This happened almost by accident—I had the final item earmarked for another roundup, had written it up already, and when the first four were done, it not only made sense to add it here, it turns out they’re all French, more or less. Hooray for, as Kool Moe Dee put it, sticking to themes.

You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.

Hewan Aman b2b Khey Mysterio, Dub Delights (Lithium Radio, Paris, September 4)

Drawbridge b2b Fatale Furylax, Dub Delights (Lithium Radio, Paris, September 4)

ellefaitquoilavic, Dub Delights (Lithium Radio, Paris, September 4)

Trois-Quarts Taxi System b2b Catartsis, Dub Delights (Lithium Radio, Paris, September 4)

Dub Delights was the thematic rubric for a full day of programming on Paris’s Lithium Radio, eight shows total, and wide open. My initial play-through suggested further evidence of a currently-underway trip-hop revival, but listening again that’s only true of about one and a half of the four I kept. “Dub” is the glue but it’s hardly prescriptive: a specifically Jamaican-bred musical phenotype, a mixing methodology applied to music very different from that, a series of production decisions, all of it counts here. The sets have their iffy moments, but also a lot of esprit de corps. I don’t know a single name here outside of this group of sets, but I hear something a friendly in them that I find appealing.

Dub as in dub techno is Hewan Aman b2b Khey Mysterio’s manifesto from the minute they start. (Not when the set does, though—there’s a roundelay of hellos, mostly in very accented English, over a slow-rising synthscape for nearly five minutes.) Over the hour’s course they backtrack into rubbery circa-2000s nu-disco and then back out into the cosmic-shivering ether. Not every selection features zinging guitar chords, but plenty do.

“As you can hear, there’s a lot going on in France,” says the announcer at the top of the Drawbridge and Fatale Furylax back-to-back, adding that “outside of the city—that’s where the exciting things go on.” This set’s ingenuity is in the way it traces a hard first-foot-forward lope across a near-hour whose musical features are not especially alike otherwise, though many lean toward post-punk abstraction. They finish smart and classy with something by the recently passed Sensational.

The ellefaitquoilavic mix starts with dub in the traditional (e.g., Jamaican) manner, though the treatments the early part of the program favor are very minimalist, with the drums routinely silenced. But the constant left turns it takes makes it the most rewarding of this clutch. If the promise of a back-to-back is that someone can yank it further in one direction and someone else can yank it elsewhere yet, here that notion is realized by one person with unpredictable crates and sensibility alike.

The Trois-Quarts Taxi System b2b Catartsis is both singular and climactic. It starts off in a foggy-noisy-jazzy vein, only to go full trip-hop and then finish with some still-waters ambient. But the selections are frequently intense, especially during the opening half; once, having put myself in a particularly outré mind-frame, the first ten minutes’ abstract intensity forced me to pause the audio and lay down. But the glitchy, scratchy improv that comes to the fore frequently here is also fetching; it makes me wonder what else I’m missing.

waltur, RA Live: Horst Festival 2026 (Resident Advisor, upl. September 24, rec. Belgium, May 14-16)

Surprise! They’re done! “Sadly, this was @walt.ur’s last dj set ever,” wrote Lolalita at the end of September, posting a final back-to-back with the apparently now retired French DJ waltur,x from Kiosk Radio. I found it when I went looking for info after being impressed by this hour and a half, which went up a week prior to that. Then I felt elegiac. And then the beat disappeared, and a limpid piano tune came in, and even clumsy percussion overlays couldn’t obscure the starburst vocal hook or the unapologetic euphoria the set finishes with. Thanks for the souvenir.

The February before last, my man Nate Patrin made me a video playlist on YouTube, to celebrate my fiftieth birthday: one music clip per year, fifty-one in total because few people were born January 1 and I’m not one of them. I vowed then and there to do something similar but different for him in return. At first, I more or less attempted to replicate what he’d made: consciously or not, usually not. Soon I realized it would be impossible. What Nate had come up with was so ingenious, and so calibrated both to my tastes and away from my experience it was a little uncanny. I had not seen any one of the fifty-one videos he included. A couple I might have seen, but did not recall having done so when my eyes met them during Nate’s cavalcade. And I loved every single one of them, individually and as a group. Maybe even more of the latter. As somebody who loves compilations and box sets as methods of narrative, that cursed word, I think what he did is the equal of any collection of music of my lifetime. Someday I will get to it in detail here.

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Shanti Celeste

In general, I try to keep my mixes timeline listening oriented to the recently available, but when something older makes its way in and sticks, this is the grouping I prefer. This particular installment took a long time to amalgamate; only when I saw a teeming three-part consideration of disco on Dweller by Destiny B.E. did I see the Ron Hardy set, highlighted in the second part, that concludes this edition.

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I remember thinking it might be possible to reconfigure the entire historical timeline of dance music just by tracking the newly available mixes from every period that were being uploaded constantly. Well, they still are and it still is. Here’s another example: five sets in four years in which a core style was introduced, matured, and blossomed. Is that all you can hear from them? Of course not—incidental data always tells.

You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.

Loftgroover & Carl Cox, Green Apple Radio—Summer 1992 (Hardscore, upl. June 5)

Colin Dale, Illusion—The Crest—Isle of Sheppey, Kent—30-10-92 (Oldskooliverpool, upl. June)

Let’s take it year to year, then. “Are you awake yet, Europe?” implores Loftgroover, a little syrupy, or is that a little lovey-dovey, near the top of the 50 minutes he shares with Carl Cox in the summer of 1992. Rave had roared back, the 303 was coming back into things hard, and stab patterns ruled; it was a hard-partying era. Euronet is co-sponsoring Green Apple Radio, we learn between numbers, but Loftgroover isn’t long for our ears, and neither is his immediate successor, our old friend “Unknown DJ.” This one is the host of Euronet’s Rave Weekend, a BBC-coded voice (he sounds, with no shade intended, a little like Eric Idle) urging listeners to write in “if you want to hear this music on the weekend.”

But form is achieved once again @ 10:30, when Carl Cox drops his first track and announces himself, whereupon follows the first third of his two-hour show. “And I’m telling you, it’s going to be absolutely dangerous,” he promises, youthfully charming. And his ear for what connects beyond the dance floor is fully intact: kicking off with “You Gotta Believe” and touching on “Feel the Rhythm” and “The Art of Moving Butts” and “In Effect.” It set can stand in as representative of this period by either Cox or the era itself. He recovers from skips with real grace: “It’s a live show,” he says, laughing off a fluff and cutting to another record.

The near-seamless transition into the Colin Dale set from Illusion at the Crest came as a surprise to me as someone who knows Dale more for his later, Detroit-techno-for-breakfast proclivities. But he came up alongside the early jungle pirates, and only months after Coxy aiming for the Euro-raving masses, Dale did the same, at a party no less. He gets his hands dirty, filling his hour with percussion and chanting that evokes Africa without necessarily being it, riffs that alternate between rubbery and blaring, embryonic D&B, and lots of pianos. He performed it for dancers, which gives it audible oomph.

Grooverider, Pandemonium Andromeda—Hard Dock, Liverpool—13-05-94 (Oldskooliverpool, upl. July 19)

Jump ahead two years. Drum & bass has begun to separate itself from jungle, and this plays like a statement of intent—even when the beats go four-to-the-floor, as they do before the first quarter-hour is up. Hey, he played what was popular even as he helped make it popular. The sonics are on such a rampaging tear that even the funhouse organ riffs take on a dangerous edge. The whole thing is dizzying, as golden-age snapshots tend to be. The no-nonsense MC helps in that regard here as well.

Roni Size, Prime Rose, Nuremberg, 1995 (Dorksirjur, upl. June 1)

Randall, Kiss 100 FM—29th November 1995 (Deep Inside the Oldskool, upl. June)

Another year forward, and the music is streamlining. Roni Size is accompanied by MC Dynamite, the snares crisp and the bass lines walloping but also measured, none more cannily or catchily than “Warp 9 Mr. Zulu,” which still sounds like a subs-first anthem. “P-Funk Era” doesn’t really evoke P-Funk but it’s still a lovely waft even with Dynamite and partner and echoplex; ditto the eternal “Pulp Fiction” and “Sovereign Melody.” Near the midway point, the music comes to a stop and the MC sternly instructs the Germans to “enjoy yourselves,” almost as a threat.

Back to the airwaves near the end of the year: the Randall tape offers up ten tracks in forty-nine minutes, the pace hurtling but the production under increasingly tight control. Just as noteworthy, all ten tracks on different labels, including “Living in Darkness (Ray Keith Remix 1).” This came out on Basement Classics in 1996, the calendar year following this Randall set and four years after the track’s original version was released. This is right in line with a major and seldom historicized moment: 1996 saw a number of early jungle tracks given new remixes, many of them becoming regular features in that year’s D&B DJ sets. Which isn’t to call the Kiss mix itself a throwback, certainly not on 1995’s terms. Announcing the details of a jungle party close to the end, Randall slyly notes: “Yes, there is a house room on this one.”

Further listening and reading

Unknown DJs: BC121

Hardscore: BC057, BC117, BC127, BC168, BC174, BC193

Grooverider: BC011, BC031

Randall: BC088, BC096, BC099

Arca at Sonar, 2019, by Verónica Estrada, via Wikipedia Commons

I am tickled to note that my report for Rolling Stone about private equity chasing the indie-music dollar has been picked up by New York’s Approval Matrix! Highbrow Despicable, the best quadrant. I’m stupidly proud.

Screenshot by Jessi Kramer

You can hear all five sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.

Jacques Greene, Rinse FM (July 9)

As the three links below attest, I find the Vancouver house artist Greene’s ear consummate. But this one stayed with me even more than the others, in a way I found surprising, until I put it on again. Right at the top, sticky beats like overheated pavement, and then: “July. Summer’s on now. Feel like it’s heatwave after heatwave after heatwave everywhere right now. Drink your water.” At the time, I don’t even think I registered it. Now, it’s a time capsule—the way I’ll remember it, or one way. The other reason is the music itself, which is the dankest and most subterranean I’ve heard him play while remaining his usual sparkling self.

Marius Bø, ED065 (Earth Dog Records, July 14)

I talk about gradual builds; there’s a tribal feel to this one that grows ever closer to, just as it says right below the title, “trance.” It also seems to trace a line between what almost no one thinks of as trance anymore—the early tracks here would have been identified broadly as that maybe in the mid-nineties, but certainly not since the later part of that decade. But the cavernous mien and steady-building acid lines and keening synths start hypnotic and grow to just about define its genre while also offering something deliciously outside it, e.g. the 3D darkwave closer.

Arca, Airdoll (July 18)

My art-fucky summer (oh, please, it’s all-seasons here) may have peaked with this packed little monster: twenty-four tracks in forty-two minutes, fully half by the DJ but also including work from a dozen others, no two much alike, most featuring beats with an oversized crunch, all of it stitched together for maximum drama. And it’s when the others jump in that things really take off, like “Put Cha Back in It” (@ 13:28, per listing, though it takes over half a minute later), or “Xanax” (@ 32:12), its hook distending as the beat disintegrates. Anything goes: She’ll suddenly interrupt a track so noisy and rough it verges on gabber with church bells, just because.

Dotdat, Reclaim Your City 705 (July 22)

It’s actually an opportune thing that I held onto this one until October: the mesmeric-creepy layering of FX and tunes and machines that festoon this set makes it perfect for Halloween partying. (Similarly with Arca above, except that one sets the table.) This Reclaim installment isn’t sepulchural, though—just spooky enough to goose up the background and hold one’s attention in the foreground. That there are no vocals only heightens the edge.

Rrose, Pure Guest.111 (July 22)

Several years back, I traveled to San Francisco to stay with friends (thank you both!) and to attend and write about an festival that featured techno-ish music but situated it within a broader sound-arts nexus. It was revelatory, and none of it more than Rrose’s set, which re-situated the context of dance music within this sound-art extravaganza. Namely, the speakers were at the back corners, bracketing the floor, and the people who were serious about dancing gravitated toward them. The more art-forward crowd were gathered in the middle, around the circular stage the performer was on. I recall it as a highly agreeable symmetry, though others may have felt differently. In any event, the music’s snaky momentum and ever-shifting landscape stayed with me as much as the room layout and the vibe. (And the sound—incredible throughout.)

Rrose’s mix for Pure Guest isn’t the first set of hers I’ve heard, but it picks right up in my mind’s ear where that San Francisco event left off. The beats and BPM are relentless, the coloring limited and targeted; it’s a set, not a live performance (as that S.F. event was), but the effect is the same, and so (since you asked) is the affect. What the DJ goes for here is pulsation more than mow-‘em-down kicks, flickering more than bombardment, a sound and style that fills a room up with its own resonances, which are also plentiful on this souvenir.

Further listening and reading

Jacques Greene: BC028, BC043, BC139

Reclaim Your City: BC067, BC147, BC156, BC160, BC165, BC194

Pure Guest: BC130

Told you I had a backlog. A couple emerged more recently, true. But chronology is malleable, as any historian will tell you. Music is time travel anyway. The fun of DJ sets is in hearing where they go—the whole “take you on a journey” routine. If I only listened to DJs with the same taste as mine, I’d never listen to any DJs, and I’d never learn anything. I fear for the latter even more than the former.

Which brings us to my man Sherburne’s A-plus broadside about music’s blessed un-solvability, and the people we have been cursed with who think otherwise. I like neophilia in principle, until it turns into this kind of thing. I particularly like Phil’s challenge: cure cancer and then you can talk about anything else you want, but only then.

Anyway, the backlog. Engaging with it helps guard against that sort of tech-driven, inhuman Toxic Newness. Besides, there are only so many hours one can spend writing. Music is for enjoying.

You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.

Nak, Live at Moniker ’26 (Victoria, Australia, rec. April 4, upl. August 3)

From Melbourne, Isabel Nakonieczny writes: “class is in session, and today we’re learning about textures. recorded live from 03:00 - 05:00 in the warehouse.” The thrill of the set is that both descriptions are true at once: it’s minimalist and detail-rich, the kicks and subs encompassing and reverberant, the voices (note: not “singers”) knock around the mix like disco-ball light strays, and the mood utterly late-night and head-down, the definition of warehouse techno. The beat speeds up, the synths grow steelier, pure FX take the stage, and there’s even some D&B. It represents another step in the low-ending of techno overall, one that earns the ultimate Beat Connection seal of approval, a flattering comparison to Perlon.

Eydn, Ethereal Mix 103 (Ethereal Grooves, April 7)

If “mumblecore” didn’t already have a fixed meaning, it would do handily as a shorthand for this set. A Belgian duo I’ve never encountered as performers, Eydn subtitled this assemblage “Sad Ballads for Countryside Wandering,” which is on the nose in a way the music isn’t. The selections are elliptical even when their structures are clear and pop; all of them have a telltale layer of dust, or hiss, or grainy reverb, or whatever. There’s a lot of distorted guitar, too, but it folds into the overall amniotic swoon like driftwood overtaken by the waves. It also kicks Boy Harsher’s Fader Mix (September 10) about ten blocks down the road.

Yu Su, Gop Tun Festival (São Paolo, April 11 or 12, upl. August 10)

Quite the lineup this one had: Jayda G, Optimo (Espacio), Steffi x Virginia, DJ Heartstring, Dekmantel Soundsystem, Paula Tape, and the other two that I’ve heard: Mad Professor (eh) and Mount Kimbie (very even but builds gradually and, toward the end, somewhat powerfully but not enough). Jackknifing between techno, house, “something that feels like a breakbeat-inflected MPB edit” (copyright Michael McKinney), a freakin’ “Glamorous Life” cover (I’ve never heard a bad version of it, this included), and floating electro-pop with a long outro that pays zero mind to anybody’s dance floor, there is so much range, so many weird choices, such try-it-all energy here that, by the lights of many, it ran away with the festival. I often praise DJs who create a singular line with their selections; it’s hard to take as many left turns as Yu Su does here while maintaining both energy and expression.

Polygonia, Guestmix for Martha on BBC Radio 1 (April 15)

Long sets give a DJ options and range. But here, in what is billed as “celebrat[ing] fifteen years of Livity Sound” (there is one ten-track run of tracks on that label, though not nearly all of it), Polygonia offers a smorgasbord that’s no less bountiful for being a hair under thirty minutes. No wonder: I’ve played this set off and on for months, and its fierce energy always travels—as if she were playing regular-length tracks with a lot of variety between them. Well, her selections are self-evidently varied, but not until writing this had I checked the track list: forty-two titles. Rather than widespread and leisurely paced, it’s intricately stitched—and still feels expansive and unhurried, even when the snares are playing double time and the subs bubble and weave.

