BC062 - Five Mixes: Retro, January 2024
Looking forward by looking back
R.I.P. Michael Watford, via Electronic Groove; see DJ Disciple’s mix below
My sincere apologies. I have been busy—more day-job hours and less writing time, basically. But I’ve been listening a lot, and more of it will be visible soon; this and the next two updates were planned out weeks ago. We’ll start here, from the top of the new year—appositely enough, by looking back to music that informs the present.
You can hear all five sets on this SoundCloud playlist.
Soul Summit, RA.918 (January 7)
The first time I heard the initial RA Podcast of 2024, I was also in the middle of reading Michael MacCambrige’s The Big Time: How the 1970 Transformed Sports in America (since finished; now halfway into Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties—Alfred Soto’s review is worth reading). So just as a kick-enhanced but familiar Philadelphia groove emerged into the picture @ 49:00, my eyes came across this quote from the Basketball Hall of Famer Julius Erving, at the end of a detailed explication of his playing style: “My overall goal is to give people the feeling they are being entertained by an artist—and to win.” Erving, of course, was a Philadelphia 76er, a time-place confluence that felt particularly potent. (It’s an interesting book—there’s a lot about amateur sports, with some of it overlapping with a detailed look at the rise of women athletes in the feminist era; there’s far less focus on the Usual Suspects of Seventies Sports: Dock Ellis’s 1970 no-hitter, pitched on LSD, gets a paragraph, for example.)
But well beyond that instance of lucky timing, this set is enormously enjoyable on its own merits. It was recorded live at Mister Sunday at Nowadays in Queens, a club I hope to actually go to someday. (Sob face.) What gets to me here are the transitions. The very different basic aural temperaments of each selection—a track that’s warm and roomy making way for something off parched sounding vinyl, or anyway the illusion thereof, has a fascination unto itself. I also love how the hour-long main set builds in momentum over its final quarter, with an encore featuring the DJs’ voices briefly over it fore and aft, thanking us. The first time through, hearing the encore (Inner Life’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”) felt a little chintzy—you had to be there. But not the second time, or any after. With repetition, it gains heft. It’s not being there, but in the recording it’s still a moment that transfers to us.
Actress, Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, January 13)
“A special old-school edition Essential Mix,” we learn right at the top—how’s that for sticking to themes? Not only are many titles here familiar, but a few are downright obvious. And yet—it doesn’t really sound old, per se. Partly it’s because Actress is mixing eras as well as records, with neither the genre focus of the set above nor the era focus of the two below. It doesn’t sound contemporary, either. He is playing a lot of classics at off speeds, which shifts their effect significantly—a cantering sensation, distended. At times it has a familiarly dungeon-like feel to it, like the cavernous catacombs of NYC’s Basement, where I once spent a memorable night running into an old friend—which isn’t far from this set’s affect, actually.
DJ Colin Bell, Hard House Classics—Vinyl-Only Mix (January 14)
I heard this via a reposting by History of Happy Hardcore, whose SoundCloud I’ve followed for years but have only occasionally followed through on, listening-wise—my cut-off is 1995, as I’ve elucidated elsewhere. And while a couple of tracks on this set have some crossover with HoHH’s usual selections, it’s not proto-, primo, or post-jungle at all. (Though their undeniable root commonality did occasionally pop up, as those selections show.) Not only was hard house its own chugging, grinding, foursquare, Brit-cum-Euro stylistic strain, it was largely forgotten until fairly recently. I wouldn’t say DJ Heartstring’s Essential Mix or, even better, DJ Fuckoff b2b Narciss at Berlin’s Whole Festival were necessarily dropping hard house tracks, but that was the effect much of the time in the cases of both—same with some of the HydeFM sets I checked last month—so when HoHH put this set from the Glaswegian DJ Colin Bell set onto my feed, I lunged.
In the September 2000 issue of Muzik, Billy ‘Daniel’ Bunter said: “I was being called a trancecore DJ as I broke away from happy hardcore. The music was then around the 160-165 BPM mark, but was being played at Trade and Sunnyside Up, as well as me playing it at Helter Skelter and Dreamscape. By 1998, all my sets at hardcore raves and clubs were hard house.”
That’s the effect here. You like cheap-n-cheerful? This draws spades on that for over 90 minutes. It’s whiter than the fucking snow, so clearly your mileage may vary. But it can also be silly fun in the right frame of mind—a frame the music offers freely. Its tinniness can needle but it can also thrill, like, say, being on ketamine as the world is ending.
Devnull, BTTO Radio: ’92 Special (Blog to the Old Skool, January 14)
Obviously, early nineties UK hardcore > drum & bass is holy writ around these parts. It’s true that I’m no 12-inch collector, not even digitally (not even as a DJ—which, by the way, I’m doing next week in St. Paul, heads up), but I’ve listened to plenty of mixes from this period, and I can safely say that I cannot recall encountering any of these selections before. When Pete Devnull calls something a rarity, it really is one. The set is perfectly of that time, needless to say—blithering, blissful, swift, a buzzing wire that jolts to the touch. Crowning touch: hyperspeed loop of the title phrase from the immortal “Work That Mutha Fucka.”
DJ Disciple, Michael Watford—The Voice to Hear: Dedication Mix (January 27)
As with Soul Summit, the sound of differently-aged vinyl and/or rips is part of the draw—it’s what we hear a DJ playing, not just the music but the condition of the pressings or files. When you see Willie Nelson, you expect him to play the guitar with the hole he’s worn into it; it’s similar to that. Disciple’s tribute gives us a broad overview of the vocalist Watford’s career. He doesn’t include my favorite-ever Watford track, “Reach on Up (Tuff Jam Garage Mix),” which features one of the most indelible lyric readings ever—“Keep on ripping,” curved upward, a wink and a plié; it runs through my mind nearly every day—but he doesn’t have to.