's not resigned himself to the implacable onward march of time, trends and technology. Rather, he’s ready to resist: after that initial anecdote, the rest of the mix rams home again and again the vital pleasures of going to the club, seeing a DJ (truly) spin, and having a proper dance.
And this being house music, there are infinite opportunities for him to articulate those very pleasures through the selections he makes. “I’ve got jazz in my soul/I can feel it from my head down to my toes” sings Frederick Turner before Gary Michael Wade emphasises “I need to dance/I wanna dance y’all” — the latter over the all-time classic ‘Dance’ by Earth People aka Pal Joey. Dance can of course also be a metaphor for sex, as 20 Fingers aka Big Sister’s ‘Round We Go’ makes perfectly clear, but the intentions in this mix are largely pure, taking aim instead at the soul and, often, the mind too. Andre's Record Shack’s ‘Freedom Suite’ provides an unexpectedly literary (at least for a house track) moment before the poignant narrative of ‘Music Is Pumping’, on which Sharon Williams tells us the age-old story of using the weekend as a release from the daily grind.
This leads into the emotional centrepiece of the mix as a whole, a moment that makes me think of Craig’s performance at Campout and the whirlwind of feelings it brought up for all of us, including, I think, him. He plays the Masters at Work remix of ‘Release’ by Afro Celt Sound System featuring Sinead O’Connor on vocals. Assuming Craig recorded this mix after the singer’s untimely death, this is as fitting a tribute to her as you could imagine. The instrumental for the song had been recorded but put on hold by the band after the death (at only 27 years old) of one of their core musicians. O’Connor, a guest vocalist, then revived it in a single studio session, her improvised lyrics about grief and remembering being both devastating and inspirational, then and, more than ever after her death, now:
Don't argue amongst yourselves
Because of the loss of me
I'm sitting amongst yourselves
Don't think you can't see me
Don't argue amongst yourselves
Because of the loss of me
I haven't gone anywhere
But out of my body
Reach out and you'll touch me
Make effort to speak to me
Call out and you'll hear me
Be happy for me
The accumulation of different desires, emotions, bodily sensations and spiritual ideas by this point is already almost too much to bear, so Craig uses the back half of the mix to release them through disco fever (a cover of ‘The Boss’), straight-up rave (A Guy Called Gerald’s bassline sampled on 33 ½ Queen’s ‘Searchin’; a banging Nightcrawlers cut) and a few Music Box-style curveballs (Palma’s ‘Slapstick’ massively pitched down as a beat tool; the trippy midsection of ‘You Need Some Activator’, also used as a bridging track without ever fulling giving away the hook). The final stretch gets us back down on solid ground with one track beseeching the crowd to “dance for me/let the drums fill you”, before the brilliant piano-led Raze-sampling closer simply hammers away at you with that drum break and fat bassline until your feet can’t help but move.
Craig was one of my artists at Campout so I felt a particular responsibility to make sure he had everything he needed, but when he started on the Hemlock Hole stage at 3pm on Sunday afternoon it was not clear to any of us whether he would be able to DJ and dance like he usually does. We had all witnessed the stage wobble and shake over the previous few days as other DJs stomped their way through their sets. Ali Berger had played vinyl on the Friday afternoon with a few issues, but, no shade to Ali, he is not quite as demonstrative a dancer as Craig. On Saturday a plan was hatched and before Sunday lunchtime the sound and backline teams had managed to lash the DJ table to the stage and bring in an extra riser for Craig to stand on, layered at right angles to the others and distributing his body-weight more evenly across the floor of the booth.
