BC001 – Theo Parrish on NTS Radio, April 2021-July 2022

Notes on a master DJ’s mega-mixes.

Rock critics have it easy. They get to stick to albums. Most of them even skip over live albums. Fair enough—so do I. But grokking a DJ’s essence is a different matter. You have to listen to a lot of sets to get the big picture on DJs who’ve played out for decades. In the room and online alike, most people only listen to sets once anyway.

But the DJ set used to be ephemeral by definition, and that has changed. Mixtapes always traded among cognoscenti. The U.S. rave scene in the nineties, for example, was all the way DIY, and if a DJ became a star within any of its crisscrossing circuits, the better chance you had of finding their tapes at a phat-pants boutique in a city not the DJ’s own. (Other parts of the dance scene had different ways of dissemination.) But mixes tended to be scene-specific, to never leave their social confines. The rise of the DJ-mix CD in the nineties began to turn that around, with a number proving canonical as well as broadly accessible.

At the same time as the mix CD was getting its wheels, the nascent Web was beginning to stream (via RealAudio) DJ sets on sites like Beta Lounge. People were uploading digitized files of old DJ mixtapes and live and radio sets prior to YouTube (est. 2005) or SoundCloud (est. 2007). So, before Boiler Room, podcasts, or a pandemic that prompted a run on Twitch rooms, there had been a surfeit of DJ sets available online the entire time I’ve used the Internet. And some sets enter your life for good, and those are the ones I like finding. I also like finding the ones that enhance your hour-or-so with them, even if they don’t stick around.

So, I love mixes and wanted to start writing about them again. And hearteningly, the Substacks I tend to like, the ones that seem to get some traction, often specialize, like Ray Padgett’s ongoing encomium to Bob Dylan’s live concert tapes. And with DJ sets, “specialty” doesn’t equal “errata,” because DJ culture, by definition, is potentially inclusive of every conceivable recording. It is, by definition, musically limitless. At Mixmag, I wrote about everything from Centuries of Sound and its year-by-year historical mixes (here’s a write-up of 1927; he’s now up to 1942) to gabber. That will be my gambit here, too. And inevitably, there will be obits.

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Long sets are Theo Parrish’s bailiwick. He was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Chicago, where as a teenager his production and DJ mentors included Larry Heard and Lil Louis. He studied art in Kansas City before moving to Detroit, where he began producing tracks and making his name as a DJ in the early nineties.

Parrish’s DJ tapes stood out immediately, even in Detroit. They’re marked by historical depth, bringing pre-house and -techno classics into the mix with a flair and scholarly nous that turned heads. (Four promo mixes from 1997 help tell the tale: Better Days, Body, Flying I, and Flying II.) Decades on, Theo still turns heads; his NTS sets, in their sheer size, feel like a statement unto themselves, a supersized collection of What I’ve Learned. Moreover, each of these long sets has its own specific feel, even when the material overlaps.

Theo Parrish is the kind of DJ whose sets go through phases, the way a painter might—his sets as canvases to be filled with sound. Or, perhaps more aptly, he goes through phases in the way an actor might. The DJ set is a performance medium—particularly true for any DJ who does it a long time and keeps the repertoire refreshed. From a young age, Parrish was a sharp-witted, deeply knowledgeable conceptualist.

I mentioned Parrish’s recent run of mixes for London’s NTS Radio in a recent New Yorker brief. I had just come upon the first, from April 23, 2021: Theo Parrish Presents eargoggles (6 Hour Mix). It’s actually six and a half hours, but what the heck. I put it on and was astonished within minutes. I went to Parrish’s NTS page—mixes he’d made specifically for them, eight of them by early August—and instantly knew where to start this long-aborning new Substack about DJ sets. (A more in-depth introductory post is forthcoming.)

NTS has been splitting its archived sets between Mixcloud and SoundCloud; I made playlists for each platform’s holdings of Parrish on NTS (SoundCloud, Mixcloud). Each contains six sets, and there are eight overall, so to listen to them all chronologically you have to jump back and forth.

Because so many of you are going to listen to them all chronologically. Don’t worry: it’ll only take forty-two hours.

You can’t just mainline these things. I often take breaks during very long sets. Though there is a purist argument to be made for experiencing duration-based art in full—the film critic A. S. Hamrah makes it forcefully and well in his book The Earth Dies Streaming—mixes are things you live with, life is full of interruptions, and so is listening.

