BC029 - Five Mixes: Old residents on Rinse FM, March 2023

I'm gonna play these ones to death.

Horse Meat Disco

Most of these I had initially planned to for the first salvo from the big Rinse March pile—all but the last were earmarked, along with TraTraTrax from last week—but once I saw the size of the new-residents list I had no problem changing course. That said, I like this selection even more. I also quite like the two follow-ups I have planned a lot. (Those will be paid-only. Get on board today!) Not to mention an insider interview with someone who helped run the most important mix CD series ever. And more!

Here are all five mixes as a SoundCloud playlist.

Jossy Mitsu, International Women’s Day Special (Rinse FM, March 8)

It starts like a radio show, Mitsu frequently back-announcing tracks, a sampler platter, appealing unto itself. But it doesn’t take long for her to start through-mixing, or to gather momentum, then keep it going. There’s a lot of variety, but it plays as one thing, crisp and irradiated, even when the joins show—when Mitsu audibly speeds up @ 11:30, for example, it’s a feature, not a flaw. There are a lot of vocal hooks floating about, some recognizable (“The Finest,” for example), and that helps, too. Plenty of wonkiness, as well, always a bonus. That it’s “all women producers,” as she notes near the top, isn’t incidental, either.

Solid Blake, Rinse FM (March 10)

Ridiculous. The opening salvo, from Anthony Rother, evokes the gates closing at the top of Citizen Kane, and things only scale up from there. What is all that white space doing in place of the rhythm @ 11:00, and why does it make the rhythm hit harder? Hi-hats on this mix = someone turned the sprinklers on, yay! The music she plays makes me contemplate whether aliens have fangs or not, and whether the machines will be kind to them after they’ve eaten us. And it finishes on breaks, just like so many good mixes seem to the past couple years, hmmmm. I’m gonna play this one to death.

Roman Flügel, Rinse FM (March 11)

It is low-key hilarious that this set is illustrated on SoundCloud by the generic light-blue rendering of the Rinse FM logo—this is a station whose sets’ accompanying images change constantly. Indeed, seeing what the next layout will be is part of the charm of following Rinse in the first place. So this? Bruh. (The real photo is on the page linked above; whew.)

Under that cover of bland stealth, Flügel crafts a bewitching hour that ambles out at first as if from a Berlin laptop circa 2001—the rhythms have a springy inventiveness redolent of that era, that sense of teasing out elements of a track until they fray. Rock guitars and found voices roll over the groove in a haze, as do violins conjuring Eastern Europe. They, like the buttery synths and canting bass lines stuck in midair and videogame claps and Claymation tunes and random zaps, have a kind of filmy cast around them, like they’re wrapped in yellowing plastic. Better yet, they seem to bask in that inorganic luminescence. 

LORA & Ozzie, Steel City Dance Discs (Rinse FM, March 15)

It isn’t quite fair to refer to this one as an “old resident.” Founded in Newcastle, Australia, and now in London, Steel City Dance Discs has had a show for over a year now on Rinse; it’s just the name of, not an artist, but a crew, and none of the programs have featured the same DJ/s twice. Their SC tag is “POSITIVE ENERGY FOREVER,” and they emanate it without seeming softheaded—the opposite, like a good time is also an active and alert one. That doesn’t mean these two hours are either hi-NRG slick or slackly New Agey—more like appreciably psychedelic cardio, with tunes.

Horse Meat Disco, Rinse FM (March 26)

I’ve written a lot about the historicization of disco, in particular this Chicago Reader piece about a great four-CD box set, A Complete Introduction to Disco, 1970-1980, which situates the box at a point where, to my wary eye, the music was being claimed by, ahem, “the kind of record collectors who, in an earlier era, might have belonged to the Sub Pop Singles Club and sneered at the very idea of listening to disco.” What I wasn’t thinking of, and feel particularly foolish in retrospect about, is the stake queer historians and/or DJs had or have in reclaiming disco, not to mention reshaping it. And, of course, many times the kind of indie scenesters I was feeling suspicious of were themselves queer, a retrospective connection that seems more obvious to me all the time. And while I don’t have to love every goddamn morsel unearthed from the archives of the era’s prime creators (and, rest assured, I don’t), there really were a hell of a lot of disco records issued in the seventies and eighties as it is, weren’t there? No wonder DJs keep discovering it.

The British DJ quartet Horse Meat Disco have been rediscovering it since 2008, and do so better than most. I like their moxie and taste, though their Rinse show does run hot and cold for me. Not unpleasantly—I just want a hard through-line, and the show’s format is often more relaxed than I want. I’m a big fan of their African Disco Special from February 2019, for example—concepts go a long way with them—though I’ve often enjoyed the occasional regular episode—in 2022, the January 30 and April 3 shows, for example.

James Hillard helms this March 26 episode. (The other members of Horse Meat Disco are Jim Stanton, Luke Howard, and Severino Panzetta, who rotate on the show.) It has no appreciable concept, but it also works as a readymade primer on what makes Horse Meat Disco its studly self. As well as the usual elastic grooves and rare scores, it’s casually internationalist—Letta Mbulu up early, Sheila Chandra down late—and reaches a piquant middle with the hypnotic proto-Italo-house of “Aerotropics (Free Fall Mix),” a weird 12-inch issued on a jazz-leaning label run by the guitarist from Be Bop Deluxe. Even cuter is the record about being a disco DJ, the great “Disco Pool Blues”: “I get more requests/For new hits than the rest/So record man, please send me more.”