Midweek Mixes (17/10/24)
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.
Succubass Live @ Recess NYC, June 2024
For this month’s Kiosk Outsiders show I was honoured to host an hour-long excerpt of Succubass playing live at NYC party Recess back in June. I wrote about Jess’s set at Hemlock Nights ‘23 earlier this year (here) and so I was excited to hear a more down-the-line club set from her. And sure, this is a more conventional club, yet there’s always a twist: what about that superficially housey track five minutes into this set, that nonetheless has a frankly creepy metallic rumble running all the way through it? Or the is-it-dubstep-is-it-electro stepper at 17 minutes? Or the transition 47 minutes in where she flips from rave-breaks-euphoria into jungle-grime? The selections themselves are full of the unexpected, and then the way she goes from one to the next simply enhances those exhilarating moments.
Actually, just because it says what I’ve been trying to say above but far more evocatively, I will reproduce this bio written for Succubass by Osmosis In The Trees festival in Oregon:
Jess Duran aka Succubass is for everyone: the wook intelligentsia, techno pseudointellectuals, gay guys who cruise at Costco, ketamine witch doctors, green-room social climbers, bisexuals in ketosis, ambient tent boofers, twinks on Beatport, record store karens, hot girls on torrent sites, boyfriends with boiler room push notifications, designer drug sommeliers, hung drag queens, burners who fuck with IDM, bassbin babysitters, Detroit purists who have never been to Michigan, smokers pit community elders, glove light show bottoms, and the track-id impaired.
If that doesn’t make you want to listen to this set then I don’t know what will.
Maybe it’s just in my very blinkered world but I feel like early 00s house is having a renaissance, and even if it isn’t then I can still believe it is. Hearing this mix of skippy, jazzy, techy minimal house from Calum certainly helps the fantasy, overly fruity trumpet solos and all. Calum is one of the co-founders of a minimal house afters for queers in Berlin called Slinky, seeking to address the apparent disjunct between these disparate scenes. (I wrote more about that last time I covered one of Calum’s mixes here.) If this is the kind of tackle — yes I said tackle — that you can hear at Slinky then sign me up right now. I’ve already demanded an ID for the ‘Hard Day’-sampling bubbler 18 minutes in (it’s Lance Desardi, clearly a man of culture), and every other track here would be one I’d happily do another mini-bump of K to at 11am on a Sunday morning. So sue me.
Prosumer’s NTS Show (01/10/24)
Prosumer introduces his latest NTS show as follows:
Today’s journey starts kind of cosmic then has some electroid elements and is landing in the world of B12, um, yuh! Something like that. Enjoy the show.
So you know already it’s going to be a good one.
Achim is known and talked about almost exclusively as a house DJ, and some of my earliest revelations with him involved classic cuts from the Chicago-New York axis. But across the now more than 15 years that I’ve been seeing him play, it’s just as often been the Detroit-UK axis picks that have blown my mind, from Kirk Smith’s ‘The Journey’ to Millsart’s ‘Gamma Player’ to the ultimate transatlantic hybrid record, Nexus 21’s ‘Real Love’. Not to mention the space he almost always makes for UK Funky and oddball synth stuff. Prosumer is much, much more than a “house DJ”.
That’s what I was thinking about when listening to this deep and free-wheeling show, which runs through the whole retrofuturist cosmogony of dance music: primordial vamps like Balladium’s ‘Andrómeda’, off Dark Entries’ recent compilation of mid-80s Portuguese wave Música Moderna Portuguesa 2.º Volume, give way to the cool future efficiency of ‘Electron Core’ from Todd Sines’s late 90s Cron project, and then the mad exuberance of Carl Craig’s remix of ‘Hooter’ by Ultramarine, a track that manages to sound both primordial and from the future at the same time.