Francesca Lombardo, Echoteca: Echoes of Spiders (Open Lab Radio, Ibiza, May)

Somehow this got into my clutches and stayed put, and it is only recently that I’ve come to understand why: the groove it kicks off with reminds me of eighties Prince. Given the personnel behind Lombardo’s selections, it’s not hard to grok why: whether it was the selector’s aim or not (probably not), chances are you’ll get a little bit of that strut (and that hi-hat work) if you dote upon his epigones. But it doesn’t stay there, or anywhere else, too long, going mainly house-ward but with the same fizz. Lombardo has a lot to play, her joins also entice, the set builds up a mild froth—it’s for the radio, not the floor, and it works.

Further listening and reading

Perlon: mixes, tracks, comparisons: BC032, BC151, BC161, BC183, BC184, BC193

Ethereal Mix: BC181

Gop Tun Festival: BC129

Yu Su: BC066, BC162

Polygonia: BC077

To paraphrase “Recitation by Hank Ballard,” the mixes come from all sides on this one, so without further ado, you can hear all five of them at this SoundCloud playlist.

Christian James, The Spinzone #198 (August 4)

A co-founding co-promoter of the just-concluded spring-summer Sunday weekly Communion and the hero of one of the key stories in my long-ass oral histories of the Dinkytowner Café (links below), Christian James is one of the axes of the Twin Cities dance scene. His sets are often just like this one: analog crunch, filthy disco samples, ear-tickling vocal snippets, anonymous divas singing their tonsils out, the works. The mood is energetic and playful, and the rhythms have a cat’s reflexes, not even counting when he drops some UK garage-flavored stuff in the middle. No, you’re speaker-freaking.

DJ Storm, RA Live: Solstice Festival 2026 (September 11; rec. June 18-20)

The degree to which Kemistry & Storm’s ears helped shape nineties drum & bass cannot be underestimated. They were the A&R women of Metalheadz, for one thing—signing its artists and signing off on its releases—which made them roughly as decisive within their realm as Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler had been for sixties soul.

Following Kemistry’s death in April 1999, Storm stepped off the decks for a long time, but it’s bracing to hear her at it, particularly here. Yes, this set does indeed remind me of the nineties—which isn’t to say it sounds much like a throwback, per se. Though I certainly recognize parts of it, and though the breaks sometimes roll in the classic way, the eras flit by as signposts rather than monuments. There’s a blurry edge to everything here, like the music (and the DJ) is in a hurry—you feel its speed here, the snares aggressively calling the time.

The DJ does much the same, quite audibly in places. Some of the mixing is very smooth and sometimes the levels are askew; at one point it sounds like a three-way crash is happening. This isn’t a criticism: nothing falls out of line, it’s just wonky in places, and that has its own kind of appeal. Especially if you remember the nineties.

Four Tet, Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, September 12; rec. Boomtown Fair, Winchester, UK, August 15)

At first it seemed like just another excellent Four Tet set, albeit one with some nice surprises near the end, worth recommending but kinda samey. And then I played it again and it scrambled my head just right; I couldn’t predict anything even after already hearing it. Sometimes the powerful lift-offs can feel automatic unto glib, but they resolve efficiently, and to compensate, the subs get a thorough and cleansing workout. The momentum is giddy and varied; it’s ravey even if not everything sounds particularly early-nineties (though plenty does). And “How to Build a Bassline” (you’ll know it, don’t worry) is the funniest track I’ve encountered in an age.

The Trilogy Tapes, NTS Radio (September 14)

Is “Lynchian” overused? Fine, I’ll overuse it some more, because this two-hour exercise in sinuous line-making is just that, sharply executed, the college-radio smorgasbord of your dreams. Even when he reaches for what I hear as lousy collectorama, what it’s doing in its place is always plain to hear. The tone is intensely greyscale: here, Roscoe Holcomb howling “Trouble in Mind” counts as a sun ray. I hear its limits as much as its depth, but it’s so strongly presented it overrides nitpicks—the line is all, the thing that matters. Every track bleeds perfectly or imperceptibly or strikingly with the next, inching the sonorous aural line forward while maintaining a smoothness of motion. Like drones? Jump in. He also sets the Dolly like a ruby.

Jane Fitz b2b Luisa, Secret Sunday Party at Gaffe (London, upl. September 15, rec. August 23)

Patience can be thrilling, too. Take this luscious four-hour beast, which bubbles near a boil without cease while also shape-shifting at the same assured but unhurried pace. When I put it on, it held me to the edge of my seat for nearly the entire running time; it floated gracefully but there was a where-next? edge that made it suspenseful. After that, I simply luxuriated. Also, back-story of the quarter: this was a pop-up, “no social media posts or listings,” word-of-mouth only, “low lights, only deep music across different styles.” They played six hours. Another recording is promised. Low-key squeeee.

Further listening and reading

Dinkytowner Café oral histories (feat. Christian James): Racket (gift link), BC183

RA Live: BC111

Kemistry & Storm: BC141

Four Tet: BC077, BC087, BC139

Essential Mix: BC006, BC007, BC013, BC040, BC048, BC054, BC062, BC069, BC075, BC114, BC119, BC176

As ever, these are touched by history in some manner or other, but the most deeply historical of them (also not a dance set, at all) is also the most fascinating. It also dovetails with some of my non-mix listening and writing, which also proved opportune.

You can hear/see three of these sets on this YouTube playlist, which also links the others.

Titonton Duvanté, themuddshow (August 6)

DJ Hell, themuddshow (September 11)

Helena Hauff b2b DJ Mell G, themuddshow x Juicy Gang Records (September 18)

Some old hands with very different sets on another YouTube channel that’s been suddenly ubiquitous on my feeds. But before I get into what they sound like, it’s worth mentioning what they look like, thanks in part to this recent essay by my friend (and DJ) Sarvesh Ramprakash, titled “Room Tone,” about how the “vibe” of streamed DJ sets moved from full crowds to no crowds. (Please note: the author says up front they used “examples and notes by Claude’s Opus 5.” I credit the thesis and note the author’s technologist background, but obviously YMMV.)

Obviously, the pandemic changed things; but so, I would argue, would pure aesthetics. Especially after watching Lovers Rock during lockdown, how could any coked-up corporate soirée compare? The sheer minimal artfulness of the post-pandemic live sets from spookily empty clubs, signified in part because they simply looked better. Aesthetics matter—and the essay says that too, and much more.

The same backdrop sets the stage for these three very un-alike sets from the same purveyor, and I must say that it took a moment to register the second of them as the same thanks to the dramatically different lighting. But the yellow-green that occupies the daylight-bred iteration of the series is also unto itself a familiar trope; cf. the Resident Advisor Greenhouse Sessions (cf. the very last link under the Further listing), among others. Along with the backdrop of vinyl shelves, this is a recurring optic in my suggestions. The lodge-like woodwork and plants behind the DJs make an instantly welcoming sight.

And very generally, the visuals break down along the lines of the music. Titonton Duvanté is always a breath of fresh air, however unorthodox. DJ Hell’s very moniker would not seem to favor sunlight, and the ringing tones he favors feel ominous even without the sight of him in his finest casual funeral-wear. Helena Hauff enjoys a breezy sunny day alongside a friendly colleague, and it’s good for everyone.

Duvanté isn’t dramatic and he’s also not particularly obscure. He just picks stuff I don’t know and am always glad to meet. And little of it is uniform; after noticing a particularly UK-garagey snare swing @ 22:30, I decided to dart around the timeline a bit. The hats elsewhere are similarly insistent but they also inflect differently track to track. I also note that some of the tunes here have a drily antic quality that I associate with e.g. Raymond Scott. That’s a compliment.

DJ Hell is dramatic—it’s in his name. He’s not worried whether you know something or not; he even drops “Call It Techno” late in the set. But the low lighting and dark velvet jacket are deceiving; he appears to be in good spirits, and so is what he plays. Electro is the through-line: good guess. The way he plays it bespeaks instant comfort, but one tendency I notice is letting an intro ride out for a long time, which lets things breathe, maybe better than the velvet jacket.

If Hell’s an electro classicist, Hauff and Mell G are more fidgety and futurist. Their shared hour is just the rights amounts of both bombastic and wormy—a bunch of readymade semi-anthems that the DJs frug quietly to, as if unused to daylight hours. Finally, a complaint about this series: these sets get interrupted by ads constantly.

Tom Campbell and Chris Edwards, KYA Radio 1260 AM (S.F.)—October 1969 (Jim Hopkins Remaster) (Retro Radio, October 14 and 16, 1969, upl. September 10)

HearThis.At

Let me be up front about my own critical engagement here: Some of the music on here is purely terrible. (And the music is indeed on here, as are the ads, so I’m being particularly circumspect about IDs this time around.) It’s fine: There’s plenty here that’s great, as well, but moreover, song-to-song greatness is not the point with an artifact like this one. Verisimilitude is more like it, or maybe just evidence.

But it’s a vivid you-are-there, caught in real time on what sounds like a couple of nice early evenings. The songs are a mix of singles and LP cuts, which for an AM station is notable. That kind of mix had been a staple of FM stations (most of them playing album rock) for a few years by this point, but for AM it was a new wrinkle—a notoriously long LP cut appears here in its radio edit, for example. This station added LP cuts, golden oldies, and occasional extras to a mix that leans as much Easy Listening as Top 40: the former is rustic and lustrous, in turn. Few stations sounded precisely like this at the time, making this long dive particularly valuable.

Among the ads are two local record shops and three for Coca-Cola, all with very of-the-day stars performing in their usual style only to veer into “Things Go Better with Coke.” Also, a jingle—used sparingly, but a jingle nonetheless! Oh yes, also an ad for, yes, an X-rated film: All the Loving Couples. Plus, an amazing spot that I am going to go ahead and quote in full:

Ladies and gentlemen, KYA stakes a claim on its gold. KYA guarantees that every golden we play is an all-time million seller! Every time KYA plays an album or single not listed on the current 1260 survey, or not listed in the official all-time million-selling record book, we will pay you one thousand dollars! When you hear any golden goof, mail it to Golden Guarantee, KYA, San Francisco! Include your name, address, phone number, and the time and title you heard! Earliest postmark wins!

Jasmín, RA.1056 (Resident Advisor, September 14)

For nearly three hours, this set never seems to stop uncoiling—you’re in good hands when an hour passes and your response is giddiness that it’s going to keep going. There’s a lot of aural muck going on, but the tracks themselves are usually bell-clean; it’s specific percussive overlays that add the dirt. The guttural percussive hooks grow denser and more deranged, then recede. The rhythms are busy throughout, but never in the same way for long. I once recommended it to a friend who needed to fill an empty room pronto.

Further listening and reading

Titonton Duvanté: BC117, BC154

Helena Hauff: BC078, BC081, BC137

themuddshow: BC201

Jim Hopkins Remasters: BCR02, BC008, BC051, BC057, BC108, BC111, BC117, BC121, BC177, BC191

RA Podcast: BC016, BC047, BC077, BC084, BC108, BC110, BC113, BC120, BC128, BC130, BC134, RA.137, RA.140, BC148, BC152, BC189, BC193

RA non-podcast: BC008, BC086, BC111, BC125, BC126, BC165

Doing so slipped my mind entirely for the last few of these, but to make certain it didn’t this time, I put together the Further Reading and Listening list before writing any of the entries, and I’m glad I did, because they helped inform the writing.

Often, when I put something like this together, I try to leave it all previously-heard-by-someone or all-new-but-old. This time I decided to mix-and-match, because it seemed mete, and because I happened to have a handful of previously-heard-by-someone sets that would fold in between the two-part newly-made like a burrito.

You can hear three of these five sets (with links to the others) at this SoundCloud playlist.

Centuries of Sound, 1951 Part One—Your Choice Is Simple (June 1)

Mixcloud

When Dave Marsh died, I played a number of albums in his memory, and in the middle of it all I went for all four discs of Rhino’s 1994 Doo-Wop Box, a landmark that sold a far larger number than anyone expected, opening the doors for more volumes as well as other kinds of historically-oriented box-set overviews. Revisiting the first disc, in particular, was so emotionally gripping, so devastating song to song, it was at times almost unbearable.

Hearing some of those early songs here, on a two-part, five-hour podcast, is a different experience entirely. “The Glory of Love” here is sandwiched between “Four in One” and “I Got Loaded,” and if you know all three artists by heart, you’re probably a pop-history geek like myself. (The tracklist is linked on the date above.) Not to mention all those sound bites and news clips that dot the songs as well. Few of the recordings selected play out in full; it is a tapestry, or maybe we can just call it “historical entertainment.” If it’s a little ersatz, that’s built in: movie music is part of the furniture here. The cavalcade effect is important, and so is the swift feel of these transitions and pairings. These long playlists tend to be fun to give one’s afternoon or evening (or day or night) over to. You learn lots of stuff, but education isn’t the point. The movement of things is. The difference is important.

The early fifties are hugely important in the formation of what would become rock and roll, but the rhythm and blues, country, and folk music that would end up as rock and roll’s mainspring would stay mostly obscure for years even (or definitively) after Elvis broke the bank. But it’s right in the sightline right from the off: country swingers essaying old blues, some formative New Orleans piano, a calypso travelogue carrying historical baggage, and only after that do we get Hank and the Tympany Five or An American in Paris.

The semi-notorious “Come on-a My House” sounds neither heinous nor scandalous, just alluring in its vanilla way; “Black, Brown, and White” remains a state-of-nation address for a nation that refuses to grapple with its own history. The “Elmer Season” joke doesn’t work because it’s not audible: it’s a reading gag, not merely a sight gag. Sinatra takes us out of the first half with lusty vestiges of his youthful swagger, avec the Harry James Orchestra—facing the future down, a future Frank himself would sing very differently.

Riks and Adrien Pastor, NTS Guide to: Rap Français 1996 (June 3)

Is it unfair to call this a curio? I don’t mean to diminish it—I’ve played it with pleasure off and on for months—but rather, contextualize it: not my regular listening, but I could certainly make it so. My French is basically nonexistent, so the pleasure I get is fairly secondhand, even when the beats nod (almost leeringly at times) toward their American cousins’. But the production is delightfully period-atmospheric, the pacing and material keep it up, and it makes me curious how other rap Français years might play out.

Farley ‘JackMaster’ Funk, Live on 102.7 FM WBMX, Chicago 7-30th, 1988 (Manny’z Tapez, upl. July 22)

The music is interesting: a first set heavy on songs and synths and sighing vocals and shattering hi-hats, though not on songs you know; second set (@ 19:15) heavy on era classics, kicking off with “Where’s Your Child?” But the incidentals alone are worth the ear time here. Almost immediately, we get a spoken-over-the-air gem. WBMX announcer: “And by the way, they say you didn’t scratch last week. Were you on strike?” Farley: “No, no, I did scratch last week. They wasn’t listening then.” The announcer laughs. First ad, after @ 18:00: a “raptastic” (yes!) concert featuring Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5. (Note the date.) And when “Child” kicks in, the DJ dedicates it to his wife, who recently broke her ankle, a ramble that climaxes thusly: “I don’t have any child. None whatsoever.” Farley also does lots of scratching, rest assured.

DJ Peshay & MC Spangler G, Sweet FM 101.8 [September 1993] (London; Hardscore, upl. August 4)

A day in the life of a halcyon era—an interesting one, overriding the sometimes fuzzy audio. Over the skid-and-collide snares, not to mention the compressed-air noises that comes from their filtering, “Inside the dark, dark crystal!” the MC chants a few times between minutes eight and nine, referring simultaneously to the Jim Henson film, to the record on the table—”Warp Drive (Version)” by DJ Crystl—and to the vibe swallowing things up right about then, when UK hardcore began its descent into scary-movie samples and synth tones-as-skronk. Spangler G is not a terribly distinct MC, but he provides roughage to a plethora of oozy-woozy selections, not to mention filling the void when the DJ just lets something come to a stop before starting the next one. As it goes, the drum breakouts tend to go ever more completely unaccompanied. Note: the final three tracks come from an early 1994 recording on the same station. The vibe doesn’t move a whit.

Les Paul and Mary Ford, via Wikipedia Commons

Centuries of Sound, 1951 Part Two—Somewhere There’s Music (August 14)

Mixcloud

Part of what drew me to this year of the Centuries of Sound project in particular is The Bomb in the Heart of the Century, an older non-DJ mix by my friend Michael Daddino, a many-hours-long cavalcade diving into the year 1950 in music by diving into every conceivable corner and coming up with an outrageous array of gems unto themselves and suggestions made by dint of song placement. Centuries of Sound himself credits Daddino’s set in the first of his 1950 two-parter. So, where did things go next?

I recently picked up David Halberstam’s The Fifties again after a long absence. Among much else, it drew me to re-play Elvis Presley’s Sunrise (disc one only, f/k/a The Sun Sessions, of which I taped my copy from the library in high school), and also to notice that (tsk-tsk) Halberstam committed a few boners (Marion Keisker’s surname didn’t have an R in it, which it does throughout The Fifties), but also to ingest an enormous amount of period atmosphere. The arms race takes up a lot of space in Halberstam’s book, rightly—it’s nail-biting, life-and-death and not a joke. (I still have a few chapters to go, but the book itself, due to such a long absence away, essentially broke apart in my hands and is now in multiple sections, alas. I fear yet more damage, but I’ll find a way.)

