BC018 – Top Ten Mixes of 2022
Including some I hadn’t written about yet!
Sorry this is so late! Please understand: In a folder I have the beginnings of eighteen newsletter posts that haven’t gotten off the ground yet, and in many cases probably won’t. That’s how a good idea begins—it finds more tributaries than you know what to do with. And that’s how 2022, the year in mixes, has been for me—a lot of good listening with the writing yet to catch up. And there’s still so much to try to catch up with, should I even attempt such a thing. Take this Top 25 Mixes of 2022 (actually many more—the list is more of a Top 25 DJs) from Michael McKinney at Passion of the Weiss; I haven’t heard any of them! And I’m sure I’d love at least a few. It shows just how big the field is. My own list will only help matters a little. Naturally, my Top 10 is full of stuff I’d written up already. Enjoy them all; I did. They’re chronological.
Again, sorry late; the next post will be up by the weekend, and it too will play some ‘22 catchup. Expect plenty more. =D
Here is a SoundCloud playlist of the Top Ten.
Myles Sergé, Minimal Detroit Vol. 133 (March 15)
LYZZA & NORA, Intearnet Radio (NTS Radio, March 23)
Radio shows can be an iffy proposition for repeat listening, and whenever I start this one again, I worry it won’t keep me. But keep me it keeps doing. LYZZA’s a Brazilian in Amsterdam, her sound is bass-led, pop-leaning, club-rocking shit where Autotune is a folk instrument, and this hour, discovered in September on the say-so of another outlet, forget which (sorry), is the best kind of stylistic mishmash, loaded full and explosive.
Nia Archives, Rinse FM (March 24)
IYRE, Mixmag: Impact (March 30)
The Rinse FM jungle post is the tip of a larger body that will likely see light in this newsletter—not just good jungle or d&b-leaning sets from 2022, but a good number going back to 2018 (and, of course much earlier). But this was the one that stayed with me—it’s liquid/aquatic in the classic nineties sense, though its tracks are new or recent. The rising Sri Lankan D&B DJ IYRE, per Mixmag’s accompanying feature, is pronounced “eye-ree,” and he typified the sound of the set as “queer”—an in-betweenness that seemed a step away from the hardcore way back when and now translates differently, and smartly—and with clear intentionality on at least IYRE’s part (he has his name on six of the thirty tracks). Whatever you want to call the set’s lantern-lit-from-within quality, it glows.
Dee Diggs, Dekmantel Podcast 384 (May 9)
Theo Parrish, NTS Radio (July 17)
Willikens & Ivokvic, Dekmantel Festival 2022 (August 5)
Silent Servant, Optimistic Decay (NTS Radio, August 24)
Both reviewed here.
Kush Jones, Rinse FM (November 22)
What I wrote last month in The New Yorker:
As a producer, Kush Jones makes beats with a unique style—his recordings usually have the dusty flair of early, sample-based hip-hop while still hewing to house music’s classic four-to-the-floor rhythm. The combination makes Jones’s tracks instantly identifiable when others spin them. As a [DJ], Jones brings off a similar kind of mixture. For a set on the London radio station Rinse FM, aired in November, his selections are heavy on hip-hop tropes—vinyl crackle, scratched-in hooks—that detonate delightfully.
Listening again, the tweaky bits are what stand out—the high-pitched flutter @ 54:10 is the most obvious—and those feel more purely house than hip-hop in style, though my reference points predate the 2010s and are probably less opposed in any real sense than I’m making them seem. In any event, this is very much a dance set—one that will delight anyone with an ear for how differently one record that seems to exist entirely on fumes can sound from another that does much the same, only with a completely different palette.
Angelica & El Niño Indigo, TML on Noods Radio (December 16)
Angelica has been one of the best Twin Cities DJs as long as I’ve been back here, seven years now, but she’s seldom uploaded her sets—she’s an admitted perfectionist. But her first hour of fellow Minneapolitan TML’s monthly show for Noods Radio is precisely the set I’ve long hoped to rehear—overcast, intimate, cryptic, hypnotic. There’s a Goth undertone to her set (and her playing in general) that’s baked into the crust rather than layered on top; when the beat returns here (@ 17:00) after a good ten minutes away, it’s loose and built on claps, the kick minimalist—arty dry-ice house, yum, and even when the instrumentation moves toward fog-alert electro (@ 30:00), that’s the vibe throughout.
The second hour comes from another Minneapolitan—as mentioned in my DJ Voices interview, El Niño Indigo, aka Gerardo Morado, has been booking some of the best New York DJs of recent years in Minneapolis. His set here is a cunning downturn after the silvery pump of Angelica’s hour—slow, slithering acid electro that gains body as it morphs into heavier, headier house, his sweet spot as a DJ, and then goes further still. Together, they ended the year with an appropriately frosty sheen.