A run-down of some of the mixes and recordings that have been soundtracking my existence – from the box-fresh to the tried-and-tested – all guaranteed to brighten up your week.

Quick update: Back In The Pocket: The Sound Of Welt Discos II compilation and mix CD is out now. Get in touch if you’d like a physical CD for your car or simply for your shelf.

This post is not about that, but in a way it is, because it’s about a mix that I’ve listened to constantly over the past two years (the timespan in which I made the two In The Pocket compilation/mix CDs) and has spoken to me deeply about my own approach to DJing and archiving.

Eris Drew released the second volume of Mystery Of The Motherbeat on 1 February 2024, six years after vol. 1 and two years after the first time I had seen her DJ, b2b with Octo Octa, at Planeta Manas on a Wednesday night in Lisbon. That DJ set left enough of an impression on me to write it up at the time (here), but I didn’t see Eris DJ again for a good while, so when this mix came out I was still a bit of Motherbeat ingénue.

Mystery Of The Motherbeat Vol. 2 floored me, not only for the quality of the mix itself but also for the manner in which Eris archived it with a track-by-track narration on her blog. As someone who regularly undertakes a similar practice for my own mixes (e.g. here, here, here) and wonders why other DJs don’t, this presentation of the mix felt familiar and comforting. I remember listening and reading and thinking: “I need to write about this”, both the mix itself and the experience of absorbing the mix through the eyes and ears of the DJ who made it. It felt like for once I had crossed over to the other side and I wanted to explore that.

Then the moment passed. Coincidentally, I saw Eris DJ solo that spring, holding down the penultimate slot at the storied No Way Back afterparty in Detroit, where she played a techno-, acid- and breaks-heavy selection featuring, memorably for me because it’s a record I own and hold dear, Cari Lekebusch’s ‘Jump 4’. The set was brilliant. Later that summer at Honcho Campout I was Eris and Maya’s artist liaison, so it would be my job to stand by the side of the stage at The Grove for six straight hours as the two of them closed the festival. They stretched out fully, taking us on a voyage that spanned UK garage and Orbital’s ‘Lush 3-1/3-2’, going down many diverting tributaries along the way. It was my birthday, and one of the happiest Sunday evenings of my life. A year later I’d see them play again at Kala Festival (write-up here), but whether for the setting, the crowd or my own state of mind, the bit of their set I saw struck me simply as “festival music”, eschewing the depth of the Campout set in order to get maximum number of hands in the air.

About those hands. Without getting too bogged down in it, over that same time period I’d also developed what I’d describe as a visceral allergy to overtly euphoric and nostalgic dance music. You must know that feeling on a Monday when you open up instagram stories only to be faced with a kind of supercut of breakdowns, M1 organs, piano chords, diva vocals and the all important snare rushes before the drop, a kind of potted elation. Because my exposure to Eris’s work up to February 2024 was limited to that one pedal-to-the-metal set with Maya at Planeta Manas and seeing these kinds of clips online, I had lumped her in with the hordes of similar DJs getting booked everywhere during those relentless summers of 90s rave fetishism, the long tail of which we’re seemingly only just getting over today. This was of course unfair, not least because Eris was actually going to those 90s raves in the first place and has more right than anyone to play that stuff if she wants to (she wrote movingly about her first experience of the Motherbeat, in 1994, here), but also because she obviously had much more to say about the nuances of ecstasy on the dancefloor than most other DJs following the trend (for example, in her 2018 Art Of DJing interview). Listening to her first Mystery Of The Motherbeat mix might also have put me straight on this point, but I never checked it out.

So I guess Mystery Of The Motherbeat Part 2 acted as a kind of corrective to my surface impression of Eris and her DJing, but to describe it merely in those terms sells it short. I also don’t see it as one of those ‘listening’ or ‘b-sides’ mixes that have become a rite of passage for upwardly mobile DJs, a means of showing themselves in a different light and diversifying their booking opportunities in the process, especially if it can be captured on stream. Rather, it feels like the opposite. While its concerns are nothing to do with the trappings and spectacle of a stream or a big festival stage or even a peaktime club, it yet contains the kernel of what I have seen Eris do in those more curated settings. If anything it feels most like a distillation. As she puts it more simply in the SC description:

No big hands in the air moments to speak of here, just deep mixing and some of the most beautiful records in my collection.

Listening to it, and absorbing the personal meaning transmitted through the music, you begin to feel that she is getting to the true heart of what she and the Motherbeat is about, the philosophical (or, perhaps better, the spiritual) root of everything she does.

(I decided to write the following without referring back to the liner notes Eris wrote about the mix, but I’m going to re-read them afterwards and see if anything interesting comes up.)