But the Elvis (and rock and roll) chapter aside, music does not get a lot of airplay in Halberstam’s reading. Fair enough: I’m sure I’d be nitpicking it to death here if he had. It also points to how outsized a role music played in things thanks to the sheer size of Presley’s success, which was magnitudes larger than pretty much everybody on 1951 Part Two, or Part One either. Music was, by historical measure, smaller that year.

Yet what Centuries does here is to amplify it getting ready to break free. On another, long-gone-I-think website, Daddino forever sealed “How High the Moon” for me as the emanation of “sexy robots.” But sex also comes forward in other ways here, ways that were then new to the radio: “It Ain’t the Meat,” “Sixty Minute Man.” And in those selections and others, so do new and daring approaches to harmony singing, voices leaping off of one another, new energies and new aural happenings beginning to strain at the bit. That’s what this second half dramatizes, with the usual gewgaws.

Further listening and reading

Centuries of Sound: BC008, BC101

NTS Guide to: BC129, BC161, BC173, BC174, BC184, BC189

Manny’z Tapez: BC039, BC063, BC065, BC068, BC073, BC086, BC091, BC127, BC133, BC164, BC179

Hardscore: BC057, BC117, BC127, BC168, BC174, BC193

Over the weekend, Rolling Stone ran my look at how private-equity firms are gobbling up the independent music sphere. Whee! What joy! Just kidding.

This grouping really should be billed as August-September, because that’s when the sets basically all appeared online, as noted. But the write-ups are in two related chunks for a reason: the first covering a much-bruited festival (rightly so, from the sound of it), the other a friend of the newsletter that the latter hasn’t covered before. Welcome aboard.

You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.

C. Lavender, At Dripping 2026 (Sparta, NJ, rec. June 13; upl. September 11)

gyrofield, DJ Set @ Dripping 2026 (Sparta, NJ) (rec. June 13; upl. August 5)

Primo, Dripping Nowadays Nonstop (New York, rec. July 18, upl. August 3)

Somehow, I managed to hear these three sets quite apart from one another; only after I’d grokked them all did I realize they had something obvious in common. They’re listed in order of real-time performance, but as the upload dates indicate, I heard them in reverse order.

As I’ve mentioned before, I try not to include live sets on principle—I’m writing about DJ mixes here. When I heard the C. Lavender set, the distinction between live or DJ mattered less than it was one long damn drone, forty whole minutes, that I really did not think I liked, yet played all the way through, whereupon it took root. I thought I hated C. Lavender’s set until I realized I couldn’t get it out of my head—and knew I had to hear it again, which has happened a couple of times now. One was at the very end of my first real night out in six months (went great), where it cushioned everything exactly. I can only imagine its impact at 5 a.m. in a room full of people.

The Gyrofield is head-twising and amorphous, so much so that it’s already generating mucho back-channel excitement, at least around my pathways. It marches out like a statement, and it never stops grabbing your ear. Here it might as well be cuckoo clocks set to a rumbling loop, there a rubber band bass going through an elevator shaft, over here mottled D&B sent through a fizz-pop filter. The grooves are generally loose even when they’re programmed to the nth; eccentricity of rhythm and affect are the rule here. Yet the energy is up-front and giving of spirit, not in the corner pondering. It’s art-fucky, but it’s also easy to imagine as a crowd-pleaser.

As for Primo, this is not from the festival, but the “around” alluded to above—a follow-up night at Nowadays, in NYC, shortly afterward. It is much more of a straightforwardly traditional club-techno kind of set. Hell, at one early point, we hear the tempo get pitched well downward, the kind of thing that can take one out of a set but actually helps dial this one in. And not only does it gradually speed up again, the faster tempo defines it in the mind’s ear. It takes a minute but once it settles into its spacey-Detroit-lite-but-faster vibe, it blossoms. The crowd must have eaten it up.

Eckblad, Communion (Minneapolis, rec. July 19; upl. August 4)

Eckblad, DJ Set at the Great Beyond (Franklin, Minnesota, July 25)

Dave Eckblad is one of the most ubiquitous fix-it people in my local dance scene, so much that his actual DJing is often overlooked (cf.). It shouldn’t be. He’s played tremendous headlining-or-thereabouts sets: I still treasure the memory of a four-year-old, bass-driven set from Communion (whose 2026 season ends this Sunday). But this pair of openers is really where his searching restless ear comes into focus; they collapse a listening lifetime into oft-beautiful clusters. On the Communion set, breakbeats are the glue. It traipses—or is that lopes?—through an hour with a wide scope and a tight schedule: broadly trip-hop early on, drum & bass midway through, electro, clanky post-punk-ish string-bending, wiper-effect-rifflets, cute lil’ subwoofer glitter. Nothing sounds much alike on its own; it hardly fell together by accident. The Great Beyond set opens with yawn-stretching ambient and slow-winds upward at a curve toward submerged-kickdrum glossolalia and broken-beat ghost-song. I bet the livestock loved it.

Marie Montexier [via]

Thirty-eight minutes into the podcast Books Up Close’s Ep. 38: Ashley Clark, the guest and the host, Chris Lloyd, are talking about Tyler Perry, who has an entry in Clark’s new book The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films. (I have not yet read it but absolutely will.) Clark went with Medea Goes to Jail for the brilliantly expedient reason that it made the most money. Lloyd describes an aghast bunch of students in his film class—he was teaching Contemporary Black American Cinema—who were furious at having paid him to show them a Tyler Perry movie.

“You’ve got to reckon with him,” Clark responded. “You have to reckon with stuff you might not love. It sounds simple, but it’s such an important part of all this as well.”

That nails it square on the head, I think. That’s the difference between criticism and fandom. You become a fan by focusing on the thing you love—which is great, of course. But criticism requires wanting to know all you can about what you care about, and that means the bad stuff, too. What makes it bad? A fan doesn’t want to know—and that’s their right. A critic does—in fact, knowing what makes something bad as well as good is what criticism does, what it’s for, what it is. Criticism is an avocation, not a decision one makes. You don’t decide to be a critic. You admit you are one.

What I’m doing here is an attempt at writing criticism—not always deeply, sometimes even whimsically, but always with an eye and ear toward what I hear making a DJ set tick, what I hear it doing, what I hear it meaning. And when I write about other things—the Waves Around posts (prefixed WA, not BC) are where I do it—I’m bringing that same set of responses to the table. Criticism means focused, rigorous engagement, and I hope that my attempts to write it are readable, as well.

Sometimes I reckon with people I have no interest in other than that this particular item dropped into my lap. Sometimes I have to turn away from people whose work I genuinely respect. But that’s how it is to interface with constantly shifting multiple sets of possibilities for attention.

You can hear all five sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.

Jana Rush, Rush Hour (NTS Radio, August 1)

Chicago footwork—I often put it on expecting to grit my teeth, and for a short while with this one, that’s what I did. It’s a learned response, but soon I was having a very different type of response, when the repetition became hypnotic and the other musical interrelationships all unlock. It’s fast but it’s also invigorating, from the dawn’s-up intro gliding right into the first “I don’t give a fuck” like the morning commute come to life. A whole day, stuffed into an ever-shifting hour, follows. Think Avalanches, or the Lone NTS show that inspired a collage (cf. BC170).

Surgeon x Erika, IT.podcast.s15e06: Closing Return to the Source 2026 (Interdimensional Transmissions; rec. Detroit, May 25; upl. August 5)

Pretty much what you’d expect and/or hope the two of them playing together might sound like, i.e., it’s great. But also, it’s not quite how I’ve heard either of them play on their own—things stay at a medium boil even when a selection really nails it: there is no place on earth where dropping “Fatherless” does not amp things—creating something truly third-mind.

Marie Montexier, HATE Podcast 499 (August 9)

Marie Montexier, themuddshow (August 26)

Previously unknown to me (lots of DJs out there, forgive me), Montexier is a vinyl-only techno spinner from Berlin—no surprise, once you offer a modicum of attention to either or both of these rathe different but highly congruent hours. They don’t just reward more attention than that, though: they invite it with little apparent effort. Shorthanded, the HATE Podcast is spookier and themuddshow appearance is hazier, but play them adjacently and they fit snugly together. Twilight synth twinkles over inky black bass and steady-chugging beats and pads; crisscrossing hi-hats intersecting over shapeshifting sonar blips so impersonal they’d give a hippie hives, never mind how roughly the whole of it knocks. What more could a person want?

Toby Tobias, August 2026 (Netil Radio, August 10)

Two hours long, glossy, extremely steady-state, but full of ear-tingling pinpricks and goosings that keep things lively. It made me think of two very different sets of ears, one of them highly attuned to all the attributes just mentioned, the other deeply dissatisfied with tech-house on the whole. The latter is a fair position, but while this is playing, it’s not the one I take. And then, almost three-quarters to the end, a bump-and-flex UK garage track with a trick bass note, right in your face just as the vocal comes in. The vocal isn’t what you’re expecting, but it ignites everything at the same time as the trick bass note.

Additional listening and reading

Erika: BC048, BC171, BC177, BC190

Surgeon: BC048, BC135

Netil Radio: BC162

Today we conclude our discussion with Lauren Martin, the London-based author of Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep, now available in North America!

The discussion picks up where we left off last time: Martin picked N-Type’s Dubstep Allstars Vol. 5, about which Lauren said in email: “The Caspa and Rusko Fabriclive 37 mix is famous, but I think this also shows the turning point towards a more hyped, dynamic sound and rapid mixing style. I think it’s probably the best in the Allstars series besides 01 and 02, IMHO.”

MM: I’m looking at the page where Rusko talks about FabricLive 37. Its availability in the U.S. makes a big difference, obviously, but it’s not just the availability; it’s also the aggression. It’s the straightforwardness of it.

LAUREN MARTIN: I’m quite a strong believer in gateway records, gateway DJs, gateway artists. If you grew up in Ohio and you heard Caspa & Rusko for the first time, and then you eventually got to DMZ, cool, fine, whatever. If your first experience of dance means it was Daft Punk, Alive 2007, and then you eventually get into Autechre, cool. Everything is a potential gateway. I don’t want to be a snob about that.

But I would say it’s particularly interesting how Youngsta talks about how Americans just don’t have that Caribbean dub sound-system heritage. Why would they possibly listen to Caspa & Rusko and think this is lacking? This is a whole new, immediate experience for them, especially people who have no connection to electronic music culture. Because God knows America has its own problems with acknowledging its own electronic music history, which you know well about.

This is also the gateway into the elephant in the room from America, which of course is Skrillex, because that was most Americans’ idea of dubstep. When I overhear people talk about dubstep, sitting in a cafe or something, they’re not talking about what we’re talking about. If I were to play this stuff for a younger American and say, “This is dubstep,” they wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about.

No, that’s very true, I suppose.

I don’t mean that in a critical way. It’s just, they wouldn’t.

No, absolutely. I would say that Skrillex—I think it is unfair to belabor him, as an artist, with whether or not Americans like Mala or Coki. I think that’s like really personally unfair to him. I say this in my epilogue: If he knew what dubstep was, and even if he was listening to this stuff, which I wholeheartedly believe he would have, because people started calling it “dubstep-adjacent.” I am sure his first entry point into it was something like Caspa & Rusko, and not DMZ. He couldn’t possibly. He was an emo kid who grew up in the States. If anything, he and his audience bypassed the British dubstep experience, because why would they have a connection to it?

I will push back on that slightly simply because when he won his first Grammy in 2012, he went out of his way to thank, and I quote, “All of the Croydon crew.”

Yes, he did say that in his speech. But I think also, to his credit, if he had made shitty copies of “Anti-War Dub,” you would have been like, “What a goddamn hack!” He made something that spoke to his brain, his imagination of music, and loads of people loved it. Lots of people hated it. But if anything, I feel like the extreme noisiness of that style has actually gone on to become just like broadly just American EDM.

Yes, that’s basically it.

It’s a misnomer that “EDM” in the U.S. is anything to do with house and techno. “EDM” is actually highly aggressive dubstep, for the most part.

Absolutely. It’s like comparing Black Sabbath to Chuck Berry.

Yeah—they’re just different things. It’s just completely different approaches to guitar.

This might sound a little immodest, but I don’t think anybody used the term “post-dubstep” before I did. It was how I accounted for the early Punch Drunk stuff—I was writing a lot for RA at the time, a lot of reviewing of 12-inches, during a very fertile time. And I’m curious, how did the mainline early guys feel about that stuff? I would imagine it was a lot of mixed emotions.

When I immediately think “post-dubstep,” I’m thinking of the Hessle Audio crew. I’m thinking of stuff like James Blake, Mount Kimbie, which is more in the indie-pop strand. If anything, “post-dubstep” was a very busy house. There was a lot of people coming and going, even the Joy Orbisons. I think it was a very broad umbrella term.

I have to say: The vast majority of artists within it probably didn’t enjoy it, because they did not want to feel like they were an afterthought to something that was very influential, or that they were trying to refigure something that actually wasn’t that old, and had only really just taken off. I have to say the book cuts off in 2011 because I wanted to keep it to be quite a tight narrative. Part of the reason why it’s not explored in the book is that I wanted to explore a decade in as much granular detail as possible, rather than trying to do rather than trying to do everything that is adjacent to dubstep.

Then it’s seven hundred pages.

Yeah, exactly. Whenever I did privately bring it up with people, it was mostly pretty magnanimous. Things are going to evolve. If anything, there was a healthy, respectful distance between it, because actually what a lot of the post-dubstep people were genuinely drawing from was a massively renewed interest in house music, and it wasn’t coming from the same junglist sound-system background. It was actually more music for house and techno clubs, and eventually becomes more [in the] indie-pop kind of sphere. I feel like the rooms were different, really.

Oh yeah: By the early 2010s, by the time that EDM starts to pick up in the States, Skream starts playing house sets, for example. He starts playing disco. Not all of those guys, but a few of them certainly, shifted their focus; I don’t feel like it was cynical at all. It was a natural thing for a lot of them.

Yeah, absolutely. This comes across in the book as well, in maybe the last, like, three chapters, in different ways: Just by the sheer fact that vastly more people became interested in dubstep in the late 2000s, moving into 2010, by the sheer force of things like the Dubstep Forum, these people touring internationally much more, getting broader audiences and eventually a broader scope of people who will start to make that make something adjacent to that music. It’s no longer thirty-five people on the Plastic People dance floor who all personally know each other.

Loefah has a really lovely line in the book where he says you know one of the when right after he finished his set on the “Dubstep Warz” broadcast: “One of my favorite things about dubstep and what we did is that at any given point I can look around the room and see all my childhood friends.” That quote’s really stuck with me, because once the sound became famous without them, that obviously would engender a lot of feeling. Especially when they were doing it genuinely not to be famous.

One of the things that I really enjoyed extrapolating on in this book—maybe not overtly in-your-face—but dubstep, along with grime, was the last new innovative genre from the UK that happened at the exact same time as exploding platform capitalism, file sharing, social media.

It is really interesting to listen to artists speak, and not much older artists—not like artists in their sixties or seventies. Artists that are maybe fifteen years older than me—I’m thirty-seven—speaking about making music, people that are late forties, maybe early fifties now. Speaking to people who were genuinely making music with zero concept of brand, of career, of marketing yourself. It really comes across in how they talk about their work. It’s ambition without capitalism.

They actively didn’t even consider [that success] to be something they wanted, and I think that’s probably why it stung. Not because of a record they didn’t like, or a producer they didn’t like. It became a different beast right in front of them.

I’m thinking of the old compilation title, Macro Dub Infection. It feels like dubstep basically did what that title indicates. The 140 BPM thing, the B-lines made their way into other kinds of music. There’s another thing as well, which is the rise of the podcast and of digital DJ. Those two things are intertwined to me because it’s the beginning of it of DJs playing less in terms of style—like Youngsta always playing the same basic thing because he wants that to be his signature—then being able to just line things up by BPM, and it doesn’t matter what they are.

Did you bring up Macro Dub Infection because that’s also named in the book?

[laughs] I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet.

It is discussed in the book because that was compelled by the Bug.

Yes, I know.

You’ll come across it later.

I’m very much a student of the Virgin AMBT series. That series just blew my head open. David Toop is a hero. But the rise of the podcast is very key here. You had to look for the sets on YouTube, for example. You had to be keyed into the nodes where you would find this stuff. Whereas, when you subscribed to the FACT Magazine podcast and it was downloading on your computer by itself, then that changes things.

It massively does, and it reminds me of a quote in the opening pages of the book, where Loefah is talking about tribalism: “I’m not just going to outright tell you about pirate radio, but if you ask me about it, I’ll tell you about it. I’m not going to tell you the frequency, but if you bother to scroll through and find the frequency, cool. Let’s talk.”