* * *

The gift of the long set is that it rewards the patient listener—particularly with a DJ like Parrish, who can show off his crates and knowledge for as long as he feels like, and can connect dots you hadn’t considered. As another great DJ, Soul Sister, put it, “DJs are historians.” (Not incidentally, Soul Sister, aka Melissa Weber, is also an archivist at the Hogan Jazz Archive in New Orleans.) The longer you go, the more connections you can make—particularly if you’re playing things in a specific manner.

“Eargoggles,” [SoundCloud, Mixcloud] is the first of Parrish’s NTS salvos. Over six and a half hours, he plays a whole span of genres—and he treats all of it to the same beat-matching and filtering and tweaking and FX that he would if he were just playing house music. In fact, this set basically turns everything—jazz, reggae, salsa, soul, funk, R&B—into house music.

Parrish doesn’t put a beat under everything—just identifies records across categories that work together. A couple of times, he’ll let a track end and reset the tempo (I’ll refer to it hereafter simply as a reset), and he’s clearly having fun. The track list at MixesDB for “Eargoggles” is nearly complete, though not totally so, and it will give you the idea, one mouthwatering title at a time.

This set has many revelatory moments, but the one that stays with me most strongly comes all the way near the end. Fourteen minutes from the finish, Parrish has played at least eighty records. Some artists repeat—Robert Glasper, Ahmad Jamal, P-Funk, Theo Parrish as credited artist (he’s also clearly edited many selections, per usual). But nothing has been homogenous; the filtering and FX and tempo-tweaking have highlighted the selections’ differences as much as their commonality, all underlined by the DJ’s singular hand. And then he gets to “Zombie.” (A note: I will ID tracks by title rather than artist; I’m not looking to feed the copyright bots.) Do you know how tiresome hearing “Zombie” in a DJ set has gotten over the years? Now, here, in Parrish’s hands, six hours in? Holy shit, “Zombie” is so fucking great.

When “Eargoggles” was over, I told a couple people I thought it might be the best DJ set I’d ever heard. I don’t know if that’s quite true. But it is brilliant and original and engrossing, and it’s going to soundtrack the first road trip I can take it on.

* * *

Parrish’s November 28, 2021 set (SoundCloud, Mixcloud) is a much more straightforward dance affair: the beginning sounds stuck between stations, like a traffic jam, but soon it clears, and we are on the floor straightaway, and stay there six and a quarter hours. It’s virtuosic in a very different way than April 2021, from absurdly bounding Chicago house based on a squeaking horn and squealing JB sample (@ 29:09) to Moog-age Braziliana (I think: @ 5:13:00), which leads to a freer final hour: jazz, a Sesame Street oldie, lengthy live P-Funk. Playing long gives Parrish space to do hard resets on tempo and style, but here he takes nearly five hours to do a full switch, and even that is more a lull than a stop.

In a way, December 31, 2021 (SoundCloud) picks right up from its predecessor. It starts out loose as the last hour of November 2021—“Pinball 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12” is even reprised within the first fifteen minutes—before settling into some discoid slow jams (“Whatcha Gonna Do with My Loving?,” a delightfully goosed-up “Heartbeat”) and then gently accelerating the tempo until a full stop (mid-song) at two hours. (Maybe that’s just the feed; no real telling.) The last two hours are heavy on trippy-sketchy electronics and edits that swallow themselves on the way to growing bulbous (e.g., “The More I Get, the More I Want” @ 3:32:00), climaxing with a heavily tweaked “Bodyheat”—a longstanding personal favorite, great to encounter here.

Parrish’s five-hour January 30, 2022 set (Mixcloud) is the drowsiest. This is by design; it takes its sweet time getting to its feet. Astral and other kinds of jazz dominate the opening; around the 27-minute mark, it decelerates to a complete standstill. Slowness is a recurring theme: consisting of songs that are Screwed down decisively (though not by DJ Screw). (The MixesDB playlist for this one is, as I write, still very minimal.) The mix’s propulsion does accelerate, but very gently—and Parrish’s ear for contrast is particularly vivid here, his non-beat blends often pleasurable in themselves, such as the long overlap between an instrumental jazz number and a vocal-group song slowed to codeine tempo (@ 1:19:45), and in particular this makes the disco selections hypnotic, such as powerful slowed-down edits of “Down to Love Town” (@ 1:45:00) and “Free Man” (@ 2:45:00).

