Midweek Mixes (14/09/23)
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.
A brief update on my movements over the next few weeks.
Tomorrow I head to London to see the Sugababes before, on Saturday night, playing b2b with Sofie K for Pumping Velvet at Dalston Superstore. If you haven’t been to PV before, you don’t know what you’re missing, but you can get an idea by reading this.
Then on Sunday evening I’ll be playing at Street Outdoors in Thessaloniki, which is my cue to post the same image I post every time I go to Greece.
At the end of the month I have a double-trouble weekend of b2bs with Gwenan. First we warm up my own Welt Discos label party at Arroz Estúdios in Lisbon on the 29th (get your ticket now!) and then we do a 4-hour closing set for Linear in Madrid on the 30th.
This week’s Midweek Mixes are a bit stream of consciousness cos that’s how I’m feeling right now. So without further ado…
This is mulch house and I won’t hear otherwise. Ciel sifts through all the damp, earthy, mossy music made by studio forest dwellers over the past 30 years and comes out with an almost unclassifiable banger of a mix. I say almost unclassifiable, because I’m unilaterally classifying it here as mulch house. OK? There’s even a bloody frog croaking ten minutes in.
What are the signifiers of mulch house? A catholic attitude to 4/4-meets-breaks when it comes to beats. A sponginess to the overall sound that may, at times, be punctuated by sharper, not to say harsher tones (like the ravey stabs in the centre of that ‘Tree Frog’ tune), but usually soon reasserts itself, like with the mulch par excellence of Susumu Yokota’s squidgy ‘Betanamin’. Then Luca Lozano’s remix of ‘Under The Lily Pads’ drives the point home (ribbit!). Another trait of mulch house is a slightly dubious new-agey vibe that I just can’t shake. The promo text for that ‘Lily Pads’ release notes:
As the siren’s song echoes out of systems worldwide, perhaps we are (re)turning to the liquid age of dance; with natural ephemera such as moss, sentiments for ecology such as swamps, and mercurial aspects of water all absorbing the aesthetic forefront.
MULCH HOUSE.
(Side note: this aesthetic turn in dance music must be a symptom of the broader post-covid yen for all things mossy. As the peril in which we have placed the natural world becomes not just undeniable but irreversible, we subconsciously reach out to it. As wildfires consume our forests, we abjectly conjure sonic leaf litter from our air conditioned studios. And perhaps there’s a whiff of the camping-as-poverty-cosplay to it too, like the crypto bros getting their fingernails dirty and ‘surviving’ the mulch that was this year’s Burning Man.)
Woah, sorry. Typing out loud. Where was I.
Like Ciel’s recording from last year’s Honcho Campout (covered here), this mix is intimidatingly well put together. And I totally support her stated aim of wading upstream against the seemingly endless inundation of euro-prog-trance-whatever. What it lacks though, for me, is the punch of that Campout live recording, the edge-of-the-seat-ness, the surprise factor. The tracks here are uniformly excellent and the transitions are precision engineered, the tension is built and sustained expertly, yet it’s barely released.
What I find myself wanting is some funkiness, and if there’s one thing mulch house just isn’t, it’s funky. It’s moss, after all, not machines. That realisation hits me hardest precisely when she does introduce some genuine robot funk 90 minutes in, the fat Detroit bassline and hihats of Angel D’Light’s ‘Dream 2 Reality’ slicing through the undergrowth to reveal a high-octane engine pulsing beneath. It’s a thrilling moment that, unfortunately for me, is over too soon. Incidentally, that track appears on a compilation that comes with a bonus (if you buy it) t-shirt with the slogan:
As a soldier of the Earth your mission is to preserve nature for a valuable future
Soldier? Mission? Valuable? Is this the mulchification of the military-industrial complex?
(Do check out Ciel’s Q&A for this mix as, among other things, it’s brimming with acute points about clubbing and DJing, especially when it comes to the topics of strobes and toilets.)
Jacob Meehan - Live @ Battle Hymn (August 2023)
On this live recording from NYC’s Battle Hymn outdoor party back in August, Jacob Meehan takes over as the previous DJ finishes their set with Limelife aka Todd Terry’s ‘Baby Can You Reach’ from 1995, which has been my track of the year ever since I first heard Nick Kagame play it in late 2022. Prosumer dropped it at The Pickle Factory back in February and I’ve been rinsing it ever since. It’s the definition of a dead cert dancefloor hit. (The mystery over DJ Disciple’s ‘Hide-A-Way’, essentially an anagram of Todd Terry’s track, and released the same year, remains to be solved.)
It’s also not the simplest track to deal with mix-wise, and rather a bombastic note to end a set on if there’s another DJ coming on next. This wasn’t a festival where you might expect a gap between sets, but a day party with one stage, so, in my view, there’s an element of DJ hand-over etiquette that should come into play. (I could write an entire piece on this and maybe one day I will.) Never mind, Jacob takes it in his stride, filtering out the female vocal and clap rushes with poise as he mixes into a measured, trippy groover that resets the vibe for what’s to come. There’s a tribal feel through the first half of the set, peaking early with a beefed up edit of ‘African Blood’ by Supermax. There’s also stripped down garagey house like Italojohnson’s ‘05B1’, which Gwenan played at my label party back in June (both sides in fact) and has since become a staple of my own.
For me it’s the back half of the set where things really get interesting. Jacob leads off the final hour with a 4-minute transition into Paranoid London’s evergreen ‘Paris Dub 1’, riding the summery chords of the previous track to contrast with Paris Brightledge’s eerie vocal until that familiar acid bassline finally drops. It’s an audacious move and, despite nothing actually harmonising with Brightledge’s off-key singing, it just about works. The mix out of ‘Paris Dub 1’ takes things up a notch, the supple incoming bassline in perfect tune this time, transforming moody acid into bubbly tech house. Jacob goes further in this direction with ‘Changing Channels’, low-key the MVP of the EP tracks Pangaea has released so far. (My only complaint here is the unnecessary filtering on the break — when a producer has gone to such great lengths to construct a break as epic as this one, the last thing it needs is additional filtering.)
And then BAM. Jacob’s own ‘Hier’ from this year, a track completely undersold by the clips on social media and which I only really ‘got’ when I heard it in full in the context of this mix. It’s a track of many parts none of which make obvious sense but, once you’ve got the hang of them all, help it become a highly distinctive and memorable anthem. It’s very cool to hear someone play their own track out in the place where it most makes sense to them, and at this particular moment in the set it absolutely slams. It’s such a big tune that it’s hardly surprising Jacob dials it back straight after, albeit only briefly before bringing in No Doubt’s cover of ‘It’s My Life’. (Rather unexpectedly, I heard this played in Vago here in Lisbon last night. This mix has been the source of many such coincidences over the past few weeks.)
The next big sequence comes with a crafty mix out of a disco house number into Dubtribe’s ‘Sunshine’s Theme’ — a track I knew Nick would be able to ID for me and, sure enough, he did — followed by a beautiful in-key mix into a dreamy post-Metro Area Kompakt-y house number that I’m sure I know from somewhere. This is foreshadowing for the end of the set, but before then there’s room for a couple more disco-y numbers including, happily, Telex. And then, there it is to finish: Jürgen Paape’s ‘So Weit Wie Noch Nie’, here to take the ‘evergreen’ badge off Paranoid London and pin it to its own lapel. This track literally never gets old and its “wir jagen die monotonie” refrain feels highly apt. Are we hunting monotony down to stamp it out? Or chasing after it to revel in it? To me it’s not clear and in this moment that ambiguity feels just right.