Midweek Mixes (11/10/23)
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.
My Midweek Mixes: Dekmantel Hör Special kinda took it out of me, but I have been coaxing myself out of the doldrums (covid? back pain? the inexplicable need to go to bed at 9pm?) with some slowjam mixes. So this week you get a selection of the sleazy stuff: two sets from artists who played at Honcho Campout back in August, and one bit of mulchy goodness from the ever reliable Bakk Heia crew.
Coming up this week I am co-hosting the Welt Discos x Pumping Velvet takeover at The Pickle Factory with Sam PV, who will also be celebrating his birthday on the night. We have Hannah Holland and Nick Kagame as guests, and me and Sam will be doing a b2b warm-up. This will be my last gig in London for a few months so I hope to see you down there nice and early — tickets for entry before midnight are a tenner and can be bought here.
Then on Saturday I will be playing for On Ice, a cosy little loft rave in Nottingham that this time is happening in a basement. I’m doing four hours from when the doors open, followed by resident Sam On Ice. Can’t wait.
Razrbark - Distant Signals 030
I missed Razrbark playing at Hemlock Hole during the Friday night of Campout for reasons I will discuss (at great length) below. Listening to this set now, I regret this immensely. This brand of electro/breaks/trancey stuff is very current and, if it were played at the usual speed, might be something I’d get a bit bored by after an hour. But here it’s slowed down to a sludgy, queasy 105bpm or so, breathing new life and mood into it. Take the proggy tunes from 20-30 minutes in: at this pace, the gated vocals, acid lines, off-beat basslines and reverbed percussion all have so much more room to breathe, spinning off into the aether in an incredibly satisfying way. The claustrophobia I often feel listening to this kind of music at normal speed is lifted. My mind can drift.
It’s worth noting that Razrbark is not only using the WIDE function of the CDJs to slowjam things with the master tempo on, but also, often I think, turning the master tempo off and pitching things down massively. With CDJs I feel like sometimes there’s a temptation to keep things on master tempo so they don’t sound super weird, but here Razrbark’s goal seems to be to intentionally lean into that weirdness. It has the feel of when I saw Vladimir Ivkovic at Nowadays back in April (read about that here), though of course he was achieving the same effect with vinyl. The stretch in this mix from 34 minutes onwards — through the funk of Radioactive Man remixing John Selway, played 30bpm slower than usual, into a couple of EBM-ish numbers that for all I know could be hi NRG slowed down by the same amount — is glorious.
(For a longer newsletter on the slowjam/fastjam, see here.)
Scott Zacharias - Gates of Sincerity, Radio 80000 (11/09/23)
Scott Zacharias played the closing set at Hemlock Hole on the same Friday night as Razrbark, after Lis Dalton had done her thing in the middle. That day was my birthday and I had already had a ridiculous amount of fun at Hemlock that afternoon while conducting my artist liaison duties for Harry Cross and Phlegm. About 500 different people had wished me happy returns. I was flying. In fact, I had so much fun on my shift that when the sun started to go down I decided to let my hair down even further — it was my birthday after all — and so I hit the booze and the drugs. It couldn’t last. To cut a long story short, by the time Scott came on at Hemlock at 3.30am that night, I was a very different Joe from the one who had decided to get on it nine hours earlier, and not entirely for the better. I had been through the acid wringer, to put it bluntly. And it was only thanks to some careful chaperoning from Sam that I hadn’t zipped myself up in my tent to wait for Saturday morning, whenever that would come. (It would come, wouldn’t it? Right?!)
My original plan for Friday night had been to stick at The Grove in anticipation of Honcho’s flagship closing set, which was due to start at 4am and end at 7am. But by the time I’d made it through the evening’s acid wilderness, that marathon no longer seemed so doable, so I ended up back at Hemlock Hole around 2am to see if I still had any legs for dancing. This is a topic for another time, but Lis Dalton was at that moment playing one of the most outrageously on-point sets I’ve heard in my life at a casual 100bpm. Everyone was maximum vibing and having a gay old time. This was, it turned out, just what the acid gremlins required to keep them happy. I’m not overstating it to say that Lis’s set helped me slow-jive my way back to existence again. (Now that’s one recording I can’t wait to hear…)
Anyway, all of this is a prelude to the moment when Scott Zacharias came on, half an hour before Honcho were due to start up at The Grove. I was at a crossroads: stick or twist. I listened to my body, my mind, and the aforementioned acid gremlins, and stuck, hard. Scott came on and simply continued with Lis’s incredible slowjam vibe, playing the kind of music that perfectly suited my somewhat embattled psychedelic mood. As far as I remember, he eschewed the more recognisable pop hits that Lis had been dropping into her set as if it was nothing, but that doesn’t mean he went abstract. Not at all. I remember luxuriating in the kind of tracks he plays in this particular radio show: highly musical, a bit dubby, at times orchestrated at others not, sometimes with vocals, always intriguing. I recall finally feeling at home in the denim jacket I had borrowed from Sam earlier in the evening (double denim, me?), enjoying grooving next to the other Hemlock regulars on a gradually emptying forest floor as more and more people made the twist up to Honcho.
