March 16, 2025

Warming Up For Cassy (08/03/25)

A week ago I warmed up for Cassy at Ministerium club in Lisbon, playing from 23h to 01h in the downstairs room, which, on a good night, is up there with the best sounding rooms in the city.

My fantasies in the run-up to the gig included, but weren’t limited to:

• Fantasy: Playing my classic mash-up of Cassy’s ‘Endless Endeavour’ and the original version of Robert Miles ‘Children’ as my final tune before she would take over.

  • Reality: rendered impossible by the fact I sold both records many years ago.

• Fantasy: Playing The Mole ‘Last Ditch’ and reminding Cassy of the time she played it at the Best Party Ever™ aka her all-nighter at the Hoxton Gallery Basement, July 2010, a party where the vibe and the drugs and the music were so good that when someone vomited on my leg I merely shrugged and carried on raving.

  • Reality: I played ‘Last Ditch’ but was unable to deliver on the anecdote, for reasons that will become apparent later.

• Fantasy: Reminding Cassy of the time we saw her in fabric in 2012 and told her it was outrageous how she’d been flown over “all the way from Berlin” to play only two hours. We would laugh together about how young and naive I had been back then, but also how wise.

  • Reality: Unrealised, for the same reasons.

• Fantasy: Artfully constructing an entire set of tracks we never actually heard Cassy play back in the day, but which she surely must have played given the way they sound, as a kind of art project.

  • Reality: Not too far from the truth.

• Fantasy: The sound in Ministerium being so clear, and my selection so on point, that the crowd (which I knew was going to be of my generation) would feel transported back to the halcyon days of the late 00s and everyone, including Cassy, would have the best time dancing to my set.

  • Reality:

Well, in reality, first of all the sound technician didn’t show up until 10 minutes after I’d started and, despite swapping a turntable and then occasionally coming to fiddle with the levels while I was playing, apparently didn’t quite get it right. From the booth it sounded OK to me, but afterwards people on the floor said it was muffled and there was a weird disconnect between the subs and the mids/highs that was making it hard to get into the groove.

Second, although there were two or three people who clearly appreciated what I was trying to do with the music, my general conclusion was that, SURPRISINGLY, people hadn’t actually come to this party to hear a very well thought out Cassy c. 2008 tribute set. Rather, the people who showed up early enough to happen to catch me playing just wanted to hear some uncomplicated disco house as they passed the time before the party really got going. Or they just wanted to hang out in the backstage, which was fuller than the dancefloor. Or both.

My bad. Such are the risks you run if you decide to artfully curate a warm-up set for no one but yourself. Thankfully I’m grown up enough to not take these things too personally (that’s why I’ve written an entire newsletter about it), so I still managed to enjoy myself a lot by indulging in my Cassy warm-up fantasy.

Here are some of the selections and why they made the cut.

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Matthias Tanzmann – ‘Hotel Sapporo (Petre Inspiresco Remix)’ [Moon Harbour, 2008]

Cassy stuck this tune in towards the end of a set in Paris in August 2008, which was recorded and subsequently spread across the internet under the title Resonant Vibes Mix. The quintessential Cassy recording for any 22-year-old fan of hers back then (i.e. me and my friends), the set swings back and forth between the extended bongo-y house tracks that were everywhere in 2008 — the ubiquitous ‘Cuero Para Mi Gente’ by Brothers’ Vibe, BV’s remix of Anonym’s ‘Detroit Huis’ (which opens the set and then reappears two hours later — queen move tbh), DJ Q’s ‘Superclique’ — and the kind of splashy, funked-up house bangers that I so strongly associate with Cassy — Carl Craig’s remix of ‘Flash’, Josh Wink (see below), Aaron-Carl’s remix of Greg Cash’s ‘Party Chat’ — and then the very then Berghain-influenced bleepy stuff like Radio Slave’s ‘What Happened’ and the sequence of Sleeparchive and early MDR tunes at the recording’s centre.

