In the summer of 2009, I had an epiphany. My then-girlfriend and I were spending some time in New York, staying in her parents’ apartment while she worked on her grad degree. (We parted two years later, amicably.) I was playing a record by a rock band I’d been gamely trying to hear something in for a couple of years when she walked in and said, flatly, “This is boring.” Instantly, I agreed, and it got me thinking: What do I really want to be listening to? What do I really want to be writing about? The answer was immediate and obvious: DJ sets.
I’ve been listening to DJ mixes online from the first time I really surfed the Internet, after moving from Minneapolis to Seattle in the summer of 1996. I was gone by the following January—I’d be back—but before I left town, I spent a lot of time at an Internet café, the first I’d ever encountered, in Lower Queen Anne. By the time I moved back three years later, it had become a realtor’s office, a sign of things to come. At this café, I’d find a spot in the rows of computers and listen to archived sets from San Francisco’s Beta Lounge—or try to. The early Internet speeds were nowhere near what they would be, leading to frequent interruptions, and I would usually resort to the CDs I could play on the computers’ mini-fridge-sized hard drives. The people who worked at the café were exceedingly kind to me. I left town owing the place sixty-three dollars.
DJ mixes have proliferated online for nearly a generation now, in one form or another. Freely downloadable mp3 collections of classic tapes abounded on the Internet from early on. I raided a number of archives I’d long doted on when I began writing The Underground Is Massive in late 2012. YouTube appeared in 2005, SoundCloud two years later, Mixcloud shortly after that. That doesn’t mean those mixes were consistently widespread, just that they were always there if you knew where to look. By now they’re an accepted part of the musical lingua franca in and out of the DJ world proper.
Yet there is less and less written about them. In fact, or until now, I’ve been writing about them less and less myself. I had been doing a column for Mixmag, called Sets & Settings, when the print edition shut down and took the column with it. (A number still live online; others were print-only.) I’m not the only one. The Guardian debuted Lauren Martin’s The Month’s Best Mixes column in June 2018; the final edition, by Tayyab Amin, who alternated with Martin, ran in March 2020, right as COVID’s chokehold tightened. This year, Philip Sherburne’s long-running Month in Mixes column for Pitchfork has morphed into “The Best DJ Mixes of 2022 So Far,” a single piece that Sherburne updates regularly—his most recent, on July 25, added more than a dozen sets. Thank heavens for that, and for the fact that Chal Ravens, whose roundups for FACT Magazine were its pre-pivot highlight, still has a monthly perch in The Face (here’s her July 4 column).
I’m missing others still, of course. In any case, I did miss writing about mixes on the regular, and have equally missed having smart colleagues tilling the same soil and being paid for it. Props to everyone who files a news item or a Mix of the Day; it all helps. But the decline of writing at length—any length—about mixes has come along at a time when the number of mixes is exploding. For two years, all those DJs weren’t playing out—but it didn’t stop them from making and uploading set after set after set.
To have this all relatively unmonitored seemed like a shame and still does. It’s richer to have more opinions, more perspectives, more sets of ears with more matrices of interest—more equaling more—particularly as DJ sets become entrenched in places like Apple Music, which now hosts Tim Sweeney’s long-running Beats in Space and has begun uploading episodes of Resident Advisor’s podcast. But the DJ mix is by nature a fugitive format. In many ways, mixes are still the Wild West. For that reason alone, smart, informed writing about them seems more necessary than ever. (It behooves me to say that I will know some of the DJs I’ll be writing about here. Being in nightlife means befriending DJs.)
This is also true for older mixes heard as new—endless radio and club sessions captured on tape and digitized, which serve to shape or reshape our understanding of dance music’s contours. Think of the heroic work of Jim Hopkins of the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society (see Tamara Palmer’s feature from the San Francisco Chronicle in March) or the Pine Walk Tapes from Fire Island, the subject of a big New York Times story in April, both preserving vintage disco sets that shed new light on an era many of whose living practitioners are no longer with us, in large part due to AIDS. Last week I quoted Melissa Weber, a curator at the Hogan Jazz Archive, and here I will again: DJs are historians.
* * *
Some background: I am the author of three books, most recently Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year (Hachette, 2020). The one that matters most here, though, is the second one, The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (Dey Street, 2015), my attempt to follow the historical line from Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse and Power Plant to the early-2010s EDM mass expansion. (I wrote a kind of afterword to that for NPR here.) That story moved away from my own musical interests, but to tell it, I listened to a couple thousand or so DJ sets in chronological order, including more recent, EDM-era sets that I wouldn’t ordinarily have sought out. I may not have had a good time playing through two dozen sets from EDC Vegas 2011, but I learned things.
