Midweek Mixes (28/12/22)
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.
Ceyda Yagiz - Dia Radio (20/12/22)
I met Ceyda Yagiz when I played at Jolene in Copenhagen recently. She’s a resident for French collective La Culottée and before I started my set we had a long and inspiring conversation about music and finding your scene. In this radio show she builds the chug deliberately from serious-and-chunky to snappy-and-funky with care and patience in the mix - everything in its right place, but simultaneously not averse to moments of drama. The humour and forward drive that explode out of the transition at 28m30s are the kind of thing I aspire to when mixing. The second half of the show switches up expertly between techno, electro and dub before ending with a record that should probably be consigned to the scrapheap of inappropriate vocals past, yet has the unfortunate merit of being an absolute banger:
Ben Mays’s ‘Lover Man’ was a staple of Prosumer’s sets back in the late 00s and on the surface it’s a top tier sleazy Chicago house banger, its rubbery bassline propelling it ever forward. But the more you listen to the lyrics the creepier its protagonist gets, until you realise he’s genuinely singing a paean to preying on underaged girls. The B-side, ‘Jailbait’, makes this even more explicit with its intro and outro vignettes featuring the police and its persistent (and gross) little girl giggles. These would be imitated a year later by Bam Bam on his equally dubious ‘The Twilight Zone’ and by serial knock-off artists Charm on ‘Housegirl’. The instrumentals to these tracks are all utter bangers that are undermined by a concept so atrocious it’s impossible to look past it. “Paedo-free Acid House Edits” concept compilation incoming?
Ceyda has a growing archive of her shows on Dia Radio here so I suggest digging in.
Longitude (Jacob Meehan & Bouffant Bouffant) - Radio Buttons #118
A treat here: an extended recording of the Buttons (Berlin) and Gimme A Reason (NOLA) heads closing out September’s Buttons at Fitzroy in Berlin. I’ve played in Fitzroy once before for Sobremesa in January 2020 and while that was a nighttime party I can easily imagine the beauty of the light pouring through the club’s grand windows that face the River Spree and the power station opposite, as these four hours played themselves out. I’m not going to try and capture such a long and varied set in this short description, but I feel like you can actively hear the two DJs locking in to each other’s vibe as the morning goes on, pushing gently in this or that direction and seeing if their partner will go with them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, but the result is always worth the experiment.
There are many favourites: Moreno Ácido + Diogo’s ‘Verde Grama’ (for some welcome Portuguese representation), Carl Craig’s ‘My Machines’, Ralphi Rosario’s ‘Suavecito’ and so on. As for the many many records I don’t know, I particularly like the more percussive moments in the first section, the bit where it gets all dream-housey halfway through, and then the shimmering almost abstract and dusty house tracks that start to come out from around the 2h40m mark. I’m well familiar with that moment in an afterparty when the music suddenly substitutes propulsion for weightlessness and people breathe a little, reconnecting with each other and their surroundings before the final stretch. The delicate, almost aching moment just before the three hour mark feels just like one of those moments. As they close out with ‘I Feel The Rhythm’ and Mickey Oliver’s ‘Never Let Go’, all I can think to myself is how this is the kind of party I want to be at as the sun rises the morning after.