BC076 - Five Mixes: The Algorithm Speaks, February-May 2024
Madonna in the mix, Edna Martinez across the global south, and more!
One thing always leads to another, especially on an algorithmically led closed system such as SoundCloud. Our last item is an exception, for the obvious reason that it’s from Mixcloud and the even more obvious reason that it involves one of the titans of both pop and club music. It came to me via some feed or other, too, rest assured.
You can hear four of these sets (plus an honorable mention) on this SoundCloud playlist.
Interplanetary Criminal b2b Main Phase, Boiler Room Festival Berlin: SYSTEM (November 17, 2023; uploaded February 8, 2024)
A UK garage roundelay that showed up some time in April. Now, I hate to fall back on such obvious and simplistic usage, but the phrase “nothing but fun” actually applies—it’s ninety minutes long, I’ve played it a whole bunch of times, and there are basically no dead spots. Is everything world-class? Nah, but when the vibe doesn’t quit, you’re less likely to care. MCs show up occasionally and so do loads of obvious samples, not to mention selections—this ends on “The Bomb!” because that’s what’s called for, damn it.
Lauren Flax, Groove Podcast 408 (February 16)
A suave beatdown, electro riding the border of techno, bloopy on top and chompy below: walking bass lines like Pac Man gobbling pellets at 130 BPM, the 303s rampant and bubbling into froth. It’s exuberant and rubber-eraser pointy; it oscillates wildly and deliciously; a huge favorite around these parts. Nothing sticks around long; a clutch of it is by Flax herself. She’s working on an album that, per her podcast Q&A, will sound nothing like this. Ooooh.
Edna Martinez, SYSTEM Mix 103 (Boiler Room; February 17)
As before, the pan-Africanist Colombian DJ Martinez’s tastes are so geared to my own it’s a little hilarious. On this unerring hour we get a lot of lovably clanky beats that peal and swerve the way the billowing guitars and gnarled accordion do. The samples show their seams, charmingly. Just about impossible to resist, one of my favorite hours of the year. Jesus, this is fast.
Neel, Nachtipod—Nachtiville 2024 (Chalet) (March 15)
It builds—it’s three hours of techno, it had better build—but it also exhibits a real charm that’s not always evident in these types of situations. I mean, of course, for techno—if you seek charisma, see the surrounding sets. But a percolating energy fizzes throughout this one, whether he’s conjuring the inside of an echoing hangar or entering hyperspace in a one-person capsule yet again.
Stuart Price, Madonna/Celebration Tour—Stuart Price DJ Mix (May 8)
I no longer recall precisely whose public post of this first caught my eye, but it did, and by the time I got to it, it was on its second day up, and had already amassed over 15,000 plays—and had done so despite the fact that this set is tagged by Mixcloud as “Private.” (At two weeks, it was 52k.) Of course—it’s the biggest living pop icon of the eighties—but it also works interestingly, in ways that open the question of what, precisely, I or anyone else means when we assess a DJ set.
Basically, Price stretches and stitches a lot of Madonna vocals over a lot of whorling-vortex dance classics: “Body Language,” “Fly Life,” “I Feel Love,” “Spastik,” ad nauseam. Now, I try not to pretend I’m not in the room when I’m listening to a set; it has to reach me in the room I’m in. But the idea that this was the opening act of an arena show in 2024—that it being so is, indeed, completely normal—strikes me as both natural and deeply odd. There are times I worry I too much internalized the suspicion of mainstream culture that seemed endemic to the nineties; indeed, I see people whose knee-jerk reaction to any pop culture at all makes me embarrassed to have ever thought that way.
But it’s not that strange—those records have seeped into the culture (I don’t mean “I Feel Love,” which was always a big pop hit, but the others weren’t, not in America) in the same way the Sex Pistols had by 1991. It’d be odder if Price hadn’t gone for those kinds of things. It’s kind of a gloppy mess, but points for candidness—they aren’t pretending the mix in this link was anything other than what Price “performed” every night.