Midweek Mixes (21/11/24)
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.
Jacob Meehan - Live at Whole 2024
“Look at that gay guy!” goes DJ Assault’s ‘Gay Guy’, which rang out at 10pm on Sunday evening at the Whole Festival Beach stage this summer. And while this was a suitably sassy sign-off from French diva Kiddy Smile, it also must have served as a highly appropriate introduction to festival founder Jacob Meehan, who came on next. How do you out-gay-diva that? Well, you open your set with the full version of ‘The Diva Dance’ from The Fifth Element — including the initial aria — performed by Luc Besson’s then-wife Maiwenn Le Besco from under a mountain of blue make-up and prostheses to a temporarily scrubbed-up Korben Dallas aka Bruce Willis. And need I remind you about Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas?
As references go, ‘The Diva Dance’ designed to send gays of a certain age absolutely crazy and perplex almost everyone else. It’s definitely one way to separate the men from the boys, and I have it on good authority that that’s exactly what it did at Whole, though you hope that at least some of the boys stuck around for the subsequent history lesson. Which is what this wonderful set is: a heartfelt two-hour survey of fabulous house music released across the past 40 years.
You want 2004? Detroit Grand Pubahs remixed by Joakim. Or 1995? Delicious Inc sampling Deee-Lite (1990) and Chez n Trent (1994). How about 2000? A Chateau Flight b-side that I remember my friend Bleimann caning at house parties back in 2008. Well how about 2008? Carl Craig in full melodrama mode remixing an Inner City original from 1991. Or for OG Chicago from 1988 we have full acid pressure from Fast Eddie. Jump forward to 2016? Transatlantic house supergroup Powerdance pastiching late 70s disco, but the beats version to make it more cunt. 1999 pre-Kompakt minimal house goes into 2019 post-Kompakt UK house into 2009 might-as-well-be-Kompakt Frankfurt house. There’s a track from DJ Assassin who, unbeknownst to me, apparently re-emerged in 2019 to sample ‘Deep Burnt’ (1999). And Jacob’s own ‘Hier’, out on Majorettes in the summer of 2023, must have been marinating delightfully waiting for exactly this moment to be deployed. The inclusion of the archetypal late 00s track ‘Where Are You Now’ — all bright and rushy and pre-EDM-y, yet also mournful like ‘Hier’ — sounds like Jacob truly wearing his influences on his sleeve. In fact the two tracks are even in the same key.
A handful of other sets from the festival try to capture in words the experience of being at an event like Whole. Juliana Huxtable opened her set with a voice repeating “a place of fulfillment and fantasies/where your dreams become realities”, DJ Northern reached for Björk’s ‘Violently Happy’, while James Lotion opened the whole damn thing in style with the monologue from ‘Let’s Go Crazy’. In Jacob’s set he follows up the operatic intro with the voice of another all-time diva, Freddie Mercury, asking “is this the real life?/is this just fantasy?”, and you wonder if this was as much a question to himself as it was to the audience. This set sounds like a victory lap, pay off after many years of blood sweat and tears pumped this annual queer u/dystopia in rural Brandenburg. It might sound from all of this like I was there in person, but I wasn’t. Just listening to this remarkable set at home, with ‘U Gave Me Love’ playing out at the end, makes it feel as if I was.
Sivanesh - Live at (Re)treat 2024
Another history lesson, although this one has a narrower purview in both era and sound, recorded live at (Re)treat Festival in Mai Chau, Vietnam, a month ago. In the first half Sivanesh focusses heavily on European — especially French — declensions of US house since the early 00s, from veterans like Julien Jabre, DJ Gregory and Fred Everything to more recent names like Lazare Hoche, plus an up-to-date remix of French Affair’s chart pop hit ‘Sexy’ by Thailand’s DOTT. Paying attention to dates again, there’s a strong 2016 component to the selections: actually not the sexiest year I think we’d all agree, but perhaps indicative of Sivanesh’s own musical path as well as a broader current turn towards the 2010s, driven, perhaps, by the benefit of critical distance and, by this point, I suppose, sheer exhaustion with the fucking 90s.
I can imagine this set going down a treat late afternoon out in the garden in Mai Chau. Nevertheless, listening back, I got a bit hung up on some of the tunes. Refined, skippy, deftly-produced minimal/tech house (to give it its official title) can be some of the best music you’ll ever hear, proving with ease the truisms about less-is-more and supplying a seemingly limitless source of groove and energy to a receptive dancefloor. It works incredibly well with the right kind of drugs. But it can also go wrong easily. For example, it can be overly rigid or dry, too po-faced, too straight. Luckily none of Sivanesh’s selections fall into this first category. But when it compensates for potential dryness by shooting for camp instead, usually through the use of a kooky vocal, it often misses and ends up coming off as hopelessly straight anyway. In this set there are several such vocals that test my patience to varying degrees: Sweely’s drawling diva is kind of amusing but falls short of Miss Kittin-ish acuity; Ronald Christoph’s Little Drummer Boy ditty and aeroplane noises are frankly groan-worthy; and Tightill’s German rap is unforgivable.
Qzen’s iconic turn on John Tejada’s ‘Sweat On The Walls’, which pops up near the end of the recording, shows the boys how it’s done. But in the end, my favourite moments throughout this set are the parts where the vocals tap out, making space for the pristine sounding tracks Sivanesh has compiled over the years, and his thoughtful mixing between them.
Paul Fleetwood - Perimeter Junk Label Mix
I was aware of Paul Fleetwood’s Perimeter Junk since meeting him a couple of years ago and listening to a promo of last year’s korrē album, but I never dug into the back catalogue. My bad. Listening to this DJ mix of tracks from the label, broadcast on Pittsburgh public radio a couple of weeks ago, you can hear an incisive vision across techno of many stripes — dubby, loopy, wormholey, minimal, whatever but make it Midwest — electro, and other broken in-between variations. The mood, for me at least, is well-oiled machine parts, smokestacks, distant horizons masked by urban haze. The production on these releases is uniformly impeccable and there are some utterly killer grooves, not least Paul’s own ‘Phlex’ from 2022 or the as yet unreleased ‘Asleep At The Wheel’. My own collection of Midwest techno is lamentably small — limited to a couple of DJ ESP EPs and one of Cari Lekebusch’s cosplaying 12s as Fred, which I’m not sure really counts — but hearing this mix, and checking some more of the PJ catalogue, has set me off on a bit of a dig.