There is an access point that you have to [reach]. There has to be genuine intrigue and interest, and you need to have the curiosity to want to know it. Once you’re in, welcome. But we’re not just going to tell you all about it. We’re not going to walk up to you and say, “Hey, do you know about this thing?” Because this tribalism hive mind, it’s effort, it’s commitment. If everyone likes everything, then nothing special, really. He was like, “That tribalism is core.”

Mala, Boiler Room London: DEEP MEDi (November 13, 2015)

Lauren in email: “I jumped ahead timeline wise here, but this dropped the year I did the original oral history for VICE and Mala’s selection and technical prowess really shine through in this. Mala also said he’d play BR on the condition they brought in a dub sound system, turned the lights off, etc. He’s particular and it really works on the video to generate the effect of a real dubstep dance.”

I want to ask about the final set. To your ear, what is a primary difference between a retrospective like the Mala Boiler Room, and a you-are-there snapshot?

Interesting. I would say that if anything, the exclusivity of dubplate culture within dubstep and the very careful audiophilia of the creation of the DMZ sound and its adjacent releases. So that will be stuff on DeepMedi, as well as like the DMZ label, the stuff that Mala has his touch on.

If anything, I would gently push back and say Mala would not consider that retrospective, and I don’t think his fans would, either because he’s so careful about keeping things feeling exclusive. He engenders this attitude as an artist, where you can play songs that are 20 years old, but in the same way that like Jah Shaka will play the same songs for 40 years, but he will play them in a way that feel contemporary and interesting.

So, if anything, I would say like, yes, a lot of the songs in this set, even in 2015, would have been ten-fifteen years old. But Mala is not someone that floods the ecosystem with his music. He doesn’t do recorded sets almost ever. That quote where he was like, “This is a physical sound, and you must be physically located to hear it”? This was a very rare set he did, because he always refuses to do recorded sets.

He wrote about this in, actually, his RA mix this past year—a very rare one, again, which is excellent. Has a totally different feel to this Boiler Room one. He says, “It’s because I feel like I’m doing the experience of the rave to serve the dance a disservice when I do a recorded one.”

Having said that, though, he apparently agreed to do this Boiler Room on the condition that the room was dark and that the Sinai sound system was brought in especially for it. So, he recreated the conditions of a DMZ dance for this stream, which is why, if you listen to this on SoundCloud, cool, you’ll enjoy it anyway.

But there is also a reason I gave you the YouTube of the actual broadcast—you can see the room and you can see how young everyone is. Probably, most of the people in that room were too young to go to DMZ, so they don’t have that firsthand experience. This is a generational shift in 2015m where they are coming to some of these 15-year-old records fresh, because they weren’t old enough to dance to them the first time round.

But I also think that the way that Mala mixes—it is almost hard to describe how hard it is to be that good at mixing dubs in a dark room, with that level of technical precision, in a way that just makes them sound absolutely seamless. [motions with hands] He has this almost like a tide . . . a tsunami effect where you don’t notice the water is moving back until all of a sudden there’s a crest of a wave, and then it swooshes down on you.

He just does it over and over again. You can be listening for a few minutes and go, “Oh shit, are we on the second track or the third track from that?” Like, you’re just so locked in. It’s like this blanket of sound, and you’re not standing there picking out the blends because he mixes in such a way that . . . yeah it moves like a tsunami wave. He’s so fucking technically good, and he makes it look so easy.

The red light, the way that the camera shifts between perspectives—it all really adds to it. Also, what you’re talking about—the word that I keep coming back to in my mind with all of this stuff, with music generally of late, is “repertoire.” This is a repertoire that you can draw from, reinvent, make new all the time. It comes from me loving Bob Dylan, who does that all the time, and loving the Grateful Dead, who did that all the time. And you obviously see a lot of it in DJ culture. There’s a lot of what I have always called “post-standards.” It’s not like the Great American Songbook standards, where you rework the changes and you add different nuances to the vocal as an interpreter. You’re interpreting it, but it’s as a producer or as a DJ, you’re taking things that are familiar and re-shuffling them, making them different.

I’d say on that point, there are a few elements that are important. I’ll try to say them all before I forget.

One is that music automatically becomes more interesting when there is more quality control around it. That original dubstep sound is really the focus of the book. I’m not talking about the myriad copycats from the 2010s onwards, or the super noisy-screechy stuff. The way Benny Ill talks about this in the book, actually, is that going from physical infrastructure to digital infrastructure meant that the A&R process was stripped out.

I think the reason that you can call it a repertoire, and that the music is so recognizable, is that through the very strict A&R processes—even from Hatcha telling Scream what to make/what not to make, Youngsta telling Loefah what to make/what not to make—those layers of quality control meant that the music that was formally released on vinyl that is known to the public is literally the fucking gold standard. It’s all killer, no filler, basically.

I think that’s why that dubstep repertoire is so recognizable and close. Like if you play Coki, “Burnin’,” and then “Anti-War Dub” and Loefah, “Horror Show,” there’s no confusion about who made those tracks or what those tracks are. So the exclusivity of the output and the quality control the output allows for repertoire to be an easily used one.

They were stripping other genres—that they did genuinely like for a time—for parts, because they didn’t like the busyness, the noisiness, the over-compression, the lack of dynamism, things that were overly engineered and without enough emotion to be memorable. They decided it is a more powerful task to edit music than it is to just keep throwing new shit at it and call it something new—the act of editing out the stuff that they no longer liked, and going, “Well, what is left? What are the fundamentals that we do like?”

If anything, I think that is an incredibly confident way to make music. They’re not doing it because they don’t like their influences. They love their influences. But what they’re saying is, “We don’t like where they’re going, and therefore we are going to do a left-hand turn and create something very different from the ashes.” The really bullish confidence to do that is why the repertoire is so strong. Anybody can make a noise. It’s harder to make the silence around a beat sound good.

That process you’re describing: that’s punk, that’s rap, that’s house. And those are very differently done, in all these cases. But it’s also like, “How can we do this on the cheap?” Whereas I feel like with dubstep, it’s completely purposeful.

There are no accidents. Towards the end of finishing the book, the edit process is that I’ve been interviewing artists for over twelve years now. Comfortably full time for at least a decade. It is astonishing to me how many artists, with the greatest of respect for their output, really do not think about their work in in real time. They are making stuff that feels intuitive, that feels good to them, but they don’t really consider their music necessarily within the broader cultural ecosystem. That’s the job of a writer or observers or listeners to put into a context for them.

Oftentimes, it’s only when you get like the really fucking killers: the Underground Resistances of the world, or the Drexciyas. You get these core crews who actually do have a mission statement, and they’re quite rare. Most artists are making something that feels intuitive, and only later down the line, when they’re being interviewed about it, do they go, “Huh, I never thought of it like that. Oh, that’s interesting you say that.”

But the dubstep people almost absolutely, universally, all were, in the moment, thinking about the creation of their music as a mission statement. “I like X, I don’t like Y. Where is my music going to sit?”

Loefah didn’t like how fast and busy and stupid jungle was getting. He wanted to shatter jungle and make it slower. “How do I do that?” There was a true creative life-force, that was like the funnel towards a task. Like, “I have a mission statement to make a new style.” There’s something almost arrogant about the drive to do that, but none of them come across as personally arrogant whatsoever.

It’s so fascinating that this collection of thirty to fifty people were all very much on the same wavelength, but with quite different angles into the sound. They had a mission. They understood the mission’s goal.

Having written a number of oral histories myself, oftentimes the people involved read it and learn things they didn’t know. My sense with this book, and with the participants in that scene, is that they did know a lot of this, because they were discussing it amongst themselves the whole time. I feel like what you’re talking about comes as much out of conversation as action.

Big time. This is also indicative of the time and the space. I was thinking about, if they’re coming from the outer edges of East London and Essex—because I feel like maybe when they talk about Croydon-comma-London: Croydon is technically just outside London. It’s got a non-London postcode. Croydon’s technically barely London at all.

I’m really fascinated by—I think that living somewhere that doesn’t really speak to you and what you’re interested in affords you the time to be bored, to think, to sit in the house for a year straight making beats and getting better and better and better. The way that Mala, Loefah, Coki, and Pokes all describe sitting around each other’s houses for years making beats and practicing emceeing: I feel like that physical activity, being around each other all the time, talking all the time, making music all the time—[there] was naturally a rolling rhythm to that. It was their lives.

They worked day jobs. They did working-class day jobs. It almost feels like it feels like an artifact of a recent past, because now: Elijah often shares a phrase like, “The rent is the creative director now.” You don’t have the time to make the art you want because you are crushed by cost of living, capitalism, like the busy-ness of life, the demand. It feels like when I was putting this oral history together and just seeing how much time that they were afforded to do this.

Mala at the time reflected on it. He said, “You know, my dad’s [been] a painter-decorator his whole life. I never worked a working-class physical job like he did, and I always felt guilty about that because I had all this time to sit around and make music and read books and smoke weed and think about myself as an artist.” His dad has passed now. But [Mala’s father] turned around one day and said, “You know, if I could ever come back in another life, I’d want to come back as my son.” [Mala] was very moved by that.

That constant talking-about-it is actually a result of being physically located with other creative people and being afforded the time and the money and the space to actually fucking do it.

The interviews—there’s no fat on them. There’s not a lot of repetition. They’re edited. But I also get the sense that because they’ve talked about this for so long amongst themselves, that the people you spoke with had a really sharp and focused idea of what they were doing, how they did it at all. Did you have to do a lot of editing on these interviews in general?

Apart from: “I mean,” “between us,” “do you know what I mean,” “like, you know?” All that obviously is cut. But I did not struggle to get really good, thoughtful sentiments out of anyone—perhaps by the sheer fact that this is the first text-led dubstep book.

I also think maybe part of that is down to the fact that I had existing relationships with some of them as a writer. I’d done the first Vice [piece] ten years before, and they’d seen that that went down well. They, I think, maybe came at this round of interviews with a greater appreciation of the fact that I actually want to do right by them, so I think there was a greater level of trust. They were really opening up to me. I’m very grateful for that.

But you are right in that they’ve been sitting with these ideas and thoughts and anecdotes for a long time, and this was the ample opportunity to really share them in great detail. And I did encourage them. You know, this is an oral history. I’m not putting my words on the page. If you remember that Loefah’s joints always hung off his lip while he was mixing, tell me that. Tell me these little details you remember, because this is what’s going to make people really understand your characters. I feel like they fulfilled the brief in that regard.

My edit process was more about structuring it so that it felt very conversational—no repetition, so that everybody who was on the page felt, “That could have only come from that person.” Only Pinch could have told me what Bristol was like at that moment, because he was the guy that brought dubstep to Bristol.

I wanted number 200 to be a special one. Meanwhile, I was facing down an inevitable run date for one of the most purely enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done—because the book, Lauren Martin’s Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep, which covers the music’s first, deeply London-centric decade, is now available in the U.S. (You can order it here.) Needless to say, I caved to the inevitable once I realized, of course! That’s our number 200, right there.

Lauren Martin has been writing about dance music for quite a while by now—searchingly, smartly, and with an especial ear for dialect. She is, in short, exactly the person to make this oral history. And Aftershock instantly joins the dance-music-book pantheon: intimately rendered and gorgeously illustrated, a volume where you can choose to sink into the stories or to take away a lifetime’s worth of incidental data from the illustrations: a bevy of flyers, photos of bedroom studios that look like they’ve been freshly raided, and an uncountable number of Sharpie’d-up CD-Rs.

Clearly, this was the person to ask if they wanted to pick five mixes and discuss them. Lauren actually did this one better—she picked six. Did I complain? Hell no! I got to listen and learn about six great sets, and then I got to discuss it all over two back-to-back Zoom sessions (I don’t have a Pro account, LOL). Hence, this will run in two parts. Below are the first five, in order. The sixth, as you’ll see, engendered plenty of what-came-next talk. And all of it was a blast. Hope you find it that way as well.

You can hear all of these sets at this YouTube playlist.

Youngsta, Dubstep Allstars Vol. 2 (Tempa CD; rel. August 2005)

Discogs

What Lauren said in email: “A lot to say about Youngsta, half-step, and how his DJing style was hugely influential.”

MM: This is just an excuse for me to listen to a bunch of mixes as chosen by an expert. It is striking how intertwined drum & bass, garage, and techno are—and yet dubstep almost immediately has its own stamp, is its own thing. Certainly by 2005, when this CD comes out.

LAUREN MARTIN: Yes, absolutely. By 2005, this is the second of the Dubstep Allstars series. First one was Hatcha, who is the other Tempa original DJ. But Hatcha and Youngsta have very different styles of DJing.

There’s a few strands to this. One is that Youngsta had a very close relationship with Loefah in this period. There’s a chapter in the book devoted to their relationship. Youngsta talks at length about his style of DJing, and that he deliberately wanted to be a single-genre specialist. So, when you’re talking about garage, jungle, drum & bass, all these things are kind of mixing and mingling—Youngsta, in particular, was absolutely set on being a hardcore single-genre . . . not even single-genre: single-sonic-strand specialist, and I feel like this mix does it really well.

The other thing about the mix that sets him apart from the Hatcha one, which was Vol. 1: Hatcha’s sound is very dubby, elastic. It’s got a lot of tribal bounce to it. That’s much more of a garage sound—really swung drums. Whereas Youngsta, he and Loefah particularly worked very, very hard—there’s a quote in the book where he says, “We eventually purged the garage, and we were”— he and Hatcha were—“the gatekeepers.”

So he was interested in stripping out the noisy signals, the overswung drums, the very layered bass. He wanted to take it down to absolute core elements. He had a rule that everybody he worked with must make tracks at 140 BPM with a snare on the half-time, so that he knew exactly when he would mix the tracks together.

The quote, as I recall, is that he “did it by maths.”

He did. It was maths. He didn’t even need to practice at home. I feel like that style, you can hear it, where the blends are absolutely seamless. It’s almost like building a totem pole: one stacks above the other, and it all has meaning together.

Also, it’s super-concentrated, because this CD only has four producers on it total.

Yeah, and that’s very indicative of that early style where certain DJs—I say “certain DJs”: basically, just Youngsta and Hatcha—decided to home in on a few producers each and devote their energies to [them]. Basically, they were executive-producing the producers, in such a way that those DJ sets could communicate the message of the type of tracks he really wanted to create.

It’s unusual. Usually, when you think of foundational DJs in different scenes, the Larry Levans, they’re drawing from across genres but playing it in their style. Whereas style and genre were very, very close in this era of dubstep.

I like how he did it that way because he didn’t have a way to practice.

Well . . . I think he could have had a way. He just chose not to, because he got so good at it. He’s a very unique character, and also an element of what he was doing alongside the half—just talking about that 140, with the snare and the half-time thing, is perhaps making it sound too simplistic.

Also, because he was from outer East London, he wasn’t from where all the DMZ people were. I feel like there, you can feel an element of quite grimy, hard-edged tracks in him. The way he mixed—he doesn’t mix like other DJs. It’s very singular. I can hear an East London, quite hard-edged sound in there that doesn’t feel like the dub sound system stuff that the DMZ were doing.

It makes perfect sense, the same way that within house music, there’s a New York style and a Chicago style and a Detroit style of DJing.

Uh-huh. And even within London, there was a little postcode-war thing going on at the time, which feels silly to think, because London . . .

It’s febrile. There’s so much. I was also amused to find out that Youngsta was Sarah Lockhart’s brother.

Yes, younger brother by about 10 years. So really, he speaks about her so fondly in the book, and on the point of DJing and mixing: “We’d be in the car listening to pirate radio,” and he would go, “Oh, what’s this track? I love it.” And she’s like, “Oh, I can get that for you on a white label, no problem,” because she was so connected, unbelievably. The dubstep scene would not exist without her, without question.

Did you try to interview her?

I did, but she’s just a cool cat. She also has a very senior job in the music industry in the UK. She’s always had a serious full-time music job in tandem with all the work she did in dubstep. She’s very private. We’ve spoken, and she fact checked everything in the book about her. She’s incredible, but she’s also super private and never does press, so I respect that. The benefit of an oral history is that others can speak about her fondly.

This book it feels like the right framework for the topic. I had liked it as a piece [on Vice] before that, but it was also so long that it was daunting. This is the right place for all of that information. You expand on it, and I feel like some of what you did was focus on those friendships like the Hatcha-Youngsta relationship. It feels like some of that is interspersed with the more storytelling, block-quote after block-quote sort of thing.

Yeah, I feel like the format of the oral history . . .

One, I’m not a Londoner. I’m from Glasgow. I did not go to the parties in their early iterations. I don’t think you have to be a soldier in the trenches to write about war, if I can use that analogy. I think sincerity and curiosity and respect like go a long way in doing this kind of work, anyway. And I have a genuine affection for the sound.

I was very inspired by Brian Belle-Fortune’s book All Crews, about the jungle scene: particularly, how they it made it feel like they were all sitting around the same table in a pub, talking about their lives together. That humanness comes across.

