BC079 - Five Mixes: May-June 2024
Two official releases, two Kompakt mixes, 239 CDs in the hopper, and more!
The Internet gives and it takes away: All my MixesDB links are about to go dead. The site is shutting down. There’s a mirror up now, and it will help, but I will miss the hell out of the OG and I hope something takes its place, pronto.
This past week, I followed my organization of first magazines, then books, and now CDs—well, not quite. What I did instead was to pull everything out that was a DJ mix CD, and put everything else in the boxes standing next to the bookshelf housing the mags. (The glamour never ends at Chez Matos.) Then I made an inventory of the CDs. Final total: 239 physical DJ mix CDs. Lots of my favorites long since disappeared or sold or lost or god knows what. I will likely replace some of those. So not as many as I thought I might have--but still, a lot, with some of those including multiple mixes. And there’s lots of grist for this precinct: I’ve already earmarked some thirteen possible Five Mixes—and that’s mostly leaving alone 59 Fabric titles.
For example, I own this. Nobody else cares, the top price on Discogs is $6.40, the guy calls himself Shawn Banger Scott without quotes or irony, barely anyone knew it existed then, either. You're damn right I own it! Anyway, stay tuned.
You can hear the first three of the sets below on this SoundCloud playlist.
Purelink, Sunday Mix (Crack Magazine; May 12)
This must be dead media month. Three out of the five here have some kind of “magazine” attached to them even if only one still puts out physical issues—I don’t think Crack Magazine ever has. Once upon a time, it would have meant a cover-mount CD. And a CD would have been ideal for something that takes a while to get going—you were more inclined to give it a few minutes than you might be with a mouse at your disposal. Here's a compliment: This set made me wonder if it wasn’t a live set rather than a DJ mix, such is its consistency of flow. It’s slow-building and sunshiny, an up mood with a melancholic edge, a drifting summer afternoon jam. The synths are limpid enough to suggest transparency; cymbals are brushed with abandon; it maintains its sun-drunk buzz throughout.
Michael Mayer, EG.990 (Electronic Groove; May 24)
It is purely coincidental that two Kompakt mixes made their way into this one, but that’s life (and marketing). Mayer is the label’s co-founder, and about half this selection comes from there, the rest from other labels. But it really does feel like a Kompakt mix, in the classical sense—meaning the CD sense, when their mixes were instant hits: languid and sumptuous, emotional and irresistibly hip-moving, a little poppy and a little gothy. One-third of the way in, “Paons (Dave DK Remix),” a slow burner with a glittering pulse, puts your heart in your mouth. “Casa (Axel Boman Dub Mix),” which follows, yanks it out of there—and does the same to your shoulders.
Regal86, Recognize (DJ Mag; May 29)
Logrolling time! I recently meet Michael McKinney, Passion of the Weiss’s longtime DJ-mixes columnist, in person in Minneapolis, where he’s been living for a year and a half now. It was great—there aren’t many other people writing regularly about DJ sets, so it was fun to compare notes. And I got to thank him for his part in this, a set that accompanies Michael’s feature on Regal86, a rising producer from Monterrey, Mexico. He produces in a lot of styles, but this set is techno—the hashtag is #hardgroove, not a familiar term to me prior to this—and it’s sharp, relentless, and thickly layered. Acid lines run through a lot of it, but they seem encased in Lucite rather than zapping across a blackened sky. The whole set sounds like somebody really having fun.
AMSL, Connecting the Dots (Kompakt; June 7)
You might think that this set, not the Mayer above, would be completely immersed in Kompaktian history and tonal shifts. After all, by his own admission, Michael is just playing what he usually plays—half the tracks are from other imprints—but EG.990 hits like Kompakt top to bottom. AMSL, a relative newcomer from Cologne, part of a crew called E.P.I.Q., hits like something else entirely, even as she immersed in the label’s archives, spending a year trawling the Kompaktian annals—over 15,000 tracks, yowzah—to craft her selection. But she has found a completely unique path, even if and when you recognize its Kompaktian components.
Specifically, AMSL’s Dots is deeply psychedelic—not an unheard-of trait for Kompakt, but seldom so potently concentrated. It’s more like a light mushroom idyll on a summer day than a dark night of the soul, though. It takes a little bit to get there, via the Orb at their most deep-spacey, but that mood maintains even when the tracks might not have suggested it in other settings. She picks things that are minimalist as in disorienting (which is her ear), not just minimalist as in cute (which is the label’s fallback), though obviously there’s overlap. She really has a taste for bleeps. She also has a taste for melting timbres.
It’s 68 minutes long. The Carry Nation below is 71 minutes. These are CD lengths, and it is not a coincidence. The mix CD is a classic format.
The Carry Nation, Full Tilt Carry Vol. 2 (Nervous Records; June 7)
Speaking of logrolling, or at least self-promotion: The Carry Nation were on the cover of the last issue of Love Injection, number 69, with my overview of Pop Conference 2023. The continuous mix at the end of the Bandcamp page is the only thing that concerns me in this space. Outside it, it’s entirely conceivable that at some point I’d want to play a couple of these tracks—or a few. But they’re going to be identified with this set for the time being, and they should be; they’re companionable together. OK, fine—they bang. The Carry Nation asked for new tracks from their peers; what they received was tribal as fuck, in the Danny Tenaglia sense—tom-toms the size of your couch. The UK is undergoing a similar revival of early-mid-nineties superclub stuff, as noted last week. It’s happening here now, too, just differently. Resonant vocal snippet: “We need to triage this injured diva.”