The mix opens with ‘Blue’, the closing track from the 1992 self-titled debut album by Latour, of ‘People Are Still Having Sex’ fame. This track was notably used in the club scene in Basic Instinct, and I briefly amused myself wondering how to integrate that reference — a fabulously coked-up Sharon Stone teasing her lesbian lover by grinding on a wooden-faced Michael Douglas — into the cosmology of the Motherbeat. Of course it’s the tune itself that tells us where we are, or where Eris wants us: a lush, slow (even pitched up from 119bpm to 124bpm it sounds unhurried) chugger built around a loose breakbeat, marauding bassline, mysterious, tension-building pads and, crucially, that raunchy guitar riff. That tells us that early 90s rave is a touchstone, but none of the elements in this track are in your face telling you how to feel. Rather, as a mix opener, ‘Blue’ sculpts a deep-sea mood that invites us to sink into it if we wish.

You can well imagine a parallel universe, perhaps in that club, where ‘Blue’ would act as the jumping off point for more straight-up rave selections, M1 organs and uplifting vocal samples, hands firmly in the air for the next two hours. This mix does not inhabit that universe. Eris doubles down on the depth with a subaqueous mix into ‘Deep Blue’ by Geo Taguchi, from 2023, a boss move not only for the disco-style world-building of the matching song titles, but also for the way she finesses the harmonics between the two records during the transition. The mix out of ‘Deep Blue’ sees Eris merge its beatless outro into the kick-less intro of the next tune. Two inventively musical transitions in and we already know we are in for a real DJing treat. As the kick on this new tune gradually comes in, the sensation is of waves gathering, an accumulation of energy, before the track resolves a minute later into a dubby turn-of-the-millennium Force Tracks vibe. In fact, the tune, an early Caldera release, was put out in 2022 by the venerable Freude Am Tanzen, apparently still going strong a quarter of a century on. But with this resolution the energy doesn’t so much break as plateau, holding something back for the next wave. Quite soon after another rise and plateau takes place through the gorgeous key mix into the next track.

Except it’s not a key mix, it’s just the next section of the Caldera tune. At this moment Eris isn’t doing anything except let the music do its thing, and it’s this kind of deceptively simple idea that really gets me excited in mixes. If a DJ makes a point of being visible (read: audible) in the mix, be it in their technique or the selection or both, then they are helping you, the listener at home or the dancer not staring at the booth, enter a mindstate where you might start hearing the DJ’s hand in moments when really they’re not doing anything. The best DJs achieve this through both selection AND technique, which I have tried to explain countless times in relation to Prosumer (like here). We’re only 12 minutes in and through the musicality in her transitions and the choice of tracks that shift and speak to each other, Eris has let us know that she knows what she’s doing and knows we know too (if we’re listening properly), priming us for a deeper engagement with the subsequent construction of the mix. Like me hearing a new track coming in when in fact it’s just a new movement within the same track, we’re ready to start hearing things, real and imagined.

To step out of the linear timeline for a moment and focus on the technical point, of Eris being ‘visible’ in the mix, the diversity, musical sensitivity and, to use that cliched DJ term, ‘craftiness’ of mixing in Mystery Of The Motherbeat Part 2 is frankly breathtaking. There are transitions that spool out over 90 seconds or more, luxuriating in the counterpoint between elements in both tracks: at 1h53m30, with the classic energy-giving breakbeat-to-4/4 combo of Molen’s ‘Molecular Machine’ into Satoshi Tomiie’s ‘Proody-106’, the sonar bloops of the former hold a full-blown conversation with the bassline growls of the latter. There are other transitions that turn on a dime: the prior mix, into ‘Molecular Machine’, sees those sonar bloops (then an octave higher from where they end up) harmonise with the last-gasp pads of Knopha’s ‘Corundrum’, in a mix that in only 10 seconds injects as much if not more energy than the 90-second one. At 1h24m40 the breakbeat of Way Out West’s ‘The Gift’ crashes, exactingly, into the first beat of the outro of Perko & Huerco S.’s ‘Prang’. You might think that a track with an outro as accommodating as ‘Prang’ would demand a long transition, but Eris doesn’t think so and, as always, she’s right. ‘The Gift’ is such a lavish track that it needs space to unfurl after the pressure of ‘Prang’, and her magician’s sleight of hand affords it that. “The moon and the stars/for the gifts you gave” sings Joanna Law, and it’s around this moment that I realise this mix, tonally, is a companion piece to Chris Cruse’s Moongazing Mix that I keep banging on about (here), just 20bpm faster. (Sidenote: when it was released in 1996, ‘The Gift’ made it to #15 on the UK singles chart and a slot on Top Of The Pops — those were the days!)