Also, really importantly to me: the way people actually speak. I feel like a lot of the time when you read someone’s interview, they edit it in a very formal “press” way. What I actually wanted is to hear Chef say, “Man’s is bonkers, bruv.” I want to feel like you’re reading like a bunch of Londoners, and oral history just gives you that breathing room.

I’m looking at page forty-eight, which has got the two sides of a Big Apple Records live flyer, and it’s the one . . .

With the roach torn out of it?

It’s the one with the banana, and it’s a gray one, and it’s just back-to-back after back-to-back after back-to-back. Part of me wonders: Were all of those back-to-backs happening simply because there was a paucity of [publicly available] records?

I would say no. Maybe because the back-to-back thing would be interesting: I feel like it engenders . . . taps more into the spirit of the dub sound-system selector. Where you’re going track-for-track, you’re pulling out your dubs, you’re impressing people. I would imagine that that part of it would be that. But also, in terms of, when you say “the paucity of the records,” there would be a split between that . . . I’d say there were significantly more dubs . . . There’s a difference between the dubs that people cut for their collections and keep exclusive, and then there’s a much smaller number of records that actually make it out into circulation, on final releases.

That’s what I was thinking of, thank you. How was it getting all of these illustrations, flyers, etc. Was it difficult?

I would not say it was difficult. I would say it was definitely time-consuming. I was really inspired by the Beastie Boys Book.

My copy is nearby.

I love that book. I love the scrapbook energy.

Also, a big part of it was that one dubstep doesn’t really have visual language. When you think about hip-hop, you think of graffiti, you think of Adidas, you think of RUN DMC, gold chains, shoes.

There’s visual signifiers that you think of when you think of other genres. Techno is hard-edged, Detroit, Underground Resistance, balaclavas, bomber jackets. But there’s not really a visual language for dubstep, and I was even thinking like the only way to do it is to literally show the physical artifacts of what it looked like at the time.

There was a lot of stylistic choices that I made. One is that they were scanned rough, so if there’s a roach edge torn out of a flyer, I leave it there. If a picture was taken on a physical film camera with a white border, I kept the white border.

I wanted to feel like my efforts were rewarded visually, because I physically collected this stuff, but also because I wanted to be able to trace how this the scene went from CDs, handwritten track lists, label inserts, physical flyers, and eventually throughout the book you actually see less and less of those physical items as it becomes a more online experience.

It certainly threw me back a lot to see these CD-Rs with handwriting on them. Another analogy that I’m thinking of here is the Blood & Fire label, which did CD reissues in the ’90s of reggae. They were packaged with a very textural eye, as well.

Actually, reggae is probably not a million miles [away], because a lot of the dubstep guys, most of them grew up on jungle and garage, and came to real dub reggae sound systems through jungle. Especially people like Mala and Coki, although they’re very much the yin yang. Like Coki makes rude-boy buzzsaw riffs from dub reggae and dancehall, and Mala is doing deep sound-system that almost comes from a Theo Parish broken-house percussive headspace. So that’s definitely present.

Kode9 and Wiley, Rinse FM (January 26, 2006)

Lauren in email: “The crossovers between grime and dubstep are a big topic, Kode9 is a leading figure.”

Let’s go to the next one. I had forgotten just how purely enjoyable Wiley can be to listen to. He’s so much fun. I remember a friend of mine who is now a DJ in Seattle referred to Wiley’s vocal style as “prissy.”

[laughs] I love that. I’ve never considered him as “prissy,” but that’s fucking really funny. It’s a great word. I’m sure he would deny it.

It’s not about him, I don’t think, as a person, just the crisp clipped-ness of his cadence.

Yes, it’s very matter-of-fact. Like, “This is how I’m doing it, so you can just listen and absorb.”

Did you hear that set, or these sets, as they appeared, or did you encounter this stuff retrospectively?

I did not listen to it live because I wasn’t in London. Rinse FM was an illegal station at the time. I probably wasn’t really tuning in that much, but it was certainly on YouTube reasonably quickly. This show was January of ’06, and YouTube launched in [2005]. I’m pretty sure I would have heard it the same year [it came out] because I was very much into dubstep and grime at the same time. I think I heard this reasonably promptly.

That crossover is interesting, especially in the States, where we’re getting this stuff thirdhand. I was a big fan of this stuff early on. When I was going through the book, I’d completely forgotten about Horsepower Productions’ In Fine Style. I bought that album when it came out, so I’ve been following it from a distance for a long time. But you’re in the living rooms in a real way with this book. What was your relationship as a listener with the pirates?

I’m going to be honest. Unless you were in London, you were not picking up that signal live. You would be getting things second- and thirdhand. Either you would be on the Dubstep Forum, and people would upload mixes. There were websites like Barefiles, where they in London would be recording those signals and then uploading the mixes later.

So, my relationship with pirates was not that I was sitting in a car in London, smoking a cigarette, listening live. My experience of that, like so many other people in the book—the people that would have listened through the Dubstep Forum and Deapoh of Barefiles. I was of the generation where I was trying my hardest to consume as much as I could.

I actually worked in a record shop called Fopp around this time. It was an independent record-store brand, a high-street chain in the UK. Straight out of high school, I worked there for a year. Myself and one other guy, we started talking, and I was like, “Oh, I really like this dubstep stuff,” and he was like, “Oh shit, me too! We should buy CDs in and build a dubstep section.” So I did that at Fopp with this dude.

But it was interesting at the time, because there was, like you talked about, the “paucity of records.” If you were going to be a shop selling CDs, there really weren’t that many commercially available CDs for dubstep. If anything, there was a hunger for the sound.

But if you did not live in London and you were not going to the raves and listening to the pirates, it was actually [what] your experience was: What’s commercially available on CD? What shows can I rip online? And then of course, eventually: What kind of parties can I go to? Is somebody going to burn their money and put something on in my town?

The spread of dubstep through the UK—I think Depot described it as the “neural pathways in the brain.” You could see the traffic on Barefiles traveling across the UK in real time.

The book brings all of that back.

Yes. And I think the dubstep story is the story of a transition from a physical infrastructure to a digital infrastructure, and how that affects a genre. I was right in the middle of that, as somebody into the sound at the time, but not living in London.

And how it builds an audience.

Exactly.

Skream feat. Mala and Chef, Stella Sessions (Rinse FM, March 14, 2006)

Lauren in email: “Pirate radio culture, the sheer volume of hits being generated within a 2-year period; also this recording, though imperfect, does capture the environmental noise of being inside a session—it’s not just a straight rip from the decks.”

It is crazy to think about how different Skream has become as a DJ. I saw him a couple of years ago in Minneapolis. It was a fun show, but it was put on by a pretty mainstream dance promoter here in town, nothing wrong with that, and the audience was coming to what they would call EDM from the pop route. I’m not criticizing them at all, but that audience would not know how to react to this set.

The Skream one: There are so many . . . Skream, for example, did one of I think the second Rinse FM commercially available mix CDs [Rinse: 02, 2007]. It’s an excellent mix CD. If anything, I could have quite easily chosen it as well.

But the reason I specifically chose this is, one, I think it’s really good. Obviously, we’re talking about how things are shared online and how they get allure and travel online. I actually think this recording is a pretty decent one, not just of the sets that are played, but [at evoking] the ambiance of being in a pirate-radio studio.

You can hear people opening cans of beer and chit-chatting and smoking in the back. I really like that you can hear someone fucking up the mix, or there’s like the fuzzy signal because somebody’s Nokia 3210 is getting a text saying “Shout out Dave from Brentford.” I’ve actually put that on in the background before and just listened to the whole thing as if it was the broadcast.

But I picked that one because the Stella Sessions that he did: Youngsta had a show called Minimal Mondays, Skream did the Stella Sessions. In the book, Plastician has a line: “It didn’t matter if I fucked up a blend because I would leave the station and nobody would ever hear that show again.” I like that lack of self-consciousness. It’s loose, it’s silly. If someone’s enjoying the tune, play it three times. If you’re not, dash off, put the next one on.

And there’s just . . . like we were talking about, the “paucity of records” again. It’s actually a phrase I really like. I can keep using this. There is a wealth in the sheer volume of music that was being made at the time—but so little of it was formally released. These pirate sets on YouTube are sometimes the last place that you could hear those beats.

If anything, this kind of archiving of pirate radio is really essential to remember how somebody used to DJ. Maybe not in their finest moment, maybe after a few spliffs and a few cans of Red Stripe. But even just . . . [playing] like a dub version of his own track that never got released. If I listen to this show, I can hear that blend, and it feels so contemporary.

There is also a key difference between the dubplate culture of drum & bass in the earlier nineties, where it’s all vinyl. Tapes are being made, but not necessarily distributed. It takes a while for some of those pirate tapes to gain mass. With dubstep, it didn’t take that long, because they were putting them right up online.

Yes, exactly.

Mala b2b Loefah feat. Sgt Pokes, FWD (June 1, 2006)

Lauren in email: “Great session from FWD, featuring a well-known MC—I wanted to get a live club mix in here.”

The other thing about that Skream mix, and it’s true of the Mala-Loefah as well: Super minimalist, super focused, very much like you were talking about with Youngsta. A claim on a specific area; a claim that this very narrow but powerful lane is what we are going to do.

I also picked this one specifically because, one, I think it’s a genuinely good example of what it would be like to go to FWD >> in that period. It also achieves a few things. One, they had already launched their own DMZ party by this point. In the book, the chapter is “The Seismic Impact”: 2006 is the true breakthrough year.

Yes, three of these sets are from then.

Yeah, but each three are quite different. There is the Mary Anne Hobbs Dubstep Warz broadcast, January ’06. DMZ first-birthday dance is March ’06. YouTube launches in [2005]. This stuff gets disseminated so much faster. So, this is the real on-ramp here, and you can really hear it—there is such a swagger and a confidence in how they’re doing this set. They have a very specific lane within dubstep: this low-end half-step sound.

But actually, it’s like a triple yin-yang here—like a triangle here—because Mala is this deep half-step sonic-voodoo-dread element. Loefah is the disgruntled junglist who wants to slow it all down and smash it apart over a Guinness and a zoot. And Pokes is the host. Rather than at other events at FWD>>, you would get grime MCs turning up and spitting on dubstep tracks. You’ll get Skepta would come down and spit over a Jammer set, and he’s playing “Midnight Request Line.” It’s the vibes blend of dubstep and grime, and it’s really magical.

Whereas a grime MC would come to FWD>> with quite different intentions. He’d turn up and everyone go: “The grime MC is here!” It would be a guest-star moment, and everyone would be very captivated by that. It’s about their lyricism. It’s the vocal performance, and the DJ and the producer are the supporting act.

Whereas with Pokes, he is the host in the same way that a DJ or an old-school dub sound system would be. He is encouraging the atmosphere of the room. He’s reacting to the records. He’s engendering an atmosphere of togetherness, and that is what like Pokes’s style is in the set.

I also liked the idea that FWD>> was, as somebody puts it, Funktion-1 music, and also iPod music. Those two things do not seem to go to go together, and yet I think that’s exactly right. People were listening to this music either on a huge system, or completely on their headphones.

Interesting. I feel like, if anything, when you’re talking about going from physical infrastructure to digital infrastructure, Mala said, “This is a physical sound, and you have to be physically located to really understand it.”

In that shift, once people start having more casual home listening, like iPods and like inner ear headphones for this music, if anything, you start to lose that. I don’t want to say it’s moving into a negative, because I would want always want people to be able to experience music in whichever way they reasonably can. But you start to understand why the low-end tracks don’t translate as well to personal headphone listening.

That’s why a like a younger generation or others that aren’t part of that very core DMZ fold, who are not purists but specialists, start saying, “Well, this isn’t translating digitally, so I’m going to make tracks that are more mid-range, more high-impact stuff that you can really pick up on, like headphones and little iPod speakers.” Like with all music genres, the technologies of the time massively impact what actually gets made.

N-Type, Dubstep Allstars Vol. 5 (Tempa CD, rel. May 14, 2007)

Discogs

Lauren in email: “The Caspa and Rusko Fabriclive 37 mix is famous, but I think this also shows the turning point towards a more hyped, dynamic sound and rapid mixing style. I think it’s probably the best in the Allstars series besides 01 and 02, IMHO.”

Which brings us, I think, to N-Type. The swarming B-line starts to really become the focal point, I think, on this one. It’s plainly an evolution from, just to stay within the selection here, Vol. 2. How do you see the evolution of the Dubstep All Stars series as a whole?

Oh, I love it! There were so [few] commercially available mixes. Also, because Tempa, the original label in that regard—I think, because they owned the publishing and the distribution of all these tracks, they had a wealth of stuff to work with. And they were so trusted that they got an incredible amount of music cleared to even be on these mixes. Although I would probably dispute the thoroughness of certain accountings over the years.

But I would say that the series itself is a is basically a blow-by-blow account of how the styles of DJing evolved, and the styles of music that were played throughout the period. It’s 2003 to 2013, so it’s a perfect ten-year period for this, Allstars; the N-Type one lands 2007.

Also, the Caspa & Rusko FabricLive mix comes out. Now, that’s a very well-discussed one. It’s obviously discussed at length in the book. It had an enormous impact in the States, especially. But I would say that, actually, the N-Type one is probably my one of my favorites of the series.

N-Type was particularly good at playing quite busy, very dynamic, buzzsaw-riffy kind of dubstep, and mixing it quite fast, in a way that . . . before, there’d be quite long, slow—sorry to use the phrase: tectonic-plate-shifting blends. He’s mixing it almost like the rave-megamix style: very sharp blends.

I think it was starting at that point [when] the smoking ban had come [to] the UK, so people couldn’t smoke weed in the dance anymore. People shifted over to different kinds of drugs, so their relationship to how the music was being played and presented changed. They wanted things that are more high-impact, more dynamic things that really kept you in the room instead of going outside for a cigarette.

By this point, the sound easily has been around for at least six solid years. You can’t just keep flogging half-step to death. That has to go in another direction. Naturally, people are going to go, “Well, it can’t get slower and it can’t get bassier.” There has to be an on-ramp to something more dynamic and filled out and aggressive.

I feel like there is much to be criticized for the different directions that [dubstep] eventually went. But I do think this N-Type mix is probably my favorite mix of this particular turning point in the sound. I would drop-kick a small child to some of these blends. I feel like I could sprint past Usain Bolt. I would be the Kool-Aid Man running through the wall. It almost has the energy of a grime mix. It’s very dynamic, like aggressive, dubstep.

And that is basically what America picked up on.

Yes, big-time.

Stay tuned for the rest of our conversation tomorrow!

I only first noticed the Berlin-based Sound Metaphors TV feed recently, but it’s been popping up a lot of late, and when I sampled a week’s worth of its early-July programming, I kept a surprisingly sizable amount of it. Lo and behold, here it is again—a trove I had a lot of fun revisiting, as I think will you.

You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist. And you can also watch three of these sets at this YouTube playlist.

Vidal Benjamin, H.A.N.D. Mix 089 (May 13)

Sound Metaphors isn’t just a TV feed: it has two additional podcast series—the one named for itself (see ffan, below) and the far older H.A.N.D. Mix, which goes back to 2019. The name stands for Have a Nice Day, and I’d already earmarked this one thanks to my good man Michael McKinney. Not because he mentioned the series’ tie to Sound Metaphors (he didn’t), but because he said the magic word, “Goa,” further noting that the DJ “isn’t that interested in delivering a genre primer,” instead taking in “static-encrusted new beat,” “haunted-house acid techno,” and “low-BPM hi-NRG.” He’s not kidding about the low BPM; it sounds like an evening’s getting-ready music circa 1993 for people who’ve entered rave through darksider means. Though it starts out so pre-Goa (meaning not Goa) that for a while I thought someone was pulling my leg, the set almost invisibly works its way to a slow but viscous froth. And because it stays in the early part of the music’s formation, it may seem quaint to a longtime psy head. But it’ll still sound foundational.

HAAi, Sound Metaphors TV – House | Live from Berlin (May 27)

Sound Metaphors TV (or at least its YouTube channel) was established July 1, 2024, but the earliest videos on it are from November 2025, the same time that this playlist, by my longtime reader Bosquet, also begins. I’ll guessing there is some corporate sponsorship afoot, never a bad idea whenever a platform is “suddenly” ascendant. In any event, the Sound Metaphors sets have been constant: one a day, nearly every day, always in front of a giant wall of vinyl—as my friend Geeta Dayal points out, the default positioning for any YouTube-ready “podcast” (substitute books as necessary). And that’s not counting the Mix Series (see below).

