BC071 - Five Mixes: March 2024
Something old, something new enough
Matthew Collin, via Radio Flouka
I truly didn’t mean to make another retro post—two of these sets document and/or evoke the seventies, and another commemorates an eight-year-old headlining set. But much of the older music here is new to me—and more to the point, the way even the already familiar is configured makes it new enough.
Here are all five sets as a SoundCloud playlist.
Fauzia, RA.926 (March 4)
Blessed be the algorithm, sometimes. This is the slow moody stuff, taking after Jon Hassell on its way to more conventional orchestration, piano ballads sent through deep ether, and cello fugues—most of it produced by Fauzia herself, much of it as yet untitled. How’s this for a throwback: one of the tracks basically just loops the intro to “Eyes without a Face.” It’s great, obviously.
Danny Tenaglia, Movement Festival Detroit 2016 (Techno Set) (May 30, 2016; uploaded March 13)
Some DJs are stylists unto themselves. You don’t go to see Danny Tenaglia spin solely because you want to dance—you go because he is going to bring the drama in his inimitable manner, a way that no one else can equal. If you’re particularly fortunate, you’ll see him do so in an extended setting—five or ten hours or so. It’s a lot to ask, of course, but my christening took place at Winter Music Conference 2000 and went from 6 to 10 a.m.—a fraction of his total time on the decks—and continued sporadically at Be Yourself at New York’s Vinyl, a residency back when it seemed there would always be a Danny Tenaglia residency in New York. You wanted as much of him as you could get.
The bountiful brooding that marks a Tenaglia set has long been fairly easy to find in other, more compact [disc] ways. My real introduction to him wasn’t WMC 2000, it was his Global Underground of that year. There was lots before that, I know, but it’s where I paid attention and connected, and at two and a half hours it concentrates him nicely while still being expansive. The same thing applies to this eight-year-old set that Tenaglia recently uploaded. It came about due to a last-minute booking: Richie Hawtin couldn’t headline Movement, so DT filled in. He played for three hours—the upload is only the first half. Naturally, I discovered this only after playing it consistently for two weeks and considering it a completed statement. Which, now, it is.
This one is studded with classics, but they’re classics done his way: thick bass grooves, hard as polished wood, the tone serious without being either menacing or po-faced. Out of this comes all kinds of diverting machine play, but the grabbers are the hooks you remember from other nights out: “The Age of Love,” “Whole Lotta Love“ (a Loft classic, duh), and, close to the end—of this chapter, anyway—a big, splashy stretch commingling “Flash” and “Spastik.” I’m reminded of what Spin said about L.L. Cool J’s Mama Said Knock You Out in its best-of-1990 issue: “Breaks no new ground. Doesn’t have to.”
DJ Roy Thode, 28-05-1977 (uploaded March 14)
This, on the other hand, was certainly groundbreaking for its time—in some ways it’s groundbreaking now—though this has more to do with pure technique than with selection, per se. By 2016, Tenaglia’s DJ style was synonymous with his production style—he was/is judicious and tech-forward, the seams invisible but the effect total. Four decades prior to that (and nearly five from now), Roy Thode was utilizing echo chambers and double copies to effects that were more rococo, more psychedelic, more purely showy than what half a century of dizzying technological breakthroughs can seem to put on offer.
There’s a taste of it right off, when Thode throws the echo onto the breakdowns of “Dirty Ol’ Man,” turning snares into smears and distending our sense of time even as the rhythm stays in place. He also dabs some echo onto his quick mix into a suitably airy disco version of a Muppet theme, but the future comes into fuller view soon enough, with silver-edged synths poking through, most memorably on “Supernature.” Thode’s m.o. was self-made edits—early on, the one for “Let’s All Chant” is particularly snappy.
(Before I go on, a note on sourcing: This one came into my purview after showing up on the sidebar while I was watching a video on YouTube, within hours of its appearance there. I double-checked Jim Hopkins’ trove at the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society—not a duplicate, in fact predates any of Thode’s sets there, which could change anytime, of course. But it has been on SoundCloud for six years now. It joined Mixcloud at the same time it hit YouTube—uploaded right alongside an even earlier Thode mix, from February 1977: six hours in two parts. Maybe another time for that one.)
At first, the mixing seems choppy (and it is, in places—a couple of the blends miss their marks, an occupational hazard of the era), but at the half-hour mark, Thode’s intercutting of “Yowsah”’s a cappella intro with a handful of other tracks has a real period charm. Then, mixing smoothly, he starts the record over on another table. That’s cool—nothing you’d be likely to hear someone do quite so baldly now, more effective for it. Over several minutes, he throws occasional echo on it, offering a shadow, a split second off—sometimes going so wide he seems to flay the track alive as it plays—but in any event extending the record to ten minutes. This technique was new, and hearing it now it still feels new.
Thode goes even crazier after the hour mark. “Try Me, I Know We Can Make It” has long been a personal favorite of the Summer canon—its heedless breathlessness has an even creamier center than usual, and the moment when the drum machine kicks in is one of my favorite in music. The track fades out—the set hits its mid-point here—and then back in, and when it returns (@ 1:03:45), it has doubled and redoubled. The first time through it’s because of the echo, plainly. Then, suddenly, it isn’t simply delay you’re hearing. It’s the same four bars repeated in exact precise succession. Thode used the echo for disguise. Now, the track is not merely futuristic in its instrumentation—it isn’t quite in the lunar orbit of “I Feel Love,” which wouldn’t be out for two months yet when this set was recorded, but it’s close enough—but in how it is being played, on top of itself, doubled not blurred. In the day, there was a lot said about the cheap sensation disco provided, and tricks like this one were likely part of what they meant. Well, hearing Donna mirror herself and extend the luxuriance isn’t cheap, it’s profound.
Nightwave, Rinse France (March 15)
What fun: Lots of Morse Code keyboard riffs and gibbering vocal samples laid end to end by a first-time host clearly out to prove something; eventually it moves into stomping acid that only a nitwit would resist. I should pay more attention to Rinse France. Anyway, a find.
Matthew Collin, 1970s UK Electronic Psychedelia Mix (March 25)
Collin is one of the key historians of British and global dance music. His Altered State (1997) is the definitive history of British rave (Simon Reynolds cast his eye equally on the U.S. and UK) and his Rave On: Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music (2016), which I blurbed, is just as essential an overview of the post-9/11 landscape, focusing on ten key cities. Collin is an instantly engaging stylist, a genuine pleasure to read. No surprise that he DJs, too—everybody does. (It’s like passing an acoustic guitar around by this point—it's how people share music.) Collin’s new book, Dream Machines: Electronic Music in Britain From Doctor Who to Acid House, is out in the UK from Omnibus Press this April and in the U.S. in July.
Naturally, Collin made a set to celebrate it for his monthly show, The Crate Radio, on Radio Flouka. If I hadn’t already been a fan, this mix would have me drooling to read it. Which it does anyway—there are as many guitars as synthesizers to be heard over the course of this hour, but the six-strings are equally celestial, which takes some doing. Note that I didn’t say “progressive”—as Michael Hann recently wrote, “prog” is still a four-letter word. And there’s plenty of it aboard here: Fripp & Eno of course, Pink Floyd double of course (two very different bands, obviously), a full round of future Orb collaborators. What Collin pulls off is that he makes a fairly disparate group of performers, musically speaking, seem utterly unified. It’s deeply hypnotic and endlessly listenable, one of my favorite sets of the year.