Midweek Mixes (18/09/24)
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.
Following my Horst write-up from earlier this year, I’m finally getting round to catching up on some of the Kiosk x The Lot Radio sets I missed over that weekend. First up is the closing by DJ Fart In The Club. Over the past few years I’ve seen her ignite a late morning Pbar, play deep and bassy in the Waking Life forest, and go techno in a cave in Vietnam, so I was excited to finally hear this closing set from Kiosk’s iconic stage at Horst. It doesn’t disappoint.
Then there are three more live recordings: Ben UFO live at last year’s Sustain-Release festival in upstate New York, with a bonus of his own Kiosk x Horst set, chased by Razrbark live from a Sorry Records party at Bossa Nova Civic Club. Listening to these sets I couldn’t help place them all in the same wider web not just of music but scenes. But rather than build up some overblown genealogy of bassy-housey dance music in Europe and the US right now, I’m going to try instead to focus on technique, because that’s what was grabbing my attention while listening to them.
DJ Fart In The Club - Live @ Kiosk x Horst Festival 2024
Video here.
DJ Fart In The Club closed the final night of Kiosk Radio’s Moon Ra stage at Horst Festival 2024, which was in fact the last night of this stage ever, before it moves to a new expanded location next year. I was at Le Soleil Rouge that night so missed the set in person, but luckily everything was recorded. Soyoon gives us precisely 23 minutes of brooding, bubbling electronics and bass pressure before she fully lets rip, and those opening tracks combine with the smoke billowing from the stage’s cone-shaped roof and the green-and-purple lighting on the crowd to conjure a truly witchy mood. Just before 22 minutes she begins to loop the crescendoing pad from a new track, teasing it into the mix to build tension before cutting the bass on the outgoing track and ending the loop, allowing the new track to crash in. The drop is a barrage of distorted percussion and claps worthy of Ron Hardy. The crowd begins to bounce.
We get less than two minutes of that before Nikki Nair’s punchline track ‘Automatic’ and from there on out it’s 100% no-holds-barred DJ Fart In The UFO. Every time I’ve seen Soyoon play it’s been different selection-wise, but the constant is her lateral thinking from track to track, and the inventiveness of the actual mixing itself. Long blends or short, moments of drama and moments of serenity. She’s hands-on in the mix and not afraid to ride a temporary divergence in pursuit of the thrill of the unexpected.
Halfway through this set she goes fully techno and although the music is intense the vibe isn’t — in fact it feels like one of the calmer stretches, demonstrating how effective her mood-building up to that point has been. She finishes with a pummelling drum workout into euphoric 4/4, teasing the pads from the new track in under the current one during the break so that they seem like a natural progression. It’s musical touches like that that elevate this set even further. As the final track fades there are absolute scenes both inside and outside the UFO. One can only imagine the Fart destruction as she closed Sustain-Release this past weekend.
Ben UFO - Live @ Sustain-Release 2023
Ben UFO - Live @ Kiosk x Horst Festival 2024
Ben seems to have honed in so successfully on Zip-speed transitions — short mixes where, barring a stretch of discreet overlap either side, the real business is over and done with in about 20 seconds — that it’s become something of a formula. Like Soyoon, he cuts the bass a lot more than Zip ever would (in fact I wonder if Zip has ever touched a high pass filter in his life), but he does it in a way that gels with the tracks rather than killing them.
From 16 minutes to 17 is a good example: at the first hint of the swelling pads in the new track, he filters for a couple of beats just to signal something is happening, and only 15 seconds later he filters again, more aggressively this time to remove the growling bass fully, and drops in the new beat. He doesn’t keep the previous track going for ages on loop in the background— there’s no need to, since the new musical idea has already been introduced so deftly and assertively. It’s a kind of active yet unobtrusive mixing, but you only achieve that level of unobtrusiveness with a hell of a lot of practice and confidence.
I called it a formula earlier because at times it can feel a bit like a default setting or cruise control, but maybe that’s an uncharitable way of putting it. It’s more like a mature style, coming from the understanding that you don’t need more than a light touch if the selection, sequencing and timing is on point. It creates this beautiful rolling, meandering, lulling mood that you might not ordinarily associate with Ben but actually, looking back through other sets online, it’s always been there. His set at Waking Life this year epitomised this for me and although there were many dissenting voices, it’s the main reason I loved it.
Listening to this Sustain-Release set revives those memories. Looking at his recording from Horst for verification, he seemingly forgoes loops entirely and barely ever touches the jogwheel except for spinbacks. I wonder if, in the same way a vinyl DJ may want to ride the pitch instead of nudging the record, this is an aesthetic choice: the master tempo on a CDJ may do away with the jarring sound of a nudge, but there’s something satisfying about the locking-in of a pitch-riding transition that you’ll simply never get from nudging. It could also just be to keep things interesting for himself.
Punctuating the rolling-meandering-lulling vibe there are the customary Ben explosions: Adam Curtain’s ‘Pest Control’ elicits the first disbelieving wail from the crowd 30 minutes into the S-R set, while Plus One’s ‘Bonk’ causes peak mayhem three quarters of the way through the Kiosk one. Possibly my favourite micro moment in the S-R set, at least with the benefit of hindsight that posting the set a year later provides, is when Ben mixes in Pangaea’s hit of summer ‘23 ‘Installation’ just after 2h06m. First he sneaks in the track’s intro in a matter of seconds, a flashy move that puts my many poor attempts to mix this track to shame. Some of the crowd immediately reacts with recognition, but it’s only when the vocal hits that the generalised wails of disbelief can be heard on the mic. I’m sure the same sequence of noises were heard everywhere last summer.
The other (final, I promise) highlight of the S-R set has to be the track 2h26m in, a heavy, contorting, half-time dub monster stomping through the dance floor, leaving metal splinters in its wake. This beast of a track heralds the final stretch into jungle and dnb, something Ben abstained from at WL but is a thrill to hear here.
Razrbark - Live @ Sorry Records
To quote the Bark herself:
"Nick told everyone I was gonna play downtempo so to subvert expectations and do something that’s never been done before at bossa I proceeded to play fast. Faces melted. Patrons began vomiting. Blood poured from my eyes. The toilets exploded and shit filled the floors."
The first half of the set is of a piece with the above two from Fart and BUFO but, Bark being Bark, for the back half she then takes us on a sideways spin through acid disco, cold wave and braindance. It’s a thriller.