Midweek Mixes (19/01/22)
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.
I’ve been a bit slow with non-Midweek Mixes posts recently, not necessarily because I haven’t had time, but because the start of the year is always a slow one for me. I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting on the sofa watching films or Twitch, playing Super Metroid, or scrolling Instagram. I’ve also been doing more translation work, which as ‘proper work’ I’m afraid takes precedent over this newsletter (though I admit it often doesn’t take precedent over scrolling Instagram).
I spent this past long weekend in Berlin visiting G and delivering some records from Carpet Distribution to shops around the city. I visited Power Park records for the first time and bought a load of electro funk and hi NRG, so watch out for that on upcoming episodes of Flamingo.
Incidentally, if you’re not following Carpet online, you won’t yet know that the next batch of records are now available for pre-order. They are really excellent releases by Shine Grooves, DJ Arg, Luhk and Pandilla Ltd and you can still hear them in this Carpet distro mix I did last year. We had some issues with the TPs for Velvet Velour’s release on Welt so that will be further down the line.
Jaye Ward - EOS NYE 2021 (Maricas Invites)
I started listening to this session for Barcelona collective Maricas while walking to the supermarket in sleepy Karlshorst yesterday and then finished it on my journey to the airport and home to Lisbon. In typical Jaye Ward style the mix covers a lot of ground, but there’s definitely more of a club leaning to it when compared to the Sunday night exorcisms of her weekly radio show Magical Real.
I’ve seen Jaye speaking out recently on the difficulty of not fitting in the boxes or ‘brands’ that promoters and venues find convenient, and thus finding it hard to get gigs. I can sympathise, but my view is that the problem has nothing to do with Jaye. Rather, people just don’t listen properly. If you actually pay attention to Jaye’s music there is a consistent and fiercely held line running through it all, binding the different styles, genres and tempos together and sending a unified message. And that fiercely held line is Jaye herself: unapologetic, unmitigated Jaye. Promoters (and by extension the scene as a whole) can often feel uncomfortable with unapologetic identities that don’t fit their preconceived, homogenising notions of what can be successful, cool, sellable. And any discomfort or difference is seen as a liability rather than a source of creative potential and growth. This is a sad state of affairs.
Jaye communicates these things through her selection - which is always lateral, catholic (in the non-religious meaning), courageous - and her technique - which can be tight or loose depending on the prevailing vibe. This mix has all of that and then some. And she even puts some of the frustration into words right at the start, opening with a quote from a 1960s television broadcaster, one of the first to speak about homosexuality on British TV:
In every large organisation like every big firm, every big civil service department, the armed forces and so on, there must be hundreds, even thousands. If all the homosexuals were to leave their jobs simultaneously, the economy of the country would be thrown into something like chaos.
Take that, snowflake promoters!
The second track in says “I can’t stop, it’s a feeling”, and I hope that this holds true for Jaye going into 2022. I want to hear more of this - not just online but in person.
Mark Farina - Live at E-Ticket, SF (23/08/96)
Any mix that opens with a smooth mix out of ‘Mood’ by Symbols & Instruments, aka one of the greatest tracks of all time, is off to a good start. The fact that this is a live recording of one third of Symbols & Instruments - Mark Farina - tells you that the rest of the session will live up to that standard. By 1996, Farina had become more associated with the San Francisco/West Coast scene than with his early work with Derrick Carter in Chicago, but this recording displays a fine balance between the two - sometimes more soulful, sometimes more stripped down, sometimes more jazzy, sometimes more bumping.
I have to talk about Farina’s technique here. My main reference point for him has always been his Fabric 40 mix from 2008, which was around the time me and my friends were getting into this music. (His Mushroom Jazz mixes were before my time.) I remember being impressed by the control he has over the mix, which is never entirely invisible (if it was it’d be boring) and always pushes the energy forwards. The same is true in this recording from over a decade earlier, and you don’t have to wait long for an example: less than two minutes after that initial mix out of ‘Mood’ into a dubby house tune, and he’s already teasing in Chez Damier and Ralph Lawson’s ‘A Dedication To Joss’ (1993). This blend itself lasts over two minutes - something I usually dislike when a DJ is playing tracks as powerful as this one, but here feels organic and even a little seductive.
I think you can only achieve this level of effortless playfulness through a huge amount of craft - both technical aptitude and a detailed understanding of the music itself. To be an old bore about it, I struggle to think of many DJs doing this today, at least not in the places I visit. It’s a style that’s the opposite of what I do myself (through necessity rather than desire - I’m just not that good at mixing), which makes it all the more fascinating.
Selection wise, for me some of the plainer loopy disco house starts to grate a little as the set rolls on, but it’s worth persevering with for the tougher moments in between, like the garagey/acid-y stretch from 36 to 40 mins, and what sounds like some third-deck Relief action soon after (one of the few moments where Farina’s ambition in the mix perhaps gets the better of him).