Midweek Mixes (13/04/23)
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.
Before I get into it: if you’re in Lisbon this weekend, come to the first ever Welt Discos party! I’ve invited Midweek Mixes staples Nick Kagame and Chima Isaaro — in fact I think they are #1 and #2 on the all-time MM leaderboard! — and I will be doing the warm up from 22h. Tickets on RA.
This week’s Midweek Mixes were all recorded live within a week of each other back in February, two of them in the very same venue. Get stuck in.
Dana Kuehr - Live @ Sundaze BXL (19/02/23)
I’ve been told that Sundaze is one of the best parties in Brussels, which is saying a lot given how many good parties there are in the city: Los Ninos (which I wrote about here), Beautiful Freaks, Gay Haze (see here and here) and the festivals Listen and Horst, which I’ll play at in a few weeks’ time (not to mention the intersecting crews from Planet, Crevette, Basic Moves, Not Your Techno, Kiosk etc etc). OK I’m a BXL fanboy, so sue me! I’m also a Dana Kuehr fanboy, as anyone who has read my review of her debut LP or listened to her EOS Radio guest mix would know. And here is a recording of her doing her DJ thing at Sundaze back in February, a set that, I heard through the grapevine, elevated the Sunday rave crowd to a higher plane.
Listening to it, you can tell why. She opens with 20 minutes or so of deep sci-fi electro and breaks, mysterious voices creeping through the mix, before opening out into 4/4 with a track that toys with prog signifiers but doesn’t actually go there (phew), instead remaining deep as fuck. In fact that’s how I’d characterise this whole mix, which is highly refreshing given it was a peaktime set. Dana mixes in bumpier, more melodic house tracks among the wonkier, more angular selections, which can occasionally give the set a bit of a ping pong feel but also results in real ‘moments’, not least of which is the transition into the final track — the sun shining through the post-thunderstorm haze.
Other highlights include the skanky banger halfway through, Go Dam’s epic ‘Forest Illusion’ and that transition 64 minutes in. I’m lucky enough to be seeing Dana do another Sundaze set in person at the end of May — I’ll report back!
Banana Moon - Live @ Maximum Joy (24/02/23)
The kind of warm-up I dream of when I go out early to a party, here made reality by Luigi Di Venere & Massimiliano Pagliara aka Banana Moon, whose 2021 EP Delphinium Blue continues in rotation round these parts. This opening set is from Luigi’s party at Sameheads in Berlin, Maximum Joy, named, presumably, after the British band who — like their counterparts Set The Tone — explicitly blended post punk with its otherwise under-recognised influences from Black music: funk, dub, boogie, hip hop etc.
And sure enough all these influences are present and correct in this set, woven through the whiter genres of dream house, italo, nu disco and their contemporary chuggy/90s-revivalist counterparts. It’s not a set of highlights because the whole thing works so well together, but if I had to pick out a few moments they would begin with Alex Kassian’s exquisite remix of Gratts’ ‘Sun Circles’ (an early 2023 favourite), move on to the triplety Kazino-like italo dub at 68 minutes (which is the kind of thing few people would ever dare to play out, or mix into for that matter, and for that reason I love it), and then the unexpected drop of ‘Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)’ near the end.
This latter song, in a version that seems to lightly amp up the bassline and add some effects while otherwise leaving the original alone, just drives home an underlying message that I take home from this mix: whatever anyone has been doing over the past 40 or so years, it had already pretty much been done, and done really well, by around 1984. Thankfully Daniel Wang’s acid tribute to Berlin ‘DSDN’ arrives right on time to puncture that lofty train of thought with its 1984-meets-2004-meets-2024 sound and delicately deadpan humour.
Carly Zeng Live @ Sameheads (16/02/23)
Carly Zeng runs the Berlin party Dissident, which, from a distance, looks to focus on the higher bpm amped-up techno/trance/pop end of the 2023 rave spectrum. Not my bag musically but it certainly looks like a hell of a lot of fun. In this set recorded at Sameheads a week before Banana Moon’s above, she’s in a slightly different register, for the first half at any rate. In fact the opening section is full of guitars, early synths and drum machines and optimistic 80s vocals. There’s a UK Funky moment, a Cantopop moment, a what-sounds-like-Sweely-meets-Cardi-B moment.
There are a lot of selections that lean further into the europop end of the spectrum and that’s where the mix loses me a bit. Then some of the records are simply OTT, like the one 44 minutes in with a woman screaming “afterhour!” as if it was a punishment. (It does feel like that sometimes, doesn’t it?) But usually Carly brings it back with something more funky and ambiguous — the industrial/weirdo italo vibe just over an hour in, for example.