But it’s the final section that’s relevant here, where Cassy emerges out of another bongo aside into an incredible, sparse, creaky-door-meets-squeaky-gate breaks tune followed by the Petre Inspirescu remix in question. I assume this was approaching the end of the night (though the music is still going when the recording cuts out) and it feels like a suitably wonky landing after all the bangers. The tight yet whimsical sound design in the two tunes speaks to Cassy’s Perlon associations, putting me in mind of those late late hours with Ricardo in Fabric Room 1, when he was apt to drop tracks like ‘True To Myself’ and every new noise would feel like an exciting gift.

Since I was warming up at the party at Ministerium, I decided to pick up where Cassy left off that 2008 set with Pedro’s remix, layering it over Roman Flügel’s Soylent Green project for an extra wonky rhythmic starting point.

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Chaton - ‘Catch The Beat (Agnès Redive)’ [Sthlmaudio Recordings, 2007]

A quintessential 2007 house track, this tune appeared everywhere that year, including Prosumer’s RA.070 podcast aka one of the mixes that changed my life. It also features in the tracklist for a set Cassy played at Panoramabar in 2007, a recording I don’t have on my old hard drive and also can’t find on the internet. (Sidenote: I guess Peebs were just more lax about recordings back then — based on some cursory google searches, the pool of live recordings from the club seems to peter out around 2016.)

Sitting in that mix alongside such 2007 throwbacks as the aforementioned Brothers’ Vibe, Anton Zap (not bad on revisiting) and Sascha Dive (forever the white bread of house music), you might expect this remix by Agnès to also be a middle of the middle-of-the-road house track. And on first listen it might even appear to be so. But let it work its magic. Let that two-minute intro breathe, before the politest of pads appears and the kick drops back in two beats earlier than you expect it to. It’s those highly effective light-touch details and the overall weightless propulsion that carry this track to greatness and it still sounds just as fresh almost twenty years later. I took great pleasure in playing this out in full off the 12” I bought back in 2008. (Incidentally, Cassy herself was still playing it in 2016. I wonder if she occasionally digs it out now.)

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Greg Stainer - ‘Turbo’ [V.I.P., 1997]

Conspicuously absent from all of the Cassy mixes I remember listening to back then, and also from the several times I saw her play live (at fabric, Peebs, Eastern Electrics, Village Underground etc), was UKG. She did have a penchant for the odd bit of steppy bass music — her Panoramabar 01 mix CD ended, iconically, with DJ Abstract’s ‘Touch’, and she dropped Martyn’s ‘All I Have Is Memories’ in a couple of the aforementioned sets — but to my knowledge there was never any out-and-out garage. Was it too swung? Did she think it was too cheesy? Is it just another example of UKG failing to land with Europeans? Anyway, as a corrective to that I insisted on playing both the above all-time great MJ Cole co-production and another UKG-adjacent but actually Chicago-produced tune, ‘Living On The Edge’, by Mazi aka Audio Soul Project, thus connecting the UKG back to the US house fundament.

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Wink - ‘Stay Out All Night’ [Ovum, 2008]

An example of the (then) contemporary splashy, funky, second-wave Chicago-style tunes that were in many ways the bedrock of Cassy sets in 2008 — thinking here also of both ‘Get Down’ (which I would have played in my set were it not a warm-up) and ‘Burnin Dub’ by 2000 And One — Josh Wink’s epic manages, despite its periodic white noise rushes and drops, to exercise just enough restraint over its 10 minute runtime. When the Rhodes organ finally comes in after almost four minutes, the track fully lifts off. I played this with about 15 minutes of my set left, imagining that Cassy, who until that point had yet to appear, would likely pop up on cue and give me a knowing smile…

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Reality

Well, you might have guessed by now that I didn’t get to share any of my anecdotes with Cassy or fulfil any of my long-held warm-up fantasies. She didn’t appear during Josh Wink, nor did she appear during the next tune. About five minutes before I was due to finish, once I’d already used up all of my Cassy tributes, I was asked to play another 10 minutes because her taxi was delayed and she would have to start her set the moment she arrived. When she did finally come into the booth I was playing Atlantic Fusion’s ‘Sleepstate’ — not a track I associate with her at all — to a relatively listless room. I packed my records, took my USB and scuttled off.

If only I’d kept hold of that Robert Miles record.

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Edit: see the comments for a link to the Resonant Vibes mix!