BC060 - Beat Connection's Favorite Sets of 2023
Lists! Lists! Lists!
Solid Blake, the DJ behind this newsletter’s top set of 2023, via Rinse FM
A few years ago, there was a brief hubbub when Resident Advisor decided to stop publishing ranked lists. A number of people on a couple of my timelines said huzzah, death to false hierarchies, et al. I understand that impulse implicitly. For generations, rock writers, me among them, have chronically underestimated Black music in particular and all kinds of music in general—dance music, obviously, being a big one. And I can understand a desire on RA’s part to shed its former image as a white Euro K-hole soundtrack repository.
But at the same time, not ranking things did and does feel strange to me, because it ignores a basic human impulse. People have preferences; those preferences are what guide and drive us. When you aggregate the preferences of a group of people, you demonstrate something about your time and place and aesthetics. The idea that, if your personal or professional or aggregated list(s) are somehow not ratified exactly by the passage of time, they are deserving of scorn, is an unserious one—people change and grow, and so does our collective understanding of music, and to second-guess that kind of growth before it can even happen seems counterproductive at best.
I’m thinking here, as well, of a similar kerfuffle over Pitchfork’s “The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s” a while back. On it, many of the higher-placed-than-usual R&B albums (Control, et al.) were exactly the same as the ones Rolling Stone put on its “100 Best Albums of the 1980s” back in November 1989. (They didn’t even wait for the decade to be out!) In many cases, the only thing that changed was the order: instead of somewhere between 30 and 90, these often Black- and/or female-made albums were in the top 20 or top 10. Like, wow—this is even an argument? How, exactly?
In any event, canons are precisely as important as you make them. For the white rock males for whom the sort of exercise so often finds favor, best-of lists tend to be preternaturally important. They indicate aesthetic status in a world where other kinds of status have long been assumed. The latter is undergoing revision—and I think assertions of aesthetic quality are important for that reason as well. This is better than that—but why? That’s the question a ranked list should open, not shut down. Here’s mine:
Beat Connection’s Top 10 Sets of 2023 (by preference)
1. Solid Blake, Rinse FM (March 10) review
2. Diskonnected, RA.904 (October 1) review
3. Dev/Null, The Lot Radio (February 19) review
4. DJ Fuckoff b2b Narciss, Whole Festival (Berlin; rec. July 30, upl. November 8) review
5. trAxx, The Definitive Articles of House Music Chapter 3 (August 12) review
6. DJ Heartstring, Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, November 4) review
7. Surgeon, Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, April 15) review (The New Yorker)
8. Courtesy, NTS Radio (October 13) review
9. Autechre, Artificial Intelligence—1992 Contextual Mix (NTS Radio, December 30, 2022) review
10. Salamanda, Groove Podcast 399 (November 24) review
I might possibly have kept on ranking things in “order,” at least down to 30 or so, but I think ten is enough. Certainly, keeping it to ten opens plenty of questions a longer ranking wouldn’t necessarily have missed.
Most notably, fully half these mixes (1-2-7-8-9) fall into the broad category of techno, and you could make partial claims for others. It was a strong year for the stuff, without question—both in person, thanks to techno’s heavy concentration on the sound of the parties I attend in the Twin Cities, and through mixes. You can also hear through the Solid Blake, Diskonnected, Surgeon, Courtesy, and Autechre sets that “techno” is and has never been anything like a monolith—even allowing for the ambient music on the last one, or the sheer size of Diskonnected’s six-hour masterwork and Autechre’s four-and-a-half-hour amble, which might seem as ready for a half-vote as the gorgeous bright pattern work of Salamanda or the raving-their-brains-out (but not their ears) DJ Heartstring.
Another reason not to order things by preference for longer: Given the sheer amount of listening it would take, I simply did not have time to do the re-listening that’s essential to a longer ranking, rendering it unfair. What follows, then, is simply the rest of my favorite 2023 sets, as covered here (or elsewhere), in chronological order. For simplicity’s sake, I eschewed older sets I heard for the first time this year.
