Midweek Mixes (30/06/21)
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 Upson & Ouissam - Queer Ears @ Rinse.fm
Love Muscle is one of two parties in Leeds (along with Cosmic Slop) that sit near the top of my list of nights I’d like to go to. Everything I’ve been told about it, along with their thoughtful (and stylish) communication and focus on inclusivity, makes it sound like a dancer’s paradise.
This is cemented by head honcho Michael Upson’s booking policy and his own musical taste, as capably illustrated in this episode of his Rinse show, Queer Ears. Disco and new beat rub shoulders with house of all kinds before last-minute bits of contemporary bleep and italo, all arranged round an absolutely epic centrepiece in Danny Tenaglia’s remix of Garbage’s ‘When I Grow Up’. This is BIG music for uninhibited moves.
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a contribution from Ouissam in the second hour. Any mix that starts with Mickey Oliver into Lemelle is alright by me, and he keeps this joyous energy going right through to a closing house version of ‘Bedtime Story’ that I’d never heard before. He even finds time for Morgan Geist’s remix of ‘If You Say So’ by (largely forgotten?) mid-00s boogie band Escort.
Ouissam playing at a post-covid Love Muscle? I’d be there like a shot.
Luigi Di Venere - Pom Radio #6: DECADA 2 Special
I’ve been doing some copy-writing for Say What? magazine’s Selections feature and one of the perks of it is regularly hearing a set of new records that I would otherwise almost certainly miss. While most of them usually have something interesting about them, there is always one that is genuinely excellent and gets me excited to write something. This edition’s case in point is DECADA 2, a compilation of music written by the late Mexican producer and visual artist Mateo Lafontaine that is being put out by Berlin label Philoxenia. You can read my blurb about it here.
A better introduction to the LP is this radio show by label head Luigi Di Venere, whose field recording expertise comes through in the clever montage of music, narrative and excerpts of interviews with Lafontaine himself. Di Venere knows how to weave a story from different sound sources and it really draws you into both his and Lafontaine’s world.
I’d love to hear more. For example, while the chats with Lafontaine touch on the politics that informed his artistic decisions at the time he was making this music, there is no discussion of the queer aesthetic already present in the DECADA 2 cover and even more explicit in much of his later artwork. Also it would be lovely to hear more about Lafontaine’s musical influences and how they travelled over the Atlantic in a pre-internet era. We do hear one track named ‘I’m Cosey Fanni Tutti’ but beyond that references are absent.
Sadly, of course, with Lafontaine’s untimely passing last year these conversations will never be had. What we are left with is the speculation provoked by his fascinating musical and visual output, and the winning anecdotes we hear in this radio show, each told with the audio equivalent of a conspiratorial wink.
Congratulations to Di Venere and his label partner Neu Verboten on this fantastic piece of archive work.