Midweek Mixes (25/05/22)
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.
Michael Jorba - Soul Kiss (October ,1985)
Sweet and slow Fire Island sleaze from total babe Michael Jorba, who played at the Annual GMHC Morning Party beachside fundraiser every year in the Pines from 1983 to 1994. This is one of over 200 tapes discovered in a house on Pine Island Walk recently, that have now been digitised, remastered and published on Mixcloud.
Any mix that has ‘Features Of Love’, ‘One Of The Living’ and ‘The Main Thing’ all in the first 30 minutes is alright by me. By 1985 synths were nothing new in mainstream rock/pop music, but I still find it exhilarating to hear flashes of bleeps and bloops in an otherwise conventional mid-tempo ditty like ‘Secret’ by OMD. It also makes me smile to hear Jorba pitching down the likes of Barry Manilow so far that he’s barely recognisable. ‘Be My Lover Now’, a collaboration between Giorgio Moroder and Phil Oakey of The Human League, epitomises the satisfying in-betweenness of a lot of this sound, and in fact it’s these oddball hybrid choices in the opening and closing sections that are far more exciting than the pedestrian Italo also-rans that populate the central part of the mix.
I wrote out the tracklist below and in doing so realised this is a total concept mix, as the existential/love (‘Soul Kiss’) theme runs through most of the track titles. I also think Jorba was having some fun with the sequencing - surely it’s no coincidence that the refrain of ‘Paradise Mi Amor’ rhymes with ‘In Your Eyes’ before it? Or that Lime’s down-to-earth ‘Do Your Time On The Planet’ gives way to Ellie Warren’s ‘Satellites’ plummeting to Earth?
That’s the kind of DJing I aspire to.
Olivia Newton-John - Soul Kiss
Mike Francis - Features Of Love
Book Of Love - Lost Souls
Tina Turner - One Of The Living
Roxy Music - The Main Thing
Idle Eyes - Tokyo Rose
OMD - Secret
Off Limits - No Soul
Reeds - In Your Eyes
Vanilla - Paradise Mi Amor
Miko Mission – Two For Love
Telex News - Forever Time
Ran - Nightcrash
Barry Manilow - In Search Of Love
Lime - Do Your Time On The Planet
Ellie Warren - Satellites
Phil Oakey & Giorgio Moroder - Be My Lover Now
Kiernan Laveaux - Dekmantel Podcast 385
Jennifer Loveless - Maricas 040
It can’t just be me that is noticing a resurgence of hitherto untrendy mid-to-late 00s minimal/tech house recently? Alongside the electroclash revival, which has been gathering pace for a few years now (and makes sense if we believe in the usual 20-year cycle of things), it seems that a sort of mini-revival of Cadenza/Kompakt/Oslo-sounding material is bubbling away, with the tunes often sped up and interspersed with the driving/ravey/proggy 90s stuff that everyone and their mother is playing these days.
At least, that’s what I feel I’ve been hearing across many recent mixes. Kiernan Laveaux’s Dekmantel session covers a huge amount of ground and reaches some exciting and extreme sonic territory, but what stood out to me in the middle section was the number of times I thought of Ricardo Villalobos. Most of these tunes are new or recent, yet several of them sound straight out of a vintage mid-00s Ricardo set or, *deep breath*, a vintage late-00s Luciano set.
One of the tunes in Laveaux’s mix is by Jennifer Loveless, whose own set for Maricas pushes even further in this direction. The centrepiece is Michel Cleis’s 2009-dominating ‘La Mezcla’, and elsewhere there are tracks by Chris Duckenfield and Dave Aju (albeit a new one not an oldie). Here as well these stripped back tunes are interspersed with things that are more current-sounding, by which I mean more maximal hyped-up 90s-aping tunes. Where Laveaux’s mix has a stronger overall concept and is more coherent to my ears (despite its frankly intimidating range), Loveless’s forays into bits of acid, vocal house and even a disco moment ultimately make it more of a fun listen.
On reflection, it actually isn’t too much of a surprise to hear this kind of music fitting into sets from lots of today’s DJs. The late 00s Cadenza & co. fetishization of ‘ethnic’ percussion, for example, isn’t really that distant, sonically speaking, from the love of polyrhythms and non-Western sounds and instrumentation that has since come to dominate much of today’s young, queer, cross-genre DJing.
(Incidentally, I specify ‘sonically speaking’ here because for the most part there is obviously quite some distance in terms of awareness, intentions and politics when it comes to these current DJs’s selections vs Luciano’s approach to A&R in 2009. Sorry Luciano if I’m underestimating you.)
Then of course there’s something highly refreshing about an agnostic approach to genre and ‘trendiness’, which - again on an intellectual level - suggests that something like ‘La Mezcla’ has as much right to be in the mix as anything else. But for me that intellectual argument sort of collapses as soon as I actually hear the tune come in, maybe because I was there the first time around and can’t hear it or any of its contemporaries afresh with untainted ears.
And where does this all end up anyway? Could we unironically enjoy ‘Orbitalife’ today any more than we could unironically enjoy ‘Rocker’ or ‘Mr Decay’? (Banger, btw.) Am I about to take my recent success in resurrecting ‘On It’ and voraciously move on to ‘Baby Kate’ or, god forbid, ‘Who’s Afraid Of Detroit?’
And finally, broadening our gaze from this quite specific (and, let’s be honest, highly ignorable) musical era into the much more prevalent ongoing trend for reviving 90s chart dance classics - what next? Someone playing ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ in Panoramabar?
No, that would be ridiculous.