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

Well, Honcho Campout recordings season is here, so you can guess what Midweek Mixes programming is going to be like over the coming months. My recording will be out on the 23rd, just in time for Christmas. In the meantime, here are three other things I’ve been listening to at home recently.

Diamin - Mutant Radio (18/11/25)

Diamin mixes are some of the most reliable listens on soundcloud. The vibe on this Mutant Radio show is gorgeous smokey bedroom torch songs, though always with a weirdo edge in both lyrical content and technical experimentation, from the opening ‘With The Day Comes The Dawn’ by Anna Domino to the closing ‘Love Without Sound’ by White Noise, a Radiophonic Workshop side-project from 1969. New and welcome surprises for me included the unmistakable voice of Brian Molko of Placebo on ‘Blue American’, which breaks the 80s-focus of the rest of the show but fits perfectly nonetheless; and Akiko Yano & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Stepping Into Asia’, produced in 1986 when the two musicians were a married couple. A mention too for Soft Cell’s ‘Seedy City’, a well-chosen tribute to the recently departed Dave Ball.

Mx. Blaire - Cherry Tapes 001

Mx. Blaire shared this with me way back in July but it took me until now to give it a proper listen, which gives an indication of the general timeframe my life has been operating on this year. It’s a two-part DJ mix on cassette, 45 minutes each side, the first part ACID and the second part BASS. The acid side opens with the beats mix of ‘Maggie’s Last Party’ by V.I.M. from 1990, and the cut-up of Margaret Thatcher saying “let’s have a party!” is highly addictive. The production immediately sets the tone for the ensuing selection: fierce, maximal, increasingly dark through the middle part and into a more uplifting finale. (Note: ‘Maggie’s Last Party’ wasn’t the first Thatcher-referencing acid house tune — that was Boy George’s ‘No Clause 28’, released in 1988 to protest the passing of the titular anti-gay legislation in the UK.)

Now I love acid house, but to be frank a lot of the tunes in the later part of this mix are not my bag: too big and garish, especially when the off-beat basslines, piano stabs and trancey vocals show up. The BASS mix takes things down a notch and is better for it, kicking off, appropriately, with CCL’s ‘Plot Twist’ before settling into a kind of swervey, compressed, involving flow. There are also some maximal 90s moments here too — that huge tribal beat about 20 minutes in is pure circuit party — but in general they are tempered by more interesting grooves, be they swung or broken. The track at 32 minutes on this side is crazy, a stuttering jackhammer beat paired with cut-up metallic breaks, while still leaving enough space amid the mayhem to catch your breath.

For me the big appeal of this project is the physicality of it, both in the chosen medium (a classic cassette with a sick inlay design, see above, which you can get on Bandcamp) and the way you can hear Mx. Blaire herself at work in the mix. Twenty-five minutes into the ACID side, Blaire kills the power on the turntable, allowing the tune that’s playing to come to an almost complete halt, before gradually speeding it back up again. It’s the kind of touch that speaks to the broader project of recording a mix with much-loved vinyl and putting it on a cassette: hands-on, intentional, human.

Alien D - Live @ Sustain Release 2025

Alien D opened the ‘Bossa Lounge’ on one of the days of this year’s Sustain Release weekend rager with a selection of noises considerably broader than your average DJ set. Already the opening track, a recording of the late Mira Calix and ensemble performing at the Aldeburgh music festival in 2007, features enough clattering to make you wonder if they were still setting up the DJ booth around him while he played. Elsewhere the moods transit from dripping primordial swamp to Wicker Man ritual sacrifice to abandoned desert outpost to — most affectingly, after almost four hours — religious close harmony set to a bellows-driven drone in a pitch-black disused railway tunnel (this last one isn’t my fantasy, that’s genuinely how the version of ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’ that appears towards the end of the set was recorded). I knew precisely none of the tracks in this mix going into it, not even the Lana Del Rey one, and I approve of all of them — except, perhaps, the dirge version of ‘The Sun Can’t Compare’. Regardless, I came out the other side a better man.