Back to the first half timeline, and two dubby minimal earworms, first BT’s ‘Relativity’, remixed by Carl Craig with notable restraint, and second Satoshi Tomiie’s ‘Un Peu’, melt unhurriedly into the lush orchestration of Edmondson’s 2023 remake of his own ‘On & On’. The Satoshi cut is also from 2023, which raises a smile because he could just as easily be represented by a release from 30 years earlier. Indeed, about half of the records in this mix were put out between 2021-2023, but the way Eris carefully combines them with old favourites of hers from the 90s often makes it difficult to tell which is which. The Edmondson tune heralds a shift from 4/4 into a 2-step section that flies us from Newcastle to Australia and back to Bristol again, before flipping us back to 4/4 with a filtered fade-in into the cymbal crash of Todd Edwards’ ‘Winter Behavior’ (sidenote: you can check my deep-dive of the great Todd Edwards bandcamp dump here). Todd’s cut-up vocals and bouncy bassline then make a perfect stepping stone to the late-night UK house of Toka Project. By now the carefully handled waves and plateaus of energy feel like they are headed for a kind of rolling peaktime euphoria, especially with Toka Project, but once again this is not that mix. Instead Eris redeploys the filter to spirit away the Toka Project outro kick completely, throwing in a couple of fader cuts for good measure, to make way for the celestial choir, strings and piano of the next track.

Who knew Moby had remixed Brian Eno? And who knew he’d remixed the same Eno track seven times? Eris plays the main ‘Mary’s Birthday Mix’ of ‘Fractal Zoom’ and it’s one of those epic the-revelation-has-begun type tunes that could only have been made in the early 90s. Eno intones a series of cryptic commands and you feel not only that we’ve come full circle since ‘Blue’ (we surely have: the two tracks are sonic and historical bedfellows, both being released in 1992) but that, over the intervening hour, the underlying thrust of the mix — the “mystery” — has been sufficiently established through the selections and technique to be finally articulated:

Slow
Lie
Endure
Recline
In a separate time
On a different plane

You wonder how Eris is going to get out of this utterly OTT track and, of course, she doesn’t: acknowledging how huge the tune is, she simply lets it run its course, a fitting closer to the first half of the mix before diving into the renewed energy of the second half.

I’m not going to go through the whole second half, safe to say that the temporal framing remains the same, as we immediately gather from the sample of ‘Domina’, from 1993, that appears in the opening track ‘Varial’, from 2023. It’s a much higher pace, more techno and breaks focussed, but with welcome forays into grimey garage, and although the selection and mixing both remain highly creative it at times feels more pressed than the first half. More of those typical rave signifiers creep into the music, and there’s the only track in the mix that I actually don’t like, a kind of steppy breaky-techno number with ‘Diva Dance’-style vocals that, unlike most of the other 2023 selections, to my ears already sounds dated.

What I like and appreciate about this second half, though, is how it forms a kind of bridge between the first half of the mix and what I’ve since seen Eris do in front of a crowd at Campout (with Octo Octa), No Way Back (solo) and Breakfast Club (also solo). It connects the dots with those more uptempo facets of her DJing while retaining the interior, mind-orientated focus of the mix as a whole. But for me the real mystery, and luxury, is in the first half, and it’s something I would absolutely love to hear her do in a club setting.

Having written all that and listened to the mix many times in the process, I finally went back to the liner notes Eris wrote to accompany it. The main thing that struck me, besides the illuminating detail about how she came about each artist/record and their historical backdrop, and the process for selecting and sequencing the mix, was the focus on turntable tricks vs basic transitions. She refers a couple of times to harmonics, counterpoint and the use of beatless moments to effect transitions, but otherwise is more likely to mention things like layering extra sound effects over individual records or juggling with doubles. These are tricks I know Eris does a lot when DJing live but it didn’t even occur to me to listen out for them in the mix. In a sense this confirms the way I feel about them: they’re a kind of bonus on top of her fundamental mixing skills, which are accomplished and inventive enough in themselves to carry the show.

Another thing that strikes me about the notes is that her approach to them evokes, even parallels, her approach to mixing records. She addresses each selection in a unique way according to a particular detail about it: ‘Blue’ she does indeed appraise through the cultural reference point of Basic Instinct (that made me smile); the Caldera tune prompts her to dig into his back catalogue; another choice from an EP titled ‘The Very First Real Magic’ is an opportunity to meditate on the function of music as magic in the modern world; and so on. This is the same level of discrimination and care that she applies to selecting each record and effecting each transition in the mix, to suit each particular situation, and you can hear it and feel it.

I want to close this rumination with a quote from Eris from one of her interviews, which basically sums the whole thing up for me. In essence, it’s what I try to articulate every time I try to explain the function of DJing in my own life, and in the liner notes of the compilation/mix CDs, and even when digging into other people’s work on this blog. Except she puts it a lot more succinctly:

I see DJing as a form of collage. You take existing cultural elements and by combining them you transform them into something that has new meaning, it has you in it. That's what's happening here, people are collaging these existing cultural artefacts and creating something really radiant and new with it, and exploring their identities through it.

Who wouldn’t want to do that?