Monday Mixes (12/08/24)
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.
Nono Gigsta – House of Crocodiles Part 2 (Live @ Freerotation 2024)
It feels a bit reckless to try to capture in words a highly cerebral DJ set by someone who wrote an entire PhD on the “speakability of music”, or, indeed, the “unspeakability” of electronic music as a “fundamentally amnesiac and non-verbal” culture (Simon Reynolds, 1998) — which is something Nono Gigsta has in fact done. “It’s a DJ set not a thesis”, the tweets eyeroll, in a variation on that old chestnut about dancing about architecture. Of course this newsletter of mine is really one long attempt to disprove those notions, but when it comes to DJing like this, which so baldly aims for the “ineffable” and the “numinous” — choice words from Nono Gigsta herself — well, the basic bitch Midweek Mixes blurb isn’t gonna cut the mustard. Unfortunately, for better or worse, of late I find myself quite lost for words when it comes to significant stuff and so, much as I’d like to write a grand thesis on why I find this set is so exhilarating, so reassuring and, somehow, so vital right now, the words won’t come easily, and I haven’t found the energy to force them.
Lucky for all of us, then, that the recording is accompanied by a detailed and thoughtful piece by Nono Gigsta herself, so there is little need for me to add much more, grand or otherwise. What I will say though is that I only witnessed the final 30 minutes of this set in person because I had been outside enjoying Kia closing down the dome. But once I’d come inside, for those 30 minutes I was swept away by the energy surging around Freero Room 2, a quite different energy from the night before, less focussed, more delirious, people flying by the seat of their pants, wooping and gasping and jaws dropping, moshing and sharing bewildered glances, all of which I’m sure you will quite be able to believe when you listen to what Nono Gigsta was doing to us all. (And I wasn’t even there for the ‘Whole Lotta Love’ moment.)
What’s clear from reading the accompanying text, and listening back to the recording, and remembering the collective vibe in the room, is that this was a DJ-set-as-love-letter, a love letter to Freero, to batshit Baskerville Hall, to the regulars, the ingenues, the pilgrims, to the the focus and the chaos, the outrageous idea of it all, the kind of set that could only emerge from the particular context of a long-running close-knit festival, where layers of personal and interpersonal meaning accrue over the years into a kind of DJ intertextuality (yes, GROAN, but go on, find me a better word). I absorbed all of this in my brief 30 minutes in the room, and then again listening back to this set as I walked down the canal in Brussels last week, and I felt the significance of what Nono Gigsta did that evening, how meaningful it was to everyone there, and to tell the truth I had never even heard the name Nono Gigsta until this year’s festival. Now THAT’S what I call DJing.
Lis Dalton – Live @ Hemlock Nights (Honcho Campout 2023)
I’ve been holding on to this mix for nearly a year in the hope of writing some grand statement that would do it justice but, as I mentioned above, my bandwidth — physical, mental, emotional, spiritual — for grand statements is currently rather limited and unfortunately time has run out. Tomorrow I travel to Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary for my second Honcho Campout, where I will once again be working Artist Liaison and, if last year was anything to go by, hopefully discovering some new things about myself. I’ve written previously about the circumstances that led to me being at Hemlock Hole for Lis Dalton’s set on Friday night last year, my birthday night, the night that she “helped me slow-jive my way back to existence again”, but I’ve never got round to talking about the set itself.
So the reason I include it here, despite not actually being able to write about it properly yet, is there’s something about it that resonates powerfully with Nono Gigsta’s. Lis, too, was a completely new name to me last August, but clearly not to the who’s who of the N America branch of the International Association of Feral Queers (IAFQ) who made up the baying front row at Hemlock Hole, hanging off the stage scaffolding, grinding and dipping it low like there was no tomorrow (incidentally, a tune that you feel Lis absolutely must have played but, in fact, did not), yelling “DANCEHALL LIS!” and generally having the time of their fucking lives.
And the reason they were acting that way wasn’t just it being a sick DJ set, but it being a specific sick DJ set, made for this group of people, for this festival where, in 2019, Physical Therapy had laid a foundation of twisted fast-and-slowjams that both Lis, on Friday, and CCL, on Saturday, were still calling back to four years later, and for this concept of Hemlock Nights, a nighttime stage where the vibe is specifically intended to be dripping-mossy-witchy-lick-a-poisonous-frog-and-howl-at-the-moon-in-half-time, and it really does achieve that 100%, where, only a year earlier, Kiernan Laveaux had chopped Lumidee into an incantation and everyone joined in.
And again, like with Nono Gigsta’s set, I’m thinking and writing all this as someone who wasn’t even there in 2019, or in 2022, and was kind of only there for Lis’s set by accident in 2023 — yet those layers, those narratives, the whole collective catharsis of these sets and moments, can be heard right there in the recordings, if you listen for them.
Of course, the real question I’m left with after everything is: was ‘Chocolate’ Kylie’s ‘Venus As A Boy’?