Nevertheless, we looked on nervously as Craig set his stuff up during Philadelphia drag performer The Moon Baby’s incredible, treadmill-powered and literally show-stopping interval performance. Craig himself was also clearly nervous about the conditions, tentatively moving around to his first few records and visibly controlling his body. There weren’t any skips, but this seemed mainly to be due to a great force of will on his part. Every time it looked like he was starting to feel more comfortable to express himself physically, something — perhaps a wobbling needle, or a jump in the record he was cueing — would seem to hold him back. And then, as he stood there, his body semi-rigid, focussed on making the most out of this compromise he hadn’t expected and certainly shouldn’t have had to deal with, he played it — that record:
Something special happens to me
Every time I hear that beat
I start to float then I hit the floor
Let the party start cos I want some more
I need to dance
I wanna dance y’all
I wanna dance dance dance
Dance dance dance
Da-ee-ance
This was the first of a series of moments of pure emotion for me during Craig’s set, watching him turn compromise into a powerful artistic statement, communicating to and encouraging the crowd, most of whom probably had no idea of the internal battle he was fighting. Of course it would have been better if the stage setup had allowed him to perform as he wanted to. But I can’t help but feel a kind of selfish gratitude to have witnessed him overcome adversity and turn it into a triumph over the course of the afternoon. And I’ll never forget it: for one glorious moment, midway through, he launched himself off the side of the stage to throw shapes with some friends on the reassuringly solid floor of the forest, before once again taking up his position, the consummate professional, at the controls.
Cay Horiuchi closed down The Grove stage on Thursday night after Jason Kendig, who was one of my designated artists. Rain during Jason’s set had led to all sorts of shenanigans involving a tarp being first held and then lashed over his head and the equipment. Miraculously everything kept going. The meat of Jason’s set was quite solidly techno but he finessed this into slower vintage-sounding synthy stuff towards the end before Cay came on. I couldn’t concretely tell you how Cay then started or even proceeded with their set, just that their selection was genre- and tempo-agnostic with a flow, everything they played was good and the mixing was sick. You could sense that both the staff and crowd had the feeling of a festival being set on the right course. Towards the end of the set, I guess around 3.30am, they dropped Paul Parker’s ‘Right On Target’ and I had a little moment. The first of many that weekend.
This mix of Cay’s for the respected Daisychain series came out in 2019, a pre-covid, pre-many-things time. When I first listened to it, a week or so after Campout, I kept wondering to myself when these tracks were from, as almost all of them have the grainy patina of original UK/Artificial Intelligence to them, but with one or two glossier elements that give them away as more contemporary. The mood is varied but coherent, helped by Cay’s deft sequencing and unobtrusive yet musical mixing, which is just how I like it. As it turns out from the tracklist, all of the selections were post-2010 and the great majority of them from the late 2010s, the only genuinely old track being an archival one from Paul Woolford aka Special Request’s Bedroom Tapes, released the same year as the mix.
On a bad day this realisation might feel a bit chastening, a reminder of how narrow my own music consumption is and has been over the years. There’s so much music being made that would speak to me yet I never make the time or effort to listen to it, or even actively shut myself off from it. (Yes, it’s true, I’ve never listened to DJ Python because I think it’s a stupid artist name and I once saw a video of him DJing wearing a backpack.) That someone could make such a glittering, evocative mix with this particular sound that I love, in 2019, using almost exclusively new or recent music that I’d never heard of or paid attention to, makes me feel a bit small and complacent as a listener and DJ. And if I was out of touch then, imagine how much worse it must be now!
But on a good day, rather than generating feelings of inferiority, this experience — of discovery, challenging preconceptions, realigning temporal and genre assumptions — instead feels mind-expanding and thrilling. Rather than encouraging acquisitiveness, it just creates a kind of awe and wonder at the richness and complexity of everything. And this is one way I would describe the experience of Campout itself, the realisation that there’s all this stuff going on out there done by people with their own voices, intersecting with the voices of others and transcending the boundaries we each construct within our own heads when we look out at and deal with the world. And that this is something to celebrate rather than to feel inferior about. “Duh”, you might say, and “duh” I say to myself. But I struggle to name a more potent illustration of that slippery yet fundamental fact than my time at Campout this year. It was a lesson in looking at things with a ‘good day’ pair of glasses on, because when everyone does that, we all have a really good day.
Of course, some of the best Campout moments were those that drew on old tracks and memories reaching back to my adolescence and even childhood, and obviously no one can listen to everything all of the time. But listening to Cay’s mix over the past couple of weeks and realising how contemporary it was when it was released, while still now sounding timeless, has been a healthy reminder not only of the power of good artistry, but also that time is in fact a very wavey thing, and sometimes it’s worth stepping out of the archives and bargain bins and fully into the present to really look at what’s going on, to be able to take that into the future. Thanks Cay for this public service broadcast across the dimensions!