November 13, 2024

Midweek Mixes (13/11/24)

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.

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Diamin - Maricas Crack Residency #5

Last Friday I very much wanted to go and see Diamin playing the opening set at Outra Cena here in Lisbon, but it was one of those evenings where I simply couldn’t drag myself out of the house. What was calling to me was the promise of music like this set, recorded for Maricas’s mid-lockdown Crack residency, and her more recent mix for their own series from earlier this year.

This Crack mix opens with scratchy electro, funky bleep and J.S. Kane’s onomatopaeic ‘Klunk’, released under his Octagon Man alias in 1995. It’s a strong start, and exactly the kind of tunes I’d want to hear emanating from the OC speakers early doors. Soon after, she plays Drum Club’s ‘Sea Above The Clouds’, a tune I’ve been wanting to drop in a set for the past few years but still never found the right moment. The mix finishes with “Space Out Locked In’ from the same Drum Club LP, the perfect track for drifting off at the end of a stellar listen.

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T.Wan - Afters Heady Mix

These tracks, and this mix as a whole, are the very definition of heady, yet, thanks to their centrifugal grooves and percussion-heavy sound palette, also very good for flinging yourself around your kitchen. Within the first fifteen minutes we’ve had Danny Daze & Jonny From Space’s broken dial-up modem ‘Tumbadora’, Naco — a Japanese producer you can always depend on to turn your ears out (especially when frog noises have been added) — with ‘Returntoto’, and Bluetoof’s equally jittery ‘Orb Ponderer’. I love the extended silence in this latter tune, broken suddenly by our favourite Canadian rave loon.

Most of this music is super new, so the tracklist is therefore very exciting — if also chastening — for anyone like me who has let their digging slide significantly these past few months. And international though they may be, all the tracks fit under the broad church of what me and my friend Dana recently, and very cleverly I’m sure you’ll agree, christened “American Club Music”. Thanks Tiffany for the excellent primer. (Though you need to tell us what the amazing penultimate track is - it’s not on the tracklist!)

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Telma & Lamaz - Live @ Waking Life 2024

This set began exactly five hours after me and G had finished our four-hour b2b in the Floresta at Waking Life, and that’s the reason I barely remember any of it: by 4am in the morning I was well and truly spangled. Being real, I was already spangled by 4pm the afternoon before, after playing father-of-the-bride for two dear friends getting married at the Casa Marmelada, indulging in copious amounts of natural wine, and then cosplaying as wedding DJs with G as the sun went down in the forest. After finishing our set I skedaddled to the Praia stage to catch Chima Isaaro playing WLTD009, then spent much of upsammy’s set getting up to no good with the crew on one of the decks at the back of the dancefloor. By the time livwutang came on (lowercase programming ftw?), we were fully en rampage and nothing was going to stop us, not even Telma and Lamaz starting up over at Floresta.

I do in fact have a very distinct memory of the two finishing their set three hours later with Orbital ‘Impact (The Earth Is Burning)’, a track I chose to finish my set at Multisex with only a month earlier. What I have absolutely no recollection of is their penultimate track being Datassette’s ‘Metropolis Light Transport’, with which I closed my Mix For Tracy many years ago. You know when you just feel an affinity?

Thanks to the aforementioned rampage, I also have no recollection of the preceding three hours of sick Floresta vibes, all the more impressive since T&L had never even played together in public before. My favourite moments listening back to the set now come from the grainy minimal tracks popping up early on (like the one that goes “tie me up/don’t let me down” and sounds like Evil C & The Hustler), the smattering of hype electro bangers, and of course the way things get loose into the final half hour with a ‘Pass That Dutch’ edit. (Though I can’t forgive the displacement of Missy’s vocals onto the wrong beat, not here, not anywhere.)

If I picture the scene as Orbital played out and DJ Rino took to the decks, I see myself on the wooden seating built into the DJ booth, spreadeagled next to A Guy Called Gerald but unable to engage him in conversation (a shame, since he seemed like a lovely guy), and worrying vaguely about sunburn as the 8am rays began to penetrate the Floresta canopy. Take me back!