Midweek Mixes (26/07/23)
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.
This week’s Midweek Mixes are two live recordings and a radio show, which have been keeping me entertained on interminable train journeys and at home while translating a book about the history of tax auditing. Such is my life this summer in between gigs and trying to go to all the parties in Berlin. This week I will be playing at CDV on Thursday afternoon (with G in Kiosk Morning Show mode), Hoer on Friday at 5pm CET, and Renate on Friday night for a Welt Discos label night in the Green Room. This is the second Welt party of the year and features me, G and Stephen Howe, whose upcoming solo EP I will be announcing very shortly. There will be two further Welt parties in September (Lisbon) and October (London) so watch this space.
CC:DISCO - Live @ Kala Festival 2023
Five hours is a lot of music but with someone like CC:DISCO it’s really only in this format that we can truly get what she’s all about. She’s a storyteller for the biggest stages (most recently a monstrous one at Sonar) but this recording is from the cosier setting of Kala Festival in Albania, where she closed down the Empire stage from 1am to 6am on the Friday morning. I’ve been lucky enough to hear CC a few times in the past year or so and to my ears this is a holistic statement of where she’s at right now — which I would also say is where she’s been all along.
She’s a DJ after my own heart, shimmying between disco, boogie, synth pop, chug, house of the hip, acid, soulful and dream varieties, a dash of tranciness to keep the kids happy and a few niche curveballs along the way. What unites all of these selections is what makes anything worth listening to: contrast, musicality and complexity of emotion.
If I had to choose some specific moments they’d be:
0h08m: The R&B lilt of a dub version of Ace Of Base’s cover of Bananarama ‘Cruel Summer’ is as clear a statement of intention as you could ask for. We’re sub-114bpm, the bassline is plunging, the drums are slapping, and it says to me: these are the things that are important, and if you’re patient you’re gonna get all the feels from what’s to come over the next five hours.
0h30m: CC has a penchant for carnival numbers with whistles, drum fills and twangy guitars. It’s a proclivity I do not share, but she usually manages to convince me anyway, primarily by seeming to know just when my patience is about to run out and switching things up. In this moment the carnival is swept away by the sound of a plane taking off and in its place arrives a piece of supreme disco suspense. (The trick is repeated at 42m with a mix into ‘Free And Easy’ by Plush; and at 191m with a gliding transition out of samba madness into a gorgeous Brandy remix.)
0h51m: ESG meets James Bond meets jungle breaks? Yes please.
1h40m: Having reached for the feels with ‘With Every Heartbeat’ followed by a sweet synth pop ditty asking “Be my lover/Be my friend”, CC finesses the mix out of the latter into a swaggering hip house number that signals the start of a new phase. This sounds like someone really hitting their stride as each groove rolls into the next, and there’s a moment of pure euphoria as the uplifting refrain “Say baby/Alright/Tell me that you’re alright/Say baby/Ain’t gonna get no sleep tonight” rings out and you realise that, given this was 3am in the morning, it was both a check-in and a promise.
2h24m: If Jam & Spoon’s ‘Right In The Night’ seems like a small nod to the kids’ ongoing eurodance fetish, it feels well-earned by this point. And again CC immediately tempers the excess with a sleight of hand into disco and 80s sleaze.
3h21m: Hot on the heels of the aforementioned Brandy edit, the arrival of Free Life’s ‘Dance Fantasy’ — all chug and fanfares — feels like the beginning of the victory lap as this set enters its final stretch. The mixes flow harmonically, there’s bombast, there’s ‘Pale Shelter’, the John Davis Disco Orchestra, ‘Baby Won’t You Dance With Me’, Womack & Womack, and then it all gloriously dissolves into Karen Ramirez’s ‘Looking For Love’, the kind of slap-your-forehead, hiding-in-plain-sight banger that the final moments of a set like this call for.
4h47m: CC finishes with an encore of Mary J Blige and Janet, two divas who know a thing or two about longevity, and it’s a fitting end to a set that makes its own claim to timelessness.
Øyvind Morken - Live at Jaeger, Oslo (02/12/22)
Listen on Mixcloud
Another DJ after my own heart, Øyvind Morken illustrates the power of push-pull between stripped down rhythm trax and melodic expansiveness in this two-hour live recording from Jaeger club in Oslo, where he has long been a resident. I’ve been a fan of Øyvind’s since I heard his various Trushmixes (this one is a fav) and saw him play in Lisbon in 2019.
To me it feels like the main structure running through this set is 90s bleepy techno (plus some modern equivalents like Fantastic Man’s ‘Bioxy’) and the aforementioned jacking trax of the Relief kind, but with that central skeleton fleshed out with forays into garage, italo, dream house and even (don’t run) a Jamie Jones remix. Then there’s an emotional series of tracks that bring us in to land before a wacky punky final track to close. I relate, hard. And one day I hope to hear Øyvind doing his thing at Jaeger in person.
(Bonus reading: I spoke to Øyvind about his ‘New Age Of Faith’ version for a previous Track-By-Track entry, here.)
Alex Sourbis - Lyl Radio (05/07/23)
Alex’s radio show saved me from insanity on a rail replacement bus service from Aachen to Düren, part of a 13-hour odyssey back from Brussels the other week, and for that I will forever be grateful. First, there was nothing better than ambient washes for complementing the droning of a bus engine. Second, the gradual build through broken mulch house (yes I’m making this happen, it’s going to happen), contemporary trip hop and actual breaks until the bass pressure peaks with Pugilist’s ‘Jade’ was exactly the kind of motivation I needed to believe the bus would not last much longer.
Finally, the tempo switch-up two thirds of the way through kept me going when it became apparent the bus was, indeed, going to last much longer. The show finishes with a track by the only artist I recognise on the tracklist, Steffi, and ‘Irreversible Cessation’ pretty much sums up what I’d like to happen to all rail replacement bus services from now onwards.