Vicki Siolos, via The Lot Radio’s SoundCloud
I had another catch-up post started when I decided to take mid-month stock of a couple weeks’ non-targeted listening, and what do you know? These all jumped up and said, “Me!” A sprightly lot, even when deliberately drowsy, as our show from the sprightly Lot Radio demonstrates. (Catch-up post next up, for paying subscribers, which will, good eye, be a pattern around here.)
Here are the first four sets as a SoundCloud playlist.
Jubilee, Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, February 24)
I admit it: The first time through, the first quarter of this showcase left me a little cold—mainly due to a “Trans-Europe Express” interpolation close to the half-hour mark that I found, and find, corny. It took a second play to realize just how well it worked anyway—and that it works not despite but because of that corn. And it took no time at all to surrender to the rest. It’s a statement piece that may be her definitive set.
That isn’t a surprise. I’ve loved Jubilee’s sets for years, listing her FACT Mix 461 (September 2014) in my top ten sets of that year and more recently spotlighting her gone-halves with Jesse Mann in January 2022 at The Lot Radio and her May 2023 Daisychain mix around these parts. (There’s also a December 2022 all-night b2b with Star Eyes that I planned to cover and didn’t get around to in a timely manner, sigh.) I’ve never sensed that she might be merely spinning her wheels, and she certainly isn’t here.
Jubilee brings a lot of Miami touches to what she plays—touches of reggaeton, lots of 303 squelch; it’s a kind of misnomer to call her “house” when “bass” is probably a little more like it, even if not quite as festival-specific as that latter one-word omni-word is often taken to be when applied to American DJs. Her low end is omnipresent, but she isn’t merely throwing crazy-weird shapes through the bins for the sake of it—the groove comes first. Still, as my friend Tamara Palmer recently put it, “A well placed 303 still gets me”—here, it does so repeatedly.
Jennifer Spektor, Echolocation (Particle FM, March 1)
Here is my declared stake: I now have a monthly show for Particle FM, titled Needles in the Haystack—second Tuesdays, streaming live at 6 p.m. PST/8 p.m. Central—and I’m proud to be associated with them. I just so happened to be perusing parts of their voluminous SoundCloud page (mirrored on Mixcloud) while waiting for my first episode to go up, when this one struck my fancy—the name seemed familiar and I liked the title and graphic, so why not. Turns out Jennifer Spektor is from Seattle and works for the techno venue Kremwerk, which opened long after I moved away fifteen years back, but this is persuasive—smoky and bloopy, consistently engaging, modest in scope and sharp in execution.
Vicki Siolos, Bright Patterns (The Lot Radio, March 7)
As with Jubilee, this is someone I got to know personally while living in New York—and someone whose Lot shows I’ve kept an ear on even if I didn’t always write about them. But her archive for the station is readymade balm for anyone looking to relax while still keeping their subconscious busy: Bright Patterns “leans on ambient, experimental, and downtempo electronic music to kick off an early morning” on the Lot, per Siolos’ program description on SC. And this program in particular lives up to the show’s title—the tracks are like ripples of water eddying out differently but congruently and connecting at the edges. It’s engrossing; it also lays me out at night like nothing flat.
DJ Polo b2b Peverelist, Rinse FM (March 13)
Apparently, per Polo’s gruffly spoken intro, these two had been planning this one for a while—always a promising sign. A better one: Nothing about this hour is forced. The trance-leaning intro builds nice and gradually, the hi-hats shuffle menacingly and playfully in turn, nothing stays the same for five minutes, and nothing sounds out of place. It’s tagged #broken beat; an old 2000 Black or DKD fan might beg to differ, but it does work pretty well descriptively of the set’s bounding rhythms.
Chrissy, Maximum Airtime: 1999 Special (Dublab, March 21)
The third of this edition’s DJs I consider friends: We bonded, poetically enough, one night at Danny Tenaglia’s loft in Long Island City during a livestream event to which press and others were invited. I’d cottoned onto him after he began doing an mp3 mix series called My Year of Mixtapes—52 sets, genre by genre, made as he digitized and divested himself of vinyl—and have been consistently impressed with his endless crates and seemingly effortless joie de vivre. He’d be one of my favorite DJs no matter what.
As My Year of Mixes demonstrated, history has been a big part of what Chrissy does, both as a DJ and producer. (I love a lot of his catalog; I recently played the Soundbwoy Killah remix of “Can’t You Feel It” at party and placed Physical Release, his 2021 album, second on my year-end list that year.) That includes a pair of presentations on panels I convened for Pop Conference, both times in Seattle, before its more recent migrations to New York and Los Angeles. And he regularly makes connections not only across DJ-focused musical styles but their adoption into pop, in a way that tends to be rare for DJs closer to my age, and is generally rooted in historicization as well as the spirit of this-matches-that. No surprise he used to be a schoolteacher.
Chrissy’s second episode of his new Dublab show, Maximum Airtime, focuses on the club music, and pop tributaries, of 1999, and it’s the best of both worlds—drawing a diagram of a fluid year in motion, with commentary. He largely keeps the mixing clean and quick, radio-style, though not always; always, though, he keeps it moving musically. He also offers genuinely insightful and helpful voiceover commentary where and when necessary. The funniest of these involves Steve Gurley’s UK garage remix of “Red Alert,” a version I love as much as the original, and the theft of a pub-quiz pot, but there’s also a lot of contextualization that works as quick-and-easy condensations of dance history; they also strike me as accessible to the nonce, though I’ve been wrong about that kind of thing before. The tracklist is on the Dublab page, and the DJ operates under the assumption that you are utilizing it as you listen—maybe the most teacherly thing about the episode.
The music itself is ripe and ready to burst, still, a quarter century later. The filtered house that Chicago’s nineties second wave had promulgated early in the decade, then migrated to Paris in the middle, had by the nineties’ end engorged itself silly, just like the economy, pumping dollars into ever-escalating numbers of clubs, festivals, and party favors. In TUIM, I frame the year in terms of Woodstock ’99, and it was an appropriate landing spot, but for a dance fan the year was nonstop bubbliciousness, a party that felt never-ending and peaky. That corresponds with a lot of my memories of the next year and change as well—a period that ends with a resounding thud with 9/11.
Though Chrissy explicitly disavows the year’s big-beat releases, the other mix from this time that I go back to in my mind here is Fatboy Slim’s disc of Essential Millennium (FFRR 3CD, rel. November 1, 1999), a definitive snapshot of the era, right before it ran out of gas—the first six minutes alone, traversing cocktail hour, buzzsaw house, the never-ending burst of “Vertigo,” and a track alternating silly sampled disco with dense programmed beat-downs, are a cumulative advertisement for high living in several senses. But that’s a superstar gambit that reaches back in time, from beginning to near-end, from “Summertime Samba” to “Born Slippy.” Chrissy is sticking with the year in question, the format enabling a lot more wandering afield, genre-wise. Then again, if Essential Millennium had come out a few months later, Fatboy Slim’s set, too, might have included “138 Trek.”
That landmark record appears about halfway into Chrissy’s episode. Its conclusion sets the stage for another landmark, “Say My Name,” with a VO discussing Timbaland and Darkchild’s adaptations of UKG rhythms—only to land the winning punch with “You Don’t Know”—lesser remembered but hitting harder rhythmically than Destiny’s Child. This works the show’s advantage—you’re lured in by the more familiar tune and then convinced by the follow-up. That, and the fact that if you’re going to connect these dots, 1999 is the year to do it with.