Midweek Mixes (30/05/24)
This week’s Midweek Mixes features three decidedly non-banging sessions as a salve for the insane amount of club music I’ve listened and danced to over the past two weeks. Last week I wrote up my three-gig Berlin-London-Berlin marathon that ended on Monday night, and by Wednesday I was already in NYC. On Friday I was out playing and dancing till 6am in NOLA before going straight to the airport to catch a flight to Detroit.
It was my first time in the city and I am doubtful I could do it justice in a newsletter. For now I’ll just say I danced for a total of 24 hours across three parties, eight hours of which were soundtracked by Mike Servito. I heard out the kind of Detroit tunes I always wanted to hear in Detroit, like ‘Fury’ and ‘Let Me Be’, plus a slew of Detroit-influenced favourites like ‘Submit To The Beat’, ‘Jump 4’, ‘Energy’ and ‘Jak To Basics’. I was bowled over by a whole load of tunes I’ve never heard before but sounded like my platonic ideal of what music should be, especially in Mike and Jeffrey Sfire’s closing B2B. I jumped around like a loon and met a whole load of lovely people. (I also heard ‘When Love Takes Over’, but the less said about that the better.)
Anyway, to give my ears a rest from this seemingly endless — and greatly inspiring — barrage of club music, I’ve been enjoying these slower mind-and-body-cleansing sets as I’ve been walking around the city since Tuesday. Despite there having been an extra 100,000 people in town over the weekend and a Grand Prix being held on the next one, Detroit feels pretty empty. It has lost two thirds of its population since its 1950s peak and as a result feels like an old sponge, with big pockets of air between its houses, streets and dilapidated highways. It’s a huge contrast to the cities I visited in East Asia two months ago. Weirdly I kept meeting people who knew about my hometown of Birmingham — a taxi driver had family there, a barlady had studied there, and a Minneapolis DJ’s surname was ‘Brumm’.
I knew I wanted to stay a few days after the festival to see some of the city. On Wednesday, I listened to the first mix in this selection as I walked from the Detroit Art Institute to the Motown Museum, taking a look at the old GM Building, Fisher Building and Henry Ford hospital on the way. The second mix soundtracked my (free!) Q line tram ride back downtown, followed by a walk out West through literal wasteland to eat at a place called Johnny Noodle King. The third mix - my own residency on Kiosk - has accompanied me this morning as I got the shuttle out to the airport and sit here writing at the gate.
Next I’m in Salt Lake City for Fervor SLC and hopefully some climbing and hiking. More updates next week.
Bouffant Bouffant - Double Scorpio Soundbaths 01
Gimme A Reason’s Bouffant Bouffant delivers the first in a five-part mix series curated by Double Scorpio, manufacturers of ‘cleaner’ for “twirling at the disco or having an intimate moment”. When I played at Gimme last Friday, Brett told me about DS’s origins in a lab in some Southern university — it was a hell of a story, which, I guess for good reason, does not appear on their ‘About Us’ page. Anyway, the company’s Soundbaths series has just launched, inviting DJs to imagine an hour at the bathhouse starting at midnight as you enter the building and ending at sunrise after…who knows what!
BoBo’s opening hour, then, is full of anticipation and intrigue, many of its tracks hitting that blend of fun and sexiness that Patrick Cowley perfected on his gay porn soundtracks. You can practically smell the poppers wafting out of the dubbed out percussion and rounded bass on the instrumental jams, while vocal moments – the stealthy boogie of Wham!’s ‘Everything She Wants’, a Cantonese version of Sade’s ‘Hang On To Your Love’ – paint a picture of love and seduction complex enough to evoke the uncertainties of sauna liaisons. There’s also a mash-up of Azealia Banks and Talking Heads, which, to me at least, doesn’t really have any particular meaning beyond slapping HARD.
aNNA - Coil Special Part 2 (Live at the White Hotel)
An excerpt from aNNA’s warm-up set for Manchester goblin botherers Bakk Heia at The White Hotel back in February, this recording acts as an accessible introduction to the band Coil and their many, MANY musical facets. Co-founder of Manchester crews All Hands On Deck and Dust Off, aNNA is no stranger to Midweek Mixes — see here and here. This time she brings us a survey of John Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson’s 22-year personal and musical partnership, which generated 18 albums, several live albums, rejected scores (e.g. for the film Hellraiser) and a huge amount of Coil ‘lore’. Balance gives rather morose voice to this in several of aNNA’s selections, his preoccupations including magick, drugs, gay sex, the world, the cosmos etc. Nothing major then, but all this makes Coil natural bedfellows for Bakk Heia. This recording also demonstrates both aNNA and the party’s range — compare and contrast with the banger of a set she played at Bakk Heia back in 2022 with fellow Dust Off founder Nick Kagame, here.
Kiosk Outsiders w/DJ City & Joe Delon (12/05/24)
For the latest instalment of my Outsiders residency on Kiosk Radio I invited one of my favourite contemporary producers, DJ City, to do a guest mix. I’ve written at some length about why I like his work, here, and it’s rare for me to do a gig without playing one of his tracks. Since this particular show went out on a Saturday morning rather than the usual evening slot (due to Horst Festival), both he and I went for a languorous weekend morning-in-bed vibe.
To use the name of a party DJ City runs in Berlin, the mix starts off Frisky and fun, opening with Saint Etienne’s ‘Sun In My Morning’ before pitching into a smorgasbord of Swedish-Samba selections. Is this the start of a Luso-Sueco love affair? Well, before long, an unreleased track of Johan’s takes things in that direction:
I’ve been thinking about you
More than I should
The way you style your hair
And how it always looks goodCould you say the same for me?
Have I been on your mind?
Maybe if you want to
We could hang out some time
Things soon enter Bad Dad territory (another of Johan’s parties), with those chuggy, drawn-out numbers in the middle section driving the sexy action. Once business has been dispensed with, the mix resolves with post-coital cloud-drifting. It’s a real trip.
My second hour of the show is a bit of an artefact, a mix I recorded for a spring fling’s birthday over 8 years ago. You can hear the sweet infatuation of a schoolboy crush through the selections — ‘Heartbeat’, ‘Handsome Man’, ‘Body Heat’ etc - and it also reminds me that I can actually mix boogie and disco records pretty well…or at least could 8 years ago!
Here’s the tracklist:
Diana Ross - Muscles
Taana Gardner - Heartbeat
Bill Withers - You Got The Stuff
Gwen Guthrie - Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent
Le Club – Un Fait Divers Et Rien De Plus
Fockewulf 190 - Body Heat
RAF - Self Control
INXS - I Need You Tonight
Scritti Politti - Boom! There She Was
Lisa Lisa - I Wonder If I Take You Home
Pam Jackman - Work Your Body
Touché - Take A Look But Don’t Touch
Mtume - So You Wanna Be A Star
New Edition - My Secret (Didja Gitit Yet?)
Sparkle Tuhran - Handsome Man
Melba Moore - Pick Me Up, I’ll Dance (Intro)