The seesawing bass drone that lands here @ 18:00 or so seems to open a portal—a very nineties one, even if the production’s up to date. The percussion extravaganza that promises itself to be “no AI” only falters when it announces that intrusive, unnecessary hook; it’s nevertheless redolent of late-eighties sample-pop (so are all the laid-in FXs that dot the track) and therefore fits in musically. The DJ here favors tracks that seem to fold in on themselves at climactic moments, but also comes out of one of the more stentorian selections with a familiar early-2000s R&B book. A romp.

ffan, Sount Metaphors Mix Series 51 (July 3)

This podcast episode is, pointedly, not on YouTube. Coming back into this selection, I had forgotten just how much heat this one gathers: by the time things get super eight-bit near the end, with the synths and blobby digital hi-hats dissolving into the ether, it has my undivided attention by drawing a clearly defined line out of unruly individual parts. Lots of subtle and effective EQ work, too—none of what a friend referred to recently as “hiding the bass,” a corny practice that she hates. The DJ is from South Korea, singular, zingy, a name to remember: two F’s, both lowercase. And what a cover image!

PLO Man, Sound Metaphors TV (July 6)

YouTube

Surprise! It starts out the exact opposite of PLO Man’s previous go-round in these parts, when I caught up with his RA Podcast and its cute robot bass minimalist twirl landed in my top ten. This starts very slowly—about one-third quiet classical piano pieces—before the first programmed beat comes in. Phew—I was worried. You’ll recognize and appreciate modes if not individual tracks. It’s definitely an essay in “minimalism,” and a nicely diverting one. Probably a necessary one, given the time and place.

Zjoso, Sound Metaphors TV (July 7)

From Melbourne and already well regarded elsewhere (an RA Mix of the Day back in April, for example), this DJ’s contribution to the Sound Metaphors TV feed reached me cold but warmed me up quickly: flickering and soul-flecked, pan-British-Africanist, the bass slinkier and the settings more purely alien as the hour goes. Allegations of trip-hop’s return continue to bubble.

Additional listening and reading

Sound Metaphors TV: BC177, BC186

PLO Man: BC148

Mark Farina in 2015, via Wiki Commons

Even more than most of these assemblages, I have no trouble admitting that this one’s pretty willful. But I had goodies to get to old and new, so why not? First I thought it was all Lot, then I mistook it for being all NTS, and then I realized that the one oldie I hadn’t yet placed was also the hottest by my ears. Et voila. A good late-summer grouping, dates be damned.

You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.

Peach, NTS Radio (May 20)

A radio set, interspersed with back-announcements, but also the kind of pure month’s cull that in itself replays attention. Tech-house and UK garage-house and also some house-house, bright and cosmic-leaning, jazzy in places, sunny and clear even when the tones darken. But the time-capsule moment comes during the talkover. To wit, @ 52:20, she gets real about the price of being a DJ in 2026: “It’s getting harder to tour, and I don’t think enough people are talking about that.”

Marge présente Bass Bloom avec DJ Koyla (Rinse France, May 21)

The accompanying blurb, via Google Translator: “So happy to welcome DJ Koyla, a French-Burkinabe artist who navigates across various musical styles. Ranging from Trance and Bounce to Afrotech—get ready!” There’s even are a few things missing, as you might have figured and/or hoped—the one that jumps out to me is UK hard house, which you can immediately take or leave, as one must. But trance is the guiding light, for silly or sickly, and to me it’s the former. Here, I find the heavily Euro high-BPM strictures oddly resonant when they bump up against equally speedy and bouncy Afro [American]-patterned stuff. Velocity: you take it where you find it.

Elena Colombi, NTS Radio (July 21)

Incidentally, by “late-summer grouping,” I mean congenial with warm weather, not “happy” or “easygoing.” Exhibit A: this industrial/post-punk/noise-leaning hour from Colombi, whose audacious and unerring taste means that even when things veer toward the harsh, they also catch and keep the ear. She even veers dance floor-ward in the back half, albeit without changing the tone much. This is true also for the couple of instantly recognizable songs that, cannily, aren’t on the official tracklist.

Mark Farina, The Lot Radio (August 1)

YouTube

If you told both an old head and a new one, separately, that Mark Farina plays “deep house,” each one would know what you meant, and both would be right. There is a sense when he plays that he is constantly moving through the stacks, locating something different than the last selection but equally hypnotic. Over the years he’s changed slightly if at all—what I hadn’t realized, since I hadn’t paid real attention in a while, is how cunning his playing is, how singularly focused. He’s been mining it forever.

If I were feeling ungenerous I could simply call it the remnants of a perpetual 1993. But that’s a compliment where I’m from, and not only are the tracks far newer than that—a random sample of a half-dozen revealed four from 2026, one from 2021, and an oldie all the way back from 2007—they approximate the layered sampling, congenial mien, and joie de vivre of 1993, as well.

Almost exactly one minute from the end, Farina mixes in one final track, “A Tribute to Music,” whose organ wash spreads slowly and determinedly over the speakers until the DJ’s time officially goes up. It’s a statement—the last thing you hear echoing through the speakers is “Music . . . Music . . . Music,” before he cuts and fades it for good.

Julia Govor, The Lot Radio (August 1)

One of the good parts of adding the list matter below is that it reminds me to pay more attention to certain DJs, and Govor is one of them. In her hands, techno matters as a stylistic endeavor, not merely a tradition passed on. There is a lot in this hour I’d term “psychedelic” but not “psy,” if you catch my drift. There’s just as much that isn’t, per se. Telling which from which is the game of it. Meanwhile, I read inside jokes and/or hunger pangs with the close proximity, toward the end, of tracks titled “Heineken,” “Orange,” and “Put a Banana in Your Ear (Aetha Remix).”

Further listening and reading

Rinse France: BC071, BC104, BC176, BC177

Elena Colombi: BC003

Julia Govor: BC077

No diminution of good recent stuff: it’s what I’ve spent most of the past couple weeks on. This grouping I made a while back, but coming back with fresher ears definitely helped me articulate things. You can hear four of these sets (with a link to the fifth) at this SoundCloud playlist.

DJ Misbehaviour, Surprises the Crowd with an All 45 Vinyl Set (Listening Room ATL, March 24)

The title is right—nothing that this Atlanta DJ plays during this set is remotely predictable. Even when the track that comes in is an acknowledged classic, it seems to enter from a side door. And all of it slaps so hard it hurts. Her Jamaican selections are particularly commanding, and the soca track is so cartoony and ingenious that she rewinds it. Presumably, the crowd demanded it. I would have. What a performance: It’s fun watching her nimbly nail every segue, then pick through the remaining seven-inches.

basic chanel, HVYWGHT x NLDC (05.11.25) (upl. May 7)

basic chanel, Off the Record Mix Series 63 (May 18)

Yes, her again, no apologies—this London DJ goes down specific avenues regularly and rewardingly. Her opening hour for a dubstep party last November sets the table with modest aplomb—and goes far past genre clichés even as she holds close to the beat patterns. The bass lines are the commonality; everything else is variable; all of it is playful and commanding. Her contribution to Phonica’s podcast series steps boldly to stage-front. Minimalist in the millennial-turning sense, the bass lines rugged and darting as much as tunneling, plus lots of new wavy synths and super-bright hat bursts. More to come!

Ben UFO, The Lot Radio (May 29)

Yes, I would have noticed this immediately even if I hadn’t known whose name it was attached to, because for the first twenty minutes on my first go-through, I didn’t. Better yet, seeing who it was came as a surprise. The artful decoration that Ben UFO often DJs with is laid to the side. Tightly played, loosely swinging, with a feet-first formalist build-through that keeps blossoming throughout, low-key but always moving forward. In the final quarter he plays a few wild cards, but overall, it’s Ben UFO at his most directly approachable.

Black Rave Culture, The Lot Radio (May 31)

I counted 44 tracks on the playlist that accompanies the link on the date above, directly to the Lot’s own replay page: No wonder this brick never stops shifting shape. Also, they’re from all over—historically, on the physical map, at bottom and on the top, in language. Karizma, Kelela, and an un-ID’ed “All I Can Say” are coordinates enough for me and I hope you as well. And it proved a perfect nightcap during a welcome visit from an old and dear friend.

Further listening and reading

Listening Room ATL: BC185

basic chanel: BC123, BC126, BC143, BC147, BC157, BC163, BC176

Ben UFO: BC087, BC104, BC114, BC152, BC156, BC161, BC166, BC187

Black Rave Culture: BC070, BC148, BC159

I did a lot of interviewing for The Underground Is Massive—close to four hundred in total—but a handful of them have really stayed with me. Robbie Hardkiss was one of them. He has a razor-sharp memory, and he was expansive and insightful as he shared it. I have thought about it a lot in the time since conducting it, nearly thirteen years ago, and I figured recently that it might be a trick of memory, that it couldn’t be wall-to-wall as good as I’d recalled. But it was. I did make some trims from the original transcript, but not too many: below the break, the Q&A is around 9,200 words.

The Hardkiss story is a fascinating one, on its own; they never got where they seemed to be going early on, but their canny sense of where things could go—and their position in the hugely important nineties San Francisco scene—makes them paradigmatic of the American rave story. But more than anything, Robbie was very wily and highly articulate. See (and hear) for yourself, and thanks for coming along for the ride.

ROBBIE HARDKISS: Furthur—it’s funny; it pulls back my memories and recollections of that crazy party. I probably do have more memorable moments from that party than from the hundreds of other parties that I played and went to.

MM: The first one?

Yes. These are some fuzzy memories—it’s a long time ago. But I’m pretty certain it’s the first one.

The first thing is flying into Chicago and driving four-and-a-half hours through the snowstorm with Frankie Bones, Adam X, Micro, Scott Hardkiss, Wade Randolph Hampton. I texted him [Wade] earlier to tell him I was talking to you. He has got a photographic memory. That guy’s crazy. He’s the best person to talk on so many subjects. He told me to hook you up with him. He’s a crazy busy person. But make sure to hit him again. I told him your name this morning and he’s up for it. He’s great to talk to.

So going out there—it was outdoors, winter, driving through a snowstorm to get there. Scott and I used to always get the six-a.m. sets, to play the pretty morning music. We get there and we realize, “Oh, my God—it’s really early. It’s really cold. We’re just out in the middle of nowhere.” We had to get through the whole night before playing, which was a bit of an adventure.

I have four strong memories. The first one being, massive nitrous balloons. I’ve never seen balloons this big. Not the size of a balloon—maybe five balloons. The size of five large balloons, but one big balloon. I think Wade might have gone right to that tank by a campfire and put two in my hands, two in Scott hands, and said, “Let’s get the party started.”

We made our way to a tent where Micro is pretty much killing it with breakbeat acid. It’s sparse people. People are up front dancing. We’re in back. It’s a dirt floor. It’s cold. We’re listening to the tunes, sitting there with our massive balloons looking like idiots. I’m talking to Scott; we’re talking, and the next thing I know he’s nowhere. I’m in the middle of a sentence, he was just talking to me, I turn, I’m looking all around—he’s down on the ground, sheets on dirt, perfectly still, just hugging the ground. He just had a little too much waka-waka from the balloon and was just taking a moment. So funny. Got up, he was fine—it was just that nitrous moment. It was a hilarious moment.

We made it through that whole night and then got to our time to play in the other tent. It’s a little vague for me. But the second strong memory is David Prince, who was one of the promoters—I’m sure you’ve heard about him naked? He’s as good as Wade; better on some things; Wade on other things he doesn’t know . . .

But we get ready to start up, and that’s when the cops come to break it up. We make it through the whole night, and there’s the police. All of a sudden, David Prince is jumping down and grabbing the needle off our record after we’ve spent four-and-a-half hours in a blizzard to get there. The entire night, it was light when we started, and to stay up and do our thing, to get to six a.m., to start putting on—we must have played “Belfast” by Orbital. I think Scott and I were tag-teaming. All of a sudden there’s David Prince, diving across the turntables, pulling the needle off the record. The cops were coming and he had to deal with them. He was having conversations with them. I have talked to him in subsequent years about that whole thing. I got in trouble doing that a month [before] in San Francisco.

David told me he had to turn the system off several times that night.

Yeah, that’s what I remember. I can’t say the middle of the night, I remember it being off and not having any of the rooms up and running.

What I remember about that particular event: I went to bed ten minutes into Aphex Twin because I’d been awake for three days. I think Woody McBride and I were the only two sober people there. I was nineteen. I had a lot of energy, but I couldn’t stay awake anymore.

When it was time to leave, I was in that van—I got picked up at the airport, and I was going back to the airport with the same cast of characters: Wade, Frankie, Adam X, Nigel Richards I think, Scott, and me. All hell broke loose when the cops came, the sound systems were shut off, and we hadn’t been paid. Obviously, the promoters are dealing with a lot. They’re not thinking about paying individual DJs. But that was all part of the thing: “OK, I’m going to get paid.” I got sent out of the van to go find the promoter—Kurt?

His parents were the ones caravanning everybody.

Wow. Funny. Holy crap. So I’m walking up the dirt road, sunlight, looking around: “I’ve got to get paid. I’m not going through this whole thing and going home without getting paid.” It was nice that I got sent out as rep, because I looked, I see Kurt, we’re walking toward each other, I’m going to talk to him, then I see him get wide-eyed looking over my shoulder and then suddenly duck and hide between two cars.

I turned around and my whole van load of guys was being frisked by the cops. They’d just been pulled out of the van I was in and were being frisked. My buddy—let’s just say there was a lot more in that van, maybe, than was actually found. They had a little bit of warning and were able to dump some stuff. But one friend got arrested. So that was the second person. Who did you say?

A British journalist named Sarah Champion. She wrote about it.

I think there might have been more. I’m pretty sure Wade got arrested for having weed in his pocket. The way he tells it, when they opened the van door, it was a cloud of weed smoke. It was like a joke, like a cartoon. They were all being frisked. Adam X was running down a path to empty his pockets. It was just odd. I saw that and did my own little U-turn: “I have nothing to do with that van.” Can’t even remember getting paid, actually! I probably didn’t get paid. But I didn’t get arrested.

It’s a trade-off.

Yeah. I’ll take that. There are a lot of stories like that from the past. I forget just how many big-time DJs were at that party. It was packed. I forgot Aphex Twin was there.

You didn’t catch any of his set?

I’m sure I did, but I just can’t recall. There were so many. We were huge “Analogue Bubblebath” fans, Selected Ambient Works. I’ve got a love-hate thing with him. The spots he hits that I like, I’m like, “Wow.” And yet he mostly doesn’t hit my spots—a little noisy for me.

He was playing when David was on the speakers naked. So if you remember that, you likely did hear him. With a legit, above-board booking like him, would he get half in advance and half upon arrival?

Yeah. Once you’ve been around the block a little bit. I wouldn’t board a plane if I didn’t get a deposit. You get your half to get you there, and sometimes things go pear-shaped, to use a nice term, and you go home without your second half, but at least you didn’t do it for no money. That’s pretty general. Also, at the time, you knew who you were dealing with. Occasionally you wouldn’t.

But I’ve taken a bunch of time off, being Mr. Mom for the last ten years, and I actually went to play somewhere and because it was a promoter I’d dealt with a bunch of times in the past and knew him, I didn’t get the deposit. I was like, “Oh, my God. What are you, a rookie?” Things got weird, and I didn’t get paid—I just got let on the sidewalk. Someone I knew and liked. Yeah, you’ve got to be cold and get your deposit, at least. That’s why I don’t have horrible memories of it—I got at least paid a deposit and never got the second half because things blew up.

You say [Furthur] was 1994? By that time we have to have been around the block enough if we were getting to play those parties with those guys. We’d obviously gotten to the level we were playing a lot. We would have gotten a deposit beforehand.

One other Furthur question: Were you dressed for the weather at all?

I remember being cold. That’s my first memory. I had to be a little bit dressed for the weather. I’m not an idiot. I could have been wearing a parka—a dad’s winter court, long, corduroy, fake-fur-lined inside-kind of thing. But getting out of that van: “Holy crap, we’re not even close to midnight, and it’s cold.” I think the fire—which is where the nitrous tank was—might have been a draw before the nitrous tank. We went to the fire and sat down.

Let’s go to the beginning of Hardkiss. You knew Scott from high school. Where was high school?

Potomac, Maryland, D.C. suburbs. We graduated in ‘87.

No rave scene at all?

Nothing.

Did you go to San Francisco right away?

No, I went to NYU, but dropped out my first year and went back to Maryland for a year, saved up money, collected my things, and headed to San Francisco in 1989. Meanwhile, Scott and Gavin were at U-Penn.

Gavin told me the two of them would go clubbing in New York. Were you part of that around ’88?

Definitely. I would go up to Philly. My sister also went to Moore College of Art there, so I would stay with her at the all-girls’ art college, which was pretty cool, then hook up with them at Penn, and sometimes we’d go to New York too. I bused out—I can’t recall being with Gavin in New York. He and Scott must have done that more in their final years at Penn. But since I was at NYU, Scott had come up to New York, he and I would take the train up and down from D.C. to New York.

Actually, Scott and I in our senior year of high school [laughs] went to New York, told our parents we were going to visit colleges—he was going to look at Connecticut College and I was going to look at NYU, and we were going to go together. We made fake IDs on the train. Do you remember Shark Pack Lectraset? Before digital, before computer graphic design, you used to have to push little letters off of cellophane. Oh, my god, you’d use typeset. We did that—covered up our dates, redid our licenses, made them on the train up there.