I learned things from the mixes and eras I loved, too—lots more than I could begin to find space for in the book itself. I made public notes about individual sets on a now-inaccessible Tumblr account. (I also put TUIM’s citational notes on a dead Tumblr; they’ve been moved here.) When you sift through nearly four hundred interviews, not to mention six figures’ worth of pages of mailing-list archives, random DJ interjections on a specific night that isn’t the one you’re writing about tend to take a backseat. But when the narrative was finished and the back matter was next, I knew instantly what I wanted there, and spent maybe the book’s two happiest days constructing what I titled the Mixography: ten recommended DJ sets that related, in some manner, to each of the eighteen chapters. That was eight years ago now. The mountain of old tapes being digitized and unleashed for new audiences has only grown steeper.
Of course, I didn’t listen to all the mixes I’d gathered as background for writing. I wound up skipping past much of 1996—the writing had caught up to the listening—and jumping to 1999. But that felt fine because that was where I’d come in.
I was born in Minneapolis in 1975 and in 1997 began freelancing record reviews to City Pages, the late Twin Cities alt-weekly, covering DJ mix CDs about half the time. I’d come of age on pop and rock, always loved dance beats and electronic instrumentation, and cottoned to the UK rave phenomenon in the late eighties and early nineties via occasionally purchased NME and Melody Maker issues (which I’d read more often at the Uptown Borders or the downtown Shinders before returning them to the shelves). I went out dancing at First Avenue’s Sunday Night Dance Party religiously starting at sixteen, and dived into raves in the spring of 1993. Minneapolis had a small but hardy scene in a sizable regional network, with reach both nationally and internationally; British and German DJs showed up regularly in Twin Cities warehouses, as did a vast number of the major second-wave Detroit and Chicago DJs. At First Avenue, I heard good DJs playing an evolving canon of cool—the alternative, hip-hop, and dance hits white bohemians like me loved—but at the parties I heard DJing that was transformative, shapeshifting, shamanistic. (It did not escape my, or anyone’s, attention that most of those great Chicago and Detroit DJs were Black.) A party DJ was tasked with turning a bunch of anonymous nonsense into sentences and paragraphs, or exercises for hundreds of sweating bodies. Everything about it fascinated me.
That included its roots. The day after Christmas of 1991, a year and a half before my first party, I purchased the twelve-LP version of The History of the House Sound of Chicago, on BCM Germany. Well, minus one—it had two copies of disc ten and none of disc eleven. Each disc contains ten songs, for roughly a half-hour per side; no DJ would ever play it in a club setting. Due to the manufacturing error, OarFolkjokeopus was selling it for fifty dollars. I had scouted it months before and snapped it up that happy December 26. (This is a later, 15-CD version.) I went to my first rave forearmed with the basics. It’s been nonstop learning ever since.
* * *
As noted last week, a DJ set is a performance, and as such it can be judged on its own merits. I listen for a developed aesthetic. Do the selections play together congruently, as a complete thought or statement? Do the segues jar or sound unfocused? What kind of performer is the DJ? The kind who adds razzle-dazzle—filtering, fast cuts, homemade edits? The kind who just plays one song after another and only adjusts the overall volume? The kind who plans everything meticulously, or just wings it?
A good DJ mix sounds intentional, and the best sound inevitable—as if this particular group of disparately sourced recordings were made to be heard together in this exact manner. This especially applies to dropping in a well known hit. Is it a genuine surprise, a brilliantly timed turnaround? Does it create a moment unique unto itself within the set—or, as sometimes happens, tuck into its surroundings in ways that defy its dominance outside the mix? (A real-life example: John Acquaviva in a late-nineties Minneapolis warehouse at 3 in the morning, seamlessly blending “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” into jackin’ house and robot techno.) Or does the hit conjure a jukebox? If so, that’s bad. A DJ is supposed to know records the rest of us don’t, and a good DJ can rock a crowd entirely with things it doesn’t already know.
If you want to judge the Academy Awards fairly, it’s been said, have each nominated actor and actress perform the same scene(s). It seems fair to say that if you sic any five DJs on the same shelf of records, each one would play them differently. That, in part, is where the DJ’s signature lies.
This newsletter is aimed at readers who like music first, and then dance music. The latter will be my focus here, but a DJ set is a fungible thing, and my coverage will reflect that to at least a small degree. Sometimes I will write about themes, sometimes I will do roundups of recent sets, sometimes I’ll find fascinating artifacts, sometimes I’ll spotlight individual DJs, sometimes I’ll interview people (not always just DJs; stay tuned), and sometimes I will write about DJs who don’t play dance music at all.
Final notes: I denote approximate times during sets in parentheses: (@ 00:01). Again, these are approximate. I ID tracks by title and not artist, in part because some songs are well known by dance fans or should be, in part because I’m not trying to get people’s shit taken down. Google is your friend; so is Discogs; so especially are MixesDB and its neon-clad cousin 1001 Tracklists. And finally, timeliness is of small concern here. There are simply too damn many mixes out there to worry overmuch about it. But if I’m first on something, great!
Next week: our first five-set roundup, featuring items of recent vintage. Thanks for reading, please subscribe, tell your friends, and let’s get it started.