BC’s 40 More Favorite Sets of 2023 (chronological)
11. Eli Escobar, Essential Mix (January 21) review/The New Yorker
12. Nada Fácil, Daisychain 262 (January 24) review
13. Ayy Den, HÖR Berlin (March 1) review
14. Edna Martinez, Tra Tra Trax (Rinse FM, March 1) review
15. Hudson Mohawke, Rinse FM (March 2) review
16. Shuffle N Swing, Rinse FM (March 3) review
17. Salomé le Chat & DJ Holographic, Paradise (Rinse FM, March 11) review
18. BYZARRA, Daisychain 272 (March 30) review
19. Miss Kittin, HÖR London Takeover (April 6) review
20. Love Letters & Mike Servito, .Freq (The Lot Radio, April 11) review
21. Astrolex, House Proud Minneapolis (Beast BBQ, May 5) review
22. Erika, Wire Mix (May 15) review
23. The Letter “C,” 8th Path Records (The Lot Radio, May 17) review
24. deep creep, ani/live Twenty Eight: Club Moniker, San Francisco (rec. May 20, upl. September 27) review
25. Jubilee, Daisychain 280 (May 22) review
26. Ron Like Hell, The Space Between Spaces 40 (Hour 2) (The Lot Radio, June 15) review
27. Temi Kogbe, The Great African Disco (NTS Radio, June 25) review
28. Sami, Truancy Volume 312 (July 13) review
29. Kiernan Laveaux, Groove Podcast 384 (July 14) review
30. Oblig b2b AceMo, Rinse FM (August 8) review
31. Slam, HÖR Berlin (August 18) review
32. Oblig presents Bassbear!!, Rinse FM (August 22) review
33. Cosmo, Intercosmic (The Lot Radio, August 23) review
34. Nikki Nair, Bleep Mix #270 (August 24) review
35. livwutang, Furniture without Memories—Dana Kelley Tribute (NTS Radio, September 4) review
36. LYDO b2b Peachlife, Draaimolen Festival 2023 (rec. September 7; upl. November 14) review
37. Batu b2b Donato Dozzy, Draaimolen Festival 2023 (Tilburg, Amsterdam; September 8) review
38. Dactylian & Palo Santos Discos, NTS Radio (September 11) review
39. 3XL w/Special Guest DJ, NTS Radio (September 18) review
40. Ichiko Aoba, NTS Radio (September 26) review
41. James McNew (Yo La Tengo), NTS Radio (September 29) review
42. Conducta b2b Tim Reaper, Conducta’s Crib, The Bongo Club, Edinburgh (rec. October, upl. November 16) review
43. Goldie, RA.905 (October 8) review
44. Neil Krug, Trapdoor (NTS Radio, October 26) review
45. Matmos, Halloween Special (Dublab, October 31) review
46. Josh Tweek, 5918mins. (November 14) review
47. Cherub420 and Argopol, Smoke 1 (HydeFM, San Francisco, November 21) review
48. Tygre, Live on HydeFM (San Francisco, December 5) review
49. Kittin, Connecting the Dots (Kompakt; rel. December 15) review
50. Ab.raham, Live on HydeFM (San Francisco, December 19) review
Forty-five of the above sets are available to hear on this SoundCloud playlist, including the Top 10 (this info has been updated). The HÖRs, and the Essential Mixes can be heard on this YouTube playlist (The EMs are on both playlists, FYI.) The mixes available from other sites are all linked to in the list above.
My choices are all over the damn place musically, and that’s as it should be. I cover dance music primarily here, but radio shows and DJ sets and mixtapes are vehicles to learn about and fall for music of any type, and that’s one of the things this space celebrates. As I think my selections demonstrate, my deep dives have often been rewarding; had I not gone through a bunch of Rinse FM sets in March, I wouldn’t have heard my number one, and the same holds true for my dip into NTS Radio’s new fall residents, which yielded Courtesy’s splashy station debut. I value consensus—three of my selections came from RA’s November Mixes of the Day, which I made a project of—but I also value adventure, and that seems to hold true for my readers as well.
What I do find sometimes overlapping between my choices and those of other writers are DJs but not necessarily sets. Let’s take my number one. Solid Blake’s hour on Rinse from March 3, is all kinds of fun—not a statement, per se, but continually enlivening and listenable, seemingly casual but deftly paced, an hour that speeds by like nothing; a set you know you’ll want to play again the first time you hear it, and every time thereafter. My number two, Diskonnected’s RA.904, is a statement, six hours long, its DJ Q&A on the website a literal manifesto, a deeply enjoyable but also deeply daunting task, a kind of Oppenheimer for techno only twice as long (because it’s techno). I’m impressed as hell with RA.904, and I will go back to it with open arms soon enough. But the thrill of this Solid Blake show is also its relative brevity and repeatability.
What you don’t find overlapping much on my list[s] are more than one set by a given DJ, with only a couple of exceptions: Kittin (Miss Kittin if you’re nasty) and, in name only, Oblig, who sits out the Bassbear!! showcase on Rinse a mere two weeks after going b2b with AceMo. I’ve tended not to repeat DJs in this space too often if I can help it, unless it’s a showcase, but having favorites is as intrinsic to being a critic as roaming widely, and I plan to proceed with that in mind. Certainly, I can accept that her March 3 Rinse FM set might not even have been Solid Blake’s top mix of 2023. But it’s still mine. Here’s to another year of finding more.