After that one, about two-thirds through, I began to wonder if either I needed a jump-start or the mix did—when, just then, the mix did. “Can You Feel It,” the first normal-sounding selection, at a medium tempo, is like the sun coming out. But “Life Goes On (Dance Ritual Mix)” (@ 3:05:00) soon appears under heavy deceleration. It’s hypnotic, and his selections remain lush and inviting to the finish. January 2022 is a strange, unique bird—not my favorite of these sets, but one whose sense of formal challenge stays with me. That’s more than most DJ mixes even ask.

So is that set’s obverse, four and a half hours that arrived on March 20, 2022 (Mixcloud). Not only is the tempo back up, much of it sped up in much the way its predecessor was slowed down. It’s jumpy from the jump, working through Nigerian juju (I think: @ 41:00), skinny drum machine minimalism (@ 1:08:00), Caribbean steel drums (@ 2:40:00), and Brazilian pop (roughly: @ 3:59:00), just for a start. And it flies by—my third-favorite of these sets, after Eargoggles and 7/17 below. After a half hour, I did some work, and when I looked back up at the timeline, hour two had just ended, and the same thing happened over the next couple half-hours.

An edit of “Peace Pipe” (@ 1:26:00) is particularly piquant: small sections, like the single bar featuring the line, “Problems of the world,” are isolated and, in that case, looped a good dozen times before the rest of the track is let go. He keeps slipping through tempos: when “To Our Disco Friends” slides in (@ 2:29:00), it’s noticeably slower, and then he goes from that into . . . a slightly peppier “Step Right Up,” from Small Change! And you wonder why I listen to these things. (A few songs later: “Mushrooms,” a good match with Waits in terms of consciously writing from a persona, as well as a good musical match with “Running Away,” into which it slides @ 2:47:00).

At a later point (@ 3:31:45), he abruptly slows the tempo of one track a couple times; it’s not the only part of the set where the tempo wavers a bit. The human touch is a Parrish hallmark, like a Basquiat squiggle; that waver works expressively, a warts-and-all approach that calls back to an earlier era of DJing, in the way that most of these selections call back to earlier styles of music making. At the finish, the DJ audibly futzes with his headphones before throwing on a Northern soul finale.

Aptly, “Jazz & Blues” is the tag on the SoundCloud edition of April 24, 2022 (four hours), even if a house kick is in place soon enough (@ 18:00). The whole thing bumps but it’s never quite a dance set, per se, like March 2022. There’s a full stop (@ 52:00), then a stutter-lope that sets the pace for everything that follows. One track (@ 1:25:00) is rather amazing, a space-age quiet storm ballad that sounds like it sprouted from Prince’s forehead during a nap in 1987. I like the way the whole thing floats and pulses, from drunken bass-and-drum dubs to P-Funk to J.B. to Talking Heads to, yes, lots of jazz and a smidgen of blues—a perfect late-night companion. The same basic description also applies to June 12, 2022 (SoundCloud, Mixcloud)—three and a half hours and also taken at a sustaining and consistent tempo, also features “Step Right Up” again, not to mention a number of other tracks as the earlier sets—though it’s less sustaining overall.

The July 17, 2022 set (SoundCloud, Mixcloud) is, drumroll, seven hours and seventeen minutes long, and was, per his echoed-out spoken intro, “recorded live at The Get Down, here in Detroit,” a party held over Memorial Day weekend with Theo playing open to close (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.). I’m not a big fan of biographical criticism—making an artwork’s real-life correlatives (did this really happen?) part or most of what you’re judging it on—but situational criticism is different enough to introduce here and there.

So, no, I wasn’t in the room, and I have no idea how people were reacting to this set. But I bet they were reacting plenty in response to a DJ who, from the sound of it, can’t stop moving. There’s something almost cubist about this set, my favorite after “Eargoggles”—it refracts the others but has its own shape, even if it has as many zig-zags as any of the others, maybe more. But the segues have an ease to them that makes the parts less important than the whole; the music moves more laterally than in leaps and the dance floor stays busy whether you’re on it or not. When Afro-house glides into big-band salsa (@ 3:52:40) and then after that into heavily filtered techno, it’s not mind-bending the way Theo can be, in part because Parrish has made all these detours and stopovers into a lingua franca you can spend a workweek steeped in. He also does it just right, hour upon hour—and seventeen minutes.

All cited times are approximate. Recommendations welcome: tweet @matoswk75