We stood in line to get into Palladium and Limelight as high school kids. Waiting behind a velvet rope at Limelight. No one but girls are getting picked, and we’re like, “Let’s speak fake French. Maybe they’ll think we’re cool Europeans.” So we’re speaking fake French, It’s like, We’re going to hook up, meet some girls in line. [laughs] We tried to go in with the girls, we chatted some girls up, and they got picked. The doorman just grabbed the rope, let the girls in, and put the rope back between the girls and us. We’re going, “Wait! Wait! Where you going?” They never looked back, just went into the Limelight. God, that’s ’87.

I remember ordering a Heineken for eight dollars: “Oh my God, I can afford one beer.” Eight-dollar beer in ’87: that’s stuck in my brain. Now—holy crap.

So Scott and I did it even before college. I remember seeing King Britt before anyone knew who he was, and Josh Wink too, at the club Revival in Philly, and the Bank. We had fun going to the Bank.

What was the draw of San Francisco?

It’s interesting—I’d never been there, but there were some people I was hanging out with in D.C.; some of my friends were artists, either into photography or fine arts. That crowd, San Francisco had a little bit of buzz in those circles. I knew one person there that moved out; she had told me about it. I was ready for an adventure and to get completely out of my world.

I loved the Northeast growing up. I loved it—I had a great time there. But now I want no part of living there. [laughs] I love to visit but something drew me out to San Francisco and once I got there, I immediately felt like, Wow, this is more natural to me. There wasn’t any real specific thing there. I knew it was a counterculture place with a lot of art going on, but that was mainly through the people I was hanging out with.

Did you know about the Full Moons or Wicked before or after Scott and Gavin arrived?

I was there before. I learned about the rave scene from Scott via letters and hooking up with him on holidays. He went to England—Oxford—he did a semester or a year abroad. In that year he happened to hit the Summer of Love in England, and got introduced to the scene there. We were both into hip-hop. I remember him writing me—talking about early breakbeat stuff like the Scientist, which is totally sped-up breakbeats. He was right.

He was like, “Listen to these crazy ‘Mentasm’ sounds. This is nuts!” He told me about it and said, “You’ve got to go look around for this in San Francisco.” I started going to record stores and started to scope out pretty quickly where parties like that were happening.

When I moved here in ’89, it really felt like a rocker town still—leather. On the dance side of things, it was industrial. Of course, there was a huge gay scene I was not a part of going on, but in my little world it was still rocker and industrial. There was a party called Mr. Floppy’s Flophouse. That was really wild. I think they were really the first raves. They were a combination of live bands, punk bands, art installations, punk art installations, and DJs playing acid house and industrial tinged stuff. Pretty wild. So I went to a few of those before Gavin and Scott came out here. Thought they were incredible.

Then ToonTown happened, which felt like the first rave-rave, with Doc Martin, who was already—he was from here but lived in L.A. He was a popular rave DJ in L.A. He’d come back and forth and play those ToonTown parties. Scott and Gavin came quickly after that. We might have gone to our first ToonTown together.

But in those very early days—you said Burning Man? Our very first parties also predate the digital age. We were going to make our flyers at Kinko’s, and one night at Kinko’s—you would be there for hours doing your flyers—we went in with our ideas and have to execute it there. It was funny. But it was on Market Street, right near the Castro. We started talking to these guys and they told us what they were doing. It was Burning Man. It was an early Burning Man flyer they were making, and we were making flyers.

We were like, “That sounds incredible. We have got to go.” We hooked up with them before anyone knew what Burning Man was. I think it started in the city on Baker Beach. We were talking to them then.

You threw parties on the beach occasionally yourselves. Was Baker Beach one of them?

I don’t know that we did them on the beach in the city—not Baker Beach. Grey Whale Cove, down the coast a little bit; we threw a party—our first party was in a funky little club on a heroin-cracky block, Sixth between Market and Mission, a horrible block to have a happy-scrappy party.

That party, we set up the sound system ourselves, bought these JBL speakers. It was called Shel’s Rendezvous. It was an old, divey lounge. I had a right pocket full of acid, a left pocket full of Ecstasy, and was giving that to people. We played ambient music to a point of frustration for the people. Scott had this plan: “If we just drag this out until the place is filled, and they’re just dying for music, once we hit ‘em with the beats, it’s going to go off.” That was the theory. You can see how it can work, but also it’s a pain in the ass and it was horrible. But it was pretty funny.

Anyway, he starts banging; I’m running around working lights, got my pockets full of things. Some guy runs up to me: “The speaker’s on fire.”

I’m like, “Yeah, it’s crazy!”

“No—on fire. Literally on fire.”

The coil caught on fire. I run out to the dance floor: “Holy crap, it’s on fire!” I get the bouncer-doorman guy. He takes the thing, throws it out in the alley, and hits it with the fire extinguisher. We’re like, “OK, we’re rocking with one speaker.” We kept going until the other one caught on fire. That party ended way early.

We said, “Everyone give us your name. We’re going to throw a free outdoor party for you.” That was our second party, which was where the story started, at Candlestick Park, near Hunter’s Point, where there were a bunch of parties. Also not a great place to throw a party. Some really hoody stuff around there.

A bunch of kids in the middle of the night—I seem to remember some kind of gunplay. Not on our night; we really didn’t have that many people there. I think I went to a party where some shots were fired.

But the night we did the party, we had rental speakers. In the middle of the night we’ve got our little dance floor, people going, and the sprinklers go off in the middle. We were right where the sprinklers were. I remember standing on the sprinkler trying to prevent the water from getting on the turntables and mixer. Nightmare number two, right out of the box.

You’re batting 1.000 in the early days.

Yeah. Those two parties—the funny thing was; I have such fond memories of them. The first night was a nightmare; the second one was just fun. By the time I was on the sprinkler, I had to laugh. It was like, “Wow.” The people who came out with us stayed through the sunrise. You know Dani Siciliano?

The singer? Yes. I’ve not talked to her.

She was married to Herbert. I know she split up. She was at that party with us. She was one of our early friends. Gavin chatted her up at the ToonTown dance floor, at 650 Howard. We were at a ToonTown party. He started chatting her up. [laughs]

Gavin’s from South Africa, so he has the accent. But you know how there’s some different way of talking that’s essentially African—like Nelson Mandela. It’s from somewhere different entirely. It’s like a [British] accent but from a different part of your voice box. When he said, “Hi, how are ya?” she thought he was deaf because of his South African accent. She was like, “How cool is this deaf guy out here dancing, just feeling the bass?”

He introduced us to her. We hung out that night. When the party ended, Dani and we all clicked. She’s from the D.C. area also, the Virginia side, so Scott and I clicked with her on that. We used to run around the same clubs in D.C.

We’re like, “Let’s go to the park.” We went home on the bus, got a case of Miller Genuine Draft, our boom box with Spacemen 3 CD, a tent, and Dani. The three of us, Scott, Gavin, and Robbie, and Dani Siciliano went to Golden Gate Park and set up a tent, as if you could just camp in Golden Gate Park, and had our after-party in a tent. Laid back in a tent, had our beers and our boom box, and put Spacemen 3 on.

We’re chilling for maybe five minutes before VROOOOOOOOM! Dirt bikes circling our tent. The cops are asking us, “What are you doing? What do you think you’re doing?” Separating us and asking us Dani’s name. We didn’t know her last name. We didn’t have IDs. So they’re trying to confirm up our names trying to get real information. We’d just met her: “I think it’s Dana something?” [laughs] So funny. Been friends with her ever since.

Those early parties—how many people came?

Ours, the first one was in a tiny dive bar—a hundred-some people. Less than that, maybe, on the thing outside. I think for what we did shortly after that, where that ToonTown was, we cut a deal with that club, 650 Howard, to do a regular party, a monthly there called Sunny Side Up. Then we started having bigger shows at that point, more proper venues people were used to going to.

How many people went to the other parties you attended?

Hard to say. Mr. Floppy’s was hundreds of people, maybe a thousand—could it have been that much? I don’t think so. I would say I’m a bad estimator at numbers. The ToonTowns were the biggest of the kind at that time. That was hundreds—if you had a big spot, and they had some big, couple-thousand people parties. They got well bigger after. Those early ones? The 650 Howard club wasn’t really big. That club filled up; that dance floor filled. It had to be hundreds.

Gavin told me you three moved in together and started to DJ together. Scott already was DJing.

Yeah. I learned on Scott’s records. The turntables were there. I just started playing there.

You probably had your own music as well.

I did have music, but not vinyl at that point, not there—I’d left my vinyl back east and was listening to CDs. I didn’t know when I moved to San Francisco that I was going to become a DJ. I actually started playing bass and jamming with some guys, teaching myself, banging on drums and playing a bass before Scott and Gavin came out here.

Gavin told me when they arrived you weren’t necessarily in the rave scene per se, and that they basically said, “Here’s what we want to do.” And you said, “Yeah, I’m down.”

Pretty much that. I think Scott had told me of their plans a bit before they came out. Those guys had thrown parties at Ten in Philly. They just graduated college and were going off to do their thing, find their fortune, find their place in life. They were close and knew each other. I didn’t necessarily know Gavin. Gavin dated my sister before, in college.

They had a plan to make music. Scott wanted to make music and he was into parties. We talked about—I don’t think they were quite ready. I think Gavin had to get to know me before he signed onto having me as a business partner, if you want to call it that. I’m sure he thought about that, coming from Penn business school. I’m sure he was thinking along those lines a little bit. He probably got spun off of that way of thinking after we got started. But in the very first moment we had to all throw down together and do it, so there was a little bit of that.

When I think back to those years, it seems like this big, long period of time. My girlfriend at the time—it was such a big, massive breakup. I remember how heartbroken it was, what a big deal it was. But we were together maybe two years. So much happened in those two years, Ninety-one, Ninety-two, Ninety-three. We wanted to start a record label. After we’d hung out a little bit they pretty quickly brought me into the fold, asked me if I wanted to do this also. I was like, “Hell yeah. Of course I will do this.” That is how it got started.

Was his business-school background antithetical to the ethos of San Francisco?

Yeah. I don’t have memories of Gavin acting or thinking like that. Gavin was, in the group, definitely the most pragmatic thinker. He carried a heavy load, as we got rolling, making sure shit got done. But yeah, I would say that he’d agree that he got wowed by seeing this open-minded counterculture world. All three of us came up in a world that was laid out for us. You go to this good high school, you get into a good college, you pick one of these professions, and you’re all set up. It’s an easy trap to just jump on. If you’re responsible and smart, you’ll be successful.

When you come out of that world, it takes a little something to break from it. You have to first be exposed to something different, and that was definitely the ethos of San Francisco and the rave scene and house music, dancing. It was quite different from that way of thinking.

I got the sense that there was some animosity in S.F. toward not just Hardkiss, but any entity—ToonTown as well—from some of the more community-oriented people.

Yeah. Maybe more on the more hippie side of things. Scott and Gavin coming from the East Coast, and Scott in particular, in the way he’d announce himself—always, for his whole life, a more brash way of doing things that was not comfortable in that social environment of peace-love-happiness. Even if he is into supporting, believing in the same things, it’s more a form versus content kind of argument. I remember the first flyer said, “This is your wake-up call, Bay Area!” Scott wrote that on the flyer. People totally took offense to that.

There was definitely some animosity from the Wicked crew—it’s pretty funny now to think back on. I do remember, especially, the Wicked girlfriends being more hostile to us. I remember a few moments: “Ooh, Scott.” But now those girls are different. Over time—it was that brash introduction to the scene in doing it, coming from the Northeast: “Here we are!” You know? “We’ve got to market ourselves,” even thinking in those terms a little bit—we wanted to get over. So we definitely thought, “If you say something in print, people believe it.” We talked about doing it.

We wanted to make beautiful music and make people dance. The intent was the same. But yeah, I’d say we had a different approach that—as we spent more time in it with everyone—it wasn’t really that different. We were all doing the same thing. But maybe they were better marketers when it came to party-throwing.

April 11, 1992: Saturday night. ToonTown threw UFOs are Real with Moby at the Fashion Center, around the corner, the Gathering held a party billed as its last.

There’s a new one I just got an invitation to.

That’s Martin, still?

Yes.

This got written about a lot, because the parties came a month after the start of SF-Raves. A lot of discussion is around—to simplify—it’s college students in 1992 debating which is the “realer” party. The Nineties were a time obsessed with realness.

Yeah. Being forty-five now, been through it all, seen it all, lived it from the beginning, the truth is, they weren’t that different, unless you felt different. I completely understand the difference. But in essence, if you’re going to pat yourself on the back too much for being one or the other, you’re not being real, right there. The music, what I would prefer of those two parties—I would prefer the one with the Wicked DJs. But that’s a preference.

They would maybe call—I remember thinking it myself—part of the rave scene was anti-fashion, getting comfortable with yourself and dancing, not putting on a show, as had just been done in the Eighties nightclubs. It was a reaction to that. The English traveler crew that came—it was all part of that, being comfortable just dancing, just being together. That was a strong sentiment. I was completely flipped up in it too.

At the same time, I didn’t care to—I would prefer that party, but if somebody liked the Moby songs better [he giggles] you know, that Moby song was not that far off. If you took a track listing from what Tony might have played that night at the Gallery—it might not be as different as you’d think. It’s more like a style or the image of the brand of the promoter.

Cool World, they’re obviously jumping on a big Hollywood cartoon movie. It was goofy. And it was an obvious, shameless, way to market to be successful and get numbers. They were going for that. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m saying they were doing that, and they’d say the same thing. I’m sure they were successful. Loads of people went to loads of their parties and had loads of fun.

The Wicked boys and the Gathering—they had their own brand, a different brand. I personally preferred the music at those parties more, myself. I loved Thomas of Wicked—he was my favorite DJ at the time. First Jeno, when I first heard him play acid breaks, I lost it. He was the DJ in San Francisco in those days. We used to go hear him all the time. We were all over that. So many great memories of seeing the fog machine in the strobe, with him lifting the spaceship up. It was just incredible. I preferred that.

Looking back as an adult, you’re going to—it’s being over upfront or not thinking that marketing is a bad thing, maybe ToonTown. You know? They were still charging money to go to their parties, right?

I’ve talked to Garth and Thomas. The Wicked guys were throwing a weekly for profit and throwing the outdoor parties for nothing. I feel like that was pretty common. A lot of people doing paid parties to pay for free parties.

It was great. It also really worked. It was really smart, if you were looking at it. It worked for the brand, having a big epic free event every month. I’m not saying they’re doing it in a cold, calculating way like that. I was right there with them. We were all feeling like we were part of something special. We weren’t thinking like, “MARKETING.” Even if we were doing it, we weren’t thinking like that.

You were thinking “scene,” it sounds like.

We were thinking, “Wow, we are all together, and we are part of some wave, some movement. These places are beautiful and friendly and we dance together. Look what we can make. We can make something out of nothing if we come together and do it.” We were feeling that, and we were doing it, and it was beautiful.

I’m sure: All of us as adults, some of that bickering and talk on SF-Raves wouldn’t happen now. You know how it is. People argue about the music and who’s real and who’s not, when there’s very fine lines.

I don’t necessarily mean there was a lot of bickering on SF-Raves, just the two parties were compared and contrasted a lot. When you get there, it seems like the late Eighties, early Nineties is the next big psychedelic flowering there. Drugs are easy and cheap to come by—good ones.

Sure.

What was in the air at that time?

It’s a huge part in the whole scene happening. It really goes more back to England. That’s why those guys—by the time they got here, they’d been doing this already. It was brand new for everyone doing it here. Even if certain people got like, “These parties are great, this is cool,” the Brits that had been in the game for a while had been doing it—were more refined, maybe, even? I don’t know.

As far as drugs—house music and acid house from Chicago and New York made it to England at the same time as Ecstasy hit in England. There you have it, right? Born right there, I would think.

We knew about Ecstasy before we came to California in the Eighties. I think Scott and I did it twice: at a Cure concert [laughs] and at a De La Soul concert. I can’t remember which one was first. It was pretty funny. It was totally clean then.

Scott had it in his mind somehow, “We should do this on an empty stomach, so it hits us harder.” Which is really stupid, looking back. But do it on an empty stomach, yeah, it hits you harder—it makes you throw up. It’s not like it won’t get into your bloodstream. It was a funny, goofy thing he had in his head. So I remember going outside to throw up at the 9:30 Club in D.C. when De La Soul came on to play.

I do remember going upstairs and going, “This is incredible,” and walking back to the car and seeing rats and going, “Oh my God—they’re beautiful!” Sitting at the bar at the off-room away from the music. Scott’s going, “Let’s go listen to the music!” I’m like: “Nooo . . . I’m so perfect right here. I’m so happy, I’m never leaving this stool.”

By the time we got out to San Francisco, the Brits when the parties started, it was already part of their scene in England—Ecstasy, acid, candy-flipping. All of that was going on. Pretty big part of it—huge part of it.

