Midweek Mixes (28/10/21)
This week’s Midweek Mixes is slightly delayed because I spent most of yesterday afternoon mistily reminiscing about my Mix For Tracy and the period from Oct 2018 to Mar 2019 that led up to me recording it. That post, tracklist and download is up already for paying subscribers - thank you!
Luigi Di Venere - Divinæ Follie Mixtape (HNYPOT 395)
Named in tribute to a famous 90s club found in Bari on the Adriatic coast - at the top of the ‘heel’ of Italy - Luigi Di Venere’s ‘Divinæ Follie’ mix for Honey Soundsystem pays tribute to piano- and saxophone-led Italian dream house, a genre described ably by Andy Beta as “almost exclusively euphoric, the perfect sound to emanate from a land of chiselled Adonises, columnated ruins, and the Tuscan sun”.
Chiselled Adonises are the order of the day as soon as Di Venere opens the mix with ‘Cruising’ by Vincent Floyd, an obvious Chicago precursor to the dream house sound and still sounding fresh on the Rush Hour repress from this year (hopefully Floyd is now seeing some proper cash from this release, after it being bootlegged ten years ago). You’d expect nothing less from Di Venere, promoter of a party called BUST A NUT, and it’s an entertaining exercise while listening to this mix to consider the things that distinguish much of today’s gay scene, with its ongoing emphasis on masculinity, from the high camp of that Italian club three decades ago, with its revolving dancefloor, colourful lights and palm tree-lined pool.
Of course many gay and queer parties are moving beyond the chiselledness (?) and rediscovering the fabulous, and this is exactly the kind of music to accompany that shift. Driving - yes - but also joyful and exuberant, ultimately designed for openness, empathy and FUN rather than a single-minded focus on being a serious man who takes serious drugs and has serious sex (more on this to come in another post shortly). I mean, imagine trying to have serious sex to mix centrepiece ‘German Bold Italic’ by Towa Tei featuring Kylie Minogue*.
If there’s one misstep for me it’s the banging piano house tune just over an hour in, which features a child cloyingly intoning religious commandments alongside samples taken, of course, from ‘Let No Man Put Asunder’. I’m sorry, Luigi, but the only children’s voices I’ll accept in house music are ones that are screaming in terror. Never mind, by the time Sexual Harrassment’s ‘K-I-S-S-I-N-G’ comes around to close things out, everything is forgiven. From cruising to kissing and everything in between - this is the soundtrack to the kind of dancefloor I want to be on.
*Actually, I take this back, I know several people who would do this, and in fact probably already have.
Ali Berger - Dance ’21: The Freestyle Episode
Broadcast on twitch during lockdown, this was in fact the only episode of a string of online sessions that Ali Berger actually recorded, and he’s now shared it on Soundcloud. Anyone who regularly searches for good freestyle will probably join me in a *groan* when faced with the prospect of a whole hour of it. It’s not a genre that stands up to relentless listening, be it skipping through YT clips on Discogs or listening to recordings from scene legends like Alberto Cabrera. Those out of tune vocals start to grate, the skip of the breakbeats starts sounding like a lurch, and the unceasing cheapness of the synths loses all its charm.
BUT thankfully this is not what Berger is giving us. Of course it isn’t, because he’s a man of fine taste. Instead, we get a diverse and energy-filled hour that views freestyle as base camp for an expedition through hip hop’s interface with early electro (‘Basstronic’ keeps popping up in these posts, and ‘Electric Kingdom’ was new to me), boogie-leaning beats and dubs, housier cuts like John Rocca’s hit ‘I Want It To Be Real’ and even some later 90s moments (Aux 88’s remix of UR’s ‘Electronic Warfare’). Ali’s having fun at the decks, as he gets through 29 tracks in 67 minutes, including a mere 90 seconds of weirdness from Click’s seminal beat track ‘Acid Deluxe’.
I’m enjoying wondering what percentage of this mix was mastered by Herb Powers Jr (who I wrote about here). As a mastering engineer himself, Berger must hold Herb in high esteem. Of course ‘Al-Naafiysh’ makes an appearance but Herb’s fingerprints are all over this era so it wouldn’t surprise me to see him on multiple credits.
Sidenote: I’ll probably write about this another week, but don’t miss Ali’s mix of his own ambient/experimental music called ‘Passing It Clockwise’.
I couldn’t resist including Tracy. It was a joy revisiting this mix this week and remembering where it came from. And there’s actually some links to be drawn between this mix and the selections above.
First, it was inspired by club experiences I had in late 2018 and early 2019 - primarily as a DJ rather than as a dancer, but still very much thinking of and trying to express that specific club environment in mix form. And second, there’s the opening section, where I plough through five beat tracks in just over 11 minutes, Hot Mix-style like Ali. There’s ‘Around My Drums’ by Sandra, two fast-jammed 90s bonus beats, a Miami bass instrumental and the bonus beats of Visage’s ‘Pleasure Boys’. Then shortly after comes House Syndicate (aka Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez)’s ‘Freestyle Bongo’.
It’s always one of my objectives when DJing to bring together tracks from this pioneering era with everything that derived from them, including today’s most glossy productions. Often it’s not easy because they can sound *so* different from each other, and dancers may find that disorientating (I know I do sometimes), but when it works it’s one of the most satisfying things I know as a DJ.