Finally, I thought, the crisis was over.
But NO. Acid has a way of springing bonus surprises on you when you least expect them — or at least it does with me — and what happened next was not something I could have been prepared for. As I danced to Scott’s set, gradually encroaching on my already fragile consciousness was the delicate sound of — bells? Not church bells; not cowbells; but jingle bells, the kind worn by Morris dancers or reindeer. At first I thought they were in the track Scott was playing, but then they carried on into the next one, always close to the beat but unwaveringly (and unsettlingly) just off it. I looked around and located the source: a fellow Campout raver whose intentions, I’m sure, were good, but, catastrophically for me, included one that involved wearing bells around their ankles. I had been bang on with the Morris dancer allusion.
I couldn’t take it. Scott was playing the most magical music in what had essentially become a private party for me and a handful of others at the end of my birthday night, and now here was some bizarre Morris-Rave dancer fucking (if you’ll excuse me) it all up. It briefly crossed my acid-addled mind that this would be a great opportunity to deploy the new assertive Joe i’ve been working on these past few years: surely no one would object to a polite but firm request to remove their ankle bells because they’re KILLING MY VIBE OK??! Of course, in reality that request would have been me absolutely murdering the innocent bell wearer’s vibe, so thankfully I pulled back from that particular approach before acting on it. Instead I did the adult thing: I removed myself from the situation, telling myself that even though I wanted to stay for the rest of Scott’s set, Honcho were playing up at The Grove and I could just go and see whether my brain could take it. If it couldn’t, I could call it a night and go back to the tent. No biggie.
So off I went on my way to The Grove, trekking through the campsite, over the bridge and into the trees near the big stage. The closer I got to the big lights and noise, the greater my conviction grew that it was simply not the one. I’d been through too much that evening and night and a plunge into a crowd of over a thousand people in the heat of a Honcho closing set was really the last thing I needed to subject myself to. Especially in double denim. I saw it all in the distance, said “good for them”, and abruptly turned back to the bridge. My mind was made up, the tent was calling.
Except. Except! As I walked back towards the bridge, who should come tinkling in the opposite direction but the Morris Raver themselves, still blissfully unaware of the ongoing drama in which the two of us had become entangled. This moment was also, I admit, a moment of pure bliss for me: the dawning realisation that Hemlock Hole would now be beautifully bell-free, the warm embrace of that soundsystem and dancefloor and Scott’s wonderful music waiting just for me, sans jingaling. I had a new spring in my (silent) step as I wended my way back through the woods before rejoining the scant others on the dancefloor, where I vibed my head off until Scott finished around 6am. Spent, I went back to my tent a whole person once again.
As it turns out, Scott had originally been scheduled to play earlier in the evening, but for some reason was swapped to the closing set. I can imagine that for him it may not have been the best change: he was now directly competing with the festival organisers themselves up at The Grove, and thus was left with a sparse bunch of Hemlock die-hards and the somewhat confused dregs of the rest (that would be me). But sometimes that’s the lot of the DJ and ego has to be put to one side. From my side, I can confidently say that Scott — and Lis before him — saved my fucking Friday night, and on my birthday to boot. For that I will forever be grateful.
Bitzer Maloney - NARR Radio (09/09/23)
Jack is very on-brand here with his romanesco broccoli because, you guessed it, this is MULCH HOUSE. He says so himself in the blurb that goes with this radio show:
RIYL goblins, perusing dungeons for items, mossy walls…
In the Razrbark vein, he’s slowjammed a bunch of faster proggy/acid/trancey things and married them with already slow psychedelic dub and even a bit of proto house. As one soundcloud commenter says: “Squelchymelchygoodness”.