People have mentioned things like DMT and another recipe called 2-CB. I’m curious about things other than the obvious ecstasy and acid.

There were [a lot of experimental drugs]. There was GHB, which scared me, I think. I can’t talk on it; I have little experience with those. GHB and Ketamine. It was a huge thing. That scene—it’s nuts to me. It seems obvious to me what Ecstasy and acid were doing for you. The others? Not so sure, other than just absolute fuck-up-for-fuck-up’s-sake; twisted.

I remember being scared because a friend was passed out on GHB at a beach party. Do you just let her sleep it off? Do you take her to an ambulance? We took her behind the smart bar. She was fine. She was breathing and sleeping and woke up in a little while. Got lucky there. But when I think back, that’s a horrifying moment. We probably escaped one or two of those by the hair on our chinny-chin-chin.

You just reminded me of the smart bar. That was really interesting, those early parties. People were trying to nourish themselves, too, while they were doing that. That also seemed a little to me like, worked for the brand and marketing, they were selling these things. It was a hot thing for a while and then it disappeared.

DMT. Terence McKenna was a bit of a hero out here. Jonah Sharp, you probably talked to him about [that]. I think I even remixed that record he did with Terence McKenna talking on it. We went to hear him speak. I think Jonah played live when he spoke. I wasn’t so much into it. I think at a certain point I had my early moments with psychedelics, and then I brushed it off. I was more the straight party boy—liked my drinks. But it was definitely here.

Who was behind Cool World?

I can’t remember.

Did you ever play or go to the Your Sister’s House parties?

I must have, but I can’t recall.

They were small parties, an all-woman collective, along the lines of a feminist collective.

There was one called Butterfly, where I was friends with Charlotte the Baroness and Dani Siciliano played. Emma Kirby from DIY Sound Systems was here for a while, and she played. I think Dani played Your Sister’s House sometimes too. I can’t recall specifics.

There’s a party—to jump ahead a bit—do you remember in November 1995 in Chicago called Ladybug 2? It was canceled. You were on the bill. The afterparty happened.

That rings a bell, Ladybug 2. Chicago. Canceled.

It’s one of the parties I’m writing about in the book [I didn’t—MM]. I’m a Minneapolis guy and did a little bit of road-tripping—Chicago parties were notorious for being busted. Just to be pedantic, the other people on the bill were Keoki, Kimball Collins, James Christian, Micro, Kikoman, and Eric Haupt. They had a Sunday morning after-party that did occur.

Who was that? I do remember going to some after-party with Spencer Kincy and maybe Derrick and Mark playing. Was that the after-party? At Red Dog or something?

You got it. Sunday morning: Paul Johnson, Diz, Mindrive, Derrick Carter, Mystic Bill, Traxx, Terry Mullan, Shapeshifter, and Lenny Love.

That sounds like a better party to me than the first one.

I agree.

[It happened] Daytime, windows with light in there. I remember the DJ was up high on a catwalk. I don’t remember much. I loved those DJs. I’m sure I was just having some beers. Maybe at that point, Jägermeister. I had some naughty times in Chicago. I don’t know if that was one of them. Like, were we going to play Detroit the next night or something? I can’t remember. I remember the place having windows and light. I would be with the Red Nail guys, Derrick and Mark. I would stay at their place. So I traveled to the party with them. But yeah, sorry.

Derrick and Mark were roommates?

Yeah. In a warehouse with Glenn G-Most and Chris Mazuka. Red Nail Studios, they all had rigs in their bedrooms. It was funny—they’d all mix at each other. It was a warehouse space, and their walls didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, but there were four sets of turntables. There were four DJs living in that place. It was pretty cool. But when they were playing they’d end up mixing with each other. Mark, Derrick, Chris, Glenn. G-Most was more of a hip-hop DJ.

It seemed like after-parties became more and more common across the States as the Nineties progressed.

Always, always. In San Francisco, the End Up was aptly named. Come Sunday, that’s where you ended up after going to party, after-party, nap, party, after-party, or no nap. That was everywhere. There came a point pretty quickly—it didn’t take long for me to want the music from the after-party more than the main floor, myself. I didn’t want it so banging. So I was always wanting to do the after-party. I don’t think there was ever a party that didn’t have an after-party, at the very minimum, at someone’s house.

I remember getting thrown off the turntables at an after-party in Paris because I was playing Parliament-Funkadelic. “What are you doing?” I’m like, “The sun is up! Do we have to play 135 BPM?” I just wanted to funk out: “No, no, no. No, no, no.”

What did they want?

Very fast house music. Maybe Laurent Garnier would be nice music or something.

Gavin told me you spent a fair amount of time on a major label record for Sony that never came out. Can you tell me about that?

We were putting out our singles. We made Delusions of Grandeur. That did well. I guess it came time when major labels were looking to sign some people. Honestly, I think Scott was ready to make the leap to have more power behind an album. We signed a deal with Sony. We shopped a deal. We also got hooked up with management at the time.

Not Wade?

No. This was Howard Jones’ manager—the Eighties-revival thing. But I guess it followed the normal course of major-label deals. When I look back, I’m laughing at how naive we were with the whole situation. We decided to stop Hardkiss and work on a couple albums, and make a big push. Things got off the rails.

Without getting into the details that I can’t remember very well, it’s a little clichéd—there were lawyers and managers and different interests. Then our A&R person leaving Columbia. So there was a delay in the making of music. Then you don’t have anyone at Columbia anymore that signed you, that’s supporting you. You have no one on your side in there. Things got weird.

Then, trying to figure our way how to deal with that, delayed things and delayed things. It took a long time to figure out what to do. We’d just get through the legal work and the paperwork just to get out of there, so we could get making music again.

It’s the moment that Hardkiss stopped functioning as a label. We were all still making music and DJing. Everything got off the rails. Then there are adults’ personal life issues that come into play; I’m not going to get into it. There were a lot of things converging at the right time, and all of a sudden, it wasn’t working for us as a crew anymore.

What was the time frame of the Sony deal?

Around ’97, maybe?

’97 to ’99?

Yeah.

This is the prime time of electronica.

Yeah. We were part of that—where all the labels were trying to find people. Josh Wink was one that Columbia signed, also. He was ready to go. He had stuff. In all honesty, Gavin and I were not ready for major label albums, or didn’t know how ready we were or weren’t.

Scott’s vision got so big for his album, it was loads and loads of live tracking, to do the ultimate electronic-fused-with-live. It’s funny, a matter of months later, maybe, and the software started to come out that would have made that happen a lot more quickly. It’s very interesting: There was no Ableton Live at that moment that could put live performances on a grid quickly. Scott had an engineer that was writing code to do this kind of thing. It was insane. It was really crazy. We were working forever on this album.

But we never got the album to them. Then the other stuff crept in, once it was delayed, with managers. I don’t really need to get into it, but there was some bad counsel. For my part, I was too naive to see what was happening.

Before the Sony deal, you each put a mix CD on Hardkiss but through Moonshine. How was dealing with Moonshine?

They didn’t have a great reputation, I remember that. But it’s funny—I don’t remember a whole lot of these things. I remember a vibe—I don’t remember specifics. I can’t really say I had any problem with them, because I think our deal was such that they put out our mix CDs, and they pressed up vinyl. They paid for the production of our vinyl—we were like, “Cool. We get some mix-CDs out and we get our vinyl pressed up.” Would I trust accounting or anything? Are there any labels I would trust accounting on? I don’t know. Being on a small label side of things, I also understand it. I do think there was a sign they were making a lot of money, Moonshine.

Moonshine was really the first U.S. label to go in on mix CDs.

Yeah. They did really well there for a while with that.

Did you sell a lot of mixtapes on your own?

We didn’t do many. We had a studio. It was a thing where you’d make a couple bucks there. But we as a crew almost never put them out. There were other people putting them out all the time. But we had a few out there.

Were you bootlegged much?

Oh yeah. The whole back catalog, Delusions of Grandeur, people have made money off that, but not us. [laughs] In the U.K. and all around the world, the number of bootlegs of that album is crazy, so who knows?

As far as DJ mixes being recorded live and then sold? Had to have happened. I used to be like, “Don’t record.” I’d find a recorder and turn it off, just to protect against that stuff. Because I wanted to OK anything that went out with my name on it. But it was just part of it. I didn’t sell many. You would promote it. It was more like being out there, promotions. I did one live recording at Pure Space that I made a little cover for and sold cassettes.

Scott—one of the first thing he did was make a recording called The Haze that he started spreading around and getting to people in L.A. That was part of him becoming recognized. But I do think part of Hardkiss’s allure was our infrequent releases. We put a lot of time, we wanted to do full color, we did it more expensive than just the cheapest 12-inch. We wanted quality vinyl, quality cover art, to try to make sure the records were as good as they could be. So we took a lot of time between releases.

It seems like you all went your own directions after the Sony deal went bust.

Yeah, it was partly where we were, our adult lives, getting married, getting divorced, moving on. I remember my wife and I were ready to get out of San Francisco and do something new. Scott lived in New York first. Then my wife and I went to Austin. We were in three different places for a while doing our own thing.

Did you feel divorced from the scene, per se, after that?

No. In the beginning I was still traveling a lot from Austin, still working on music for a good while there, until I had a kid. We’d traveled around the world so much that we were still connected to so many people, and still traveling. I’d still run into the same people—from the San Francisco scene, in particular. I still maintain so many friendships, and when people would come through Austin and I would end up out here or anywhere on the road, still felt connected—still felt like it was always a big global thing anyway, not just a San Francisco thing.

I’m asking because this is around the period the crackdowns begin. Disco Donnie is busted in August 2000. Did things tail off for you in that way?

Definitely so at that time; 2000 is the year I left for Austin. As I said before, some of that really hard music in the big rooms, I couldn’t stand it. And I was being booked in these really big rooms, sandwiched between happy hardcore and gabber—I was going, “What? Who hired me and put me here?”

As a DJ, I was in a tough spot—I’m never going to ignore the crowd that’s in front of me. I’m going to try my hardest to make them happy; I’m not going to just turn around and please myself. It was definitely a strange time for me. I only played things I liked, but I had to find the hardest stuff I liked to play. [laughs] I had to slide in stuff I wanted to hear. So I’m becoming disillusioned as a DJ at that point, with those gigs. I was really happy to get smaller, for a more club-oriented thing myself.

I was not up in arms with parties getting shut down. I mean, I didn’t like it; I wouldn’t want it to happen. But in my own selfish way, it wasn’t bothering me so much because I wasn’t enjoying being at those parties. I would rather be in groovier environments at that point.

Why Austin?

I gigged there sometimes. Just loved it. My wife is from Texas—not Austin, but three hours away. When I hit the point when we were thinking about going somewhere else, when you start thinking about the places you want to go in the country, that one is kind of small. It was looking to get out of the city. Even San Francisco, which is kind of a light, easy city, in a way, I wanted to be around a little more trees and people, not have such a hectic life. Austin was big enough and small enough.

Now that I’ve lived East Coast, West Coast, you know the old cliche—don’t live in New York too long or you’ll become too hard; don’t live in San Francisco too long, you become too soft. I kind of believe that. There’s something to that: the head-in-the-clouds aspect out there; the hard, in-your-face of New York.

I like down-to-earth realism and I think Austin is right in the middle of the country. It’s weird enough; you’ve got counterculture. But it’s also like, I lived in Marin County. You can do yoga if you want [in Austin], but you don’t have to like you have to there.

Was there an Austin scene when you moved there?

There was a little one. There were promoters and parties; I played a couple of raves. Like you say, the timing—the big parties were fading. Very small little house music scene. I would play here and there, not much. Austin is a big music scene—tiny little crew of house-music people.

New Music Seminar in 1992 was where people got into a fight at the techno panel. Adam X was in the audience, he told me about it; it was mostly about European rave and the Detroit people were pissed.

I was at a panel—I can’t remember who the guy was—it was the way they were talking about making a dance hit. It was so funny; I had to laugh so hard at actually sitting in a panel; that’s the last panel I ever went to. It seemed so funny, the way he was talking about it. We were all in the scene and wanted to have hit records, but it seemed hilarious to have this guy from—was he Dutch? German? I do remember the guy talking and there being some kind of thing. I don’t remember any hardcore fight.

I quickly realized that Miami was so much more fun. Being in that lobby, I saw the Rabbit in the Moon logo on a promo that Dave had had under his arm. I’d heard that record from Jon Williams in Seattle. I recognized the logo: “That is crazy, that song.” I saw the logo, went up, introduced myself: “Oh my God, we love this record. You made this record? Holy crap!” That’s how we ended up putting it out: “Out of Body Experience.”

You’re from San Francisco and there’s a great deal of overlap between the San Francisco sound and the Florida sound.

Florida breaks, yeah.

What was the mood of the early WMC? My sense is that it was very much New York house guys on spring vacation.

Yeah, definitely very New York-centric. I guess it was big enough for a bit of European action, too. But that New York house scene was pretty developed. It’s been doing it since the Eighties.

From my own perspective, we were like hippies in the middle of that scene. We crashed on Dave and Three’s hotel floor. We went to the Fontainebleau and once again the price of a cocktail—we bought a pina colada for twelve bucks. It’s like, “Wow. Tomorrow we’re bringing a bottle of rum to put in our record bag, and buy one pina colada and keep refilling.”

It was just a schmooze-fest—spring-break schmooze-fest, but then you could go walking to endless clubs. Those New York guys—you wanted to hear Tony Humphries. That was the place we would—he would show up in town maybe once in a blue moon. But you got to see that down in Miami, and that was huge, yummy.

I wrote about the 1993 WMC with the early techno people: Richie Hawtin, Nigel Richards, Tommie Sunshine met down there and saw Tony Humphries. He wowed them by playing “Plastic Dreams” at -6, which was being played by rave DJs at +2.

Totally. It was already fast.

He also told me there was a bit of—not necessarily animosity—Barbara Tucker told me, “What we did, you didn’t need drugs.” There was a lot of house snobbery toward the rave scene.

Yes. For sure. We were definitely a merry band of pranksters. We were rock and roll. It was like Seventies acid rock in a lot of ways. We were living a rock and roll life. They were not. We were all over the place. The clubs were just one place we were partying, house music clubs. We were on beaches and houses and after-parties and rock venues. It was definitely different.

More of a total lifestyle?

Yeah. And yet, they had their lifestyle too. It annoys the hell out of me, living this life—how tribal we still are. That’s bugged me in that—what you were talking about a little bit, what happened on SF-Raves: “You’re not doing it right. You’re not being real. You’re not real sons of disco.” It’s just—oh man, having felt the power and the beautiful feeling of being caught up in a wave with a lot of other people, I totally understand it.

I look now, once there becomes group thought, once it has a name and a fashion [laughs], a set of rules, loose as they may be, I don’t like it. I get a little uncomfortable with group-thought. It leads to that. It’s camps.

Those New York house people—we were these young guys totally turned on by what they did. I’m sure there was some of that snobbery. I didn’t see a lot of it, personally. But you know it’s there.

via Mubi

Since 2017, my friend and upstairs neighbor Nate Patrin and I have gotten together at his house on a weekly basis, had dinner, and watched a movie. Aside from a year and change off during lockdown, we’ve maintained this schedule regularly. Here are notes, recently made, about the first six months’ viewing of 2026.

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For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music (dir. Trent Burton; Cosmic Shambles, 2026)

YouTube playlist

Boy, did I want to love this series more than I actually do. Even after watching it all in sequence, and seeing the ways it falls short—in the case of a couple episodes, damn near falls apart—part of me wants to root for it, just because I want more of its like in the world. Hell, part of me wants what follows to be Notes Toward a Supercut, a guided tour of the parts you’ll want to pay attention to, skipping over the rest—a box set that needs editing, just what a busy person needs.

Obviously, I have a weakness for the big-picture overview. For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music is a recent nine-episode series produced by the British documentary-makers Cosmic Shambles and uploaded straight to YouTube, and it casts its net wide—dauntingly, tantalizingly, and at its best engagingly so.

It took four years to make and involves more than a hundred interviews, as well as numerous secondary sources, many of them clearly taken from carefully combing cheaply available historical archives. Bob Dylan, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else—whatever; he says something legible about songwriting, good enough. They smartly hook the idea of the blues on some good B. B. King footage. The series is tangential as well as huge in scope, and that flightiness plays a part in its failures as well as its successes.

And yes, YouTube—not as secondary source or network default, but as native ground. It’s sobering to consider that a work as ambitious as this series had to go straight to YouTube, as well as be crowdfunded. It does not say anything good, even as we accept it as inevitable.

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Willikens & Ivkovic, via Futura Artists

As was the case with another recent look-back (cf. BC178), this grouping came about through my own listening from the period: what I heard, kept, remembered—and, for this grouping, repaid my listening time (and yours). I intend to do more with Dekmantel during this period, as well. It certainly felt vertiginous then; it sounds pretty ace now.

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