BC077 - Five Mixes: May 2024
Finely finessed and loaded with surprises: new goodies from Four Tet, Julia Govor, and more
Julia Govor, via RA
Because it was on The Criterion Channel and because I’d never actually sat down and watched it—an idea I’d have found faintly ridiculous at the time—about two months ago, I finally put on Exhibitionist—Purpose Maker Mix (US: Jeff Mills, 2004), and I’m really glad I did. I am (obviously) one of those saddos who stood in front of the booth for much of the nineties, watching the DJ like a hawk; I was fascinated by that level of technical skill, which I did and do not possess. (As a DJ, I live and die by my selections and by automation, in that order.) And I was fascinated anew here, though I shouldn’t have been so surprised. It was seeing Mills at a Minneapolis rave in 1994, after all, that turned a corner for my relationship with dance music; it was like seeing Hendrix in 1966. Exhibitionist isn’t as kinetic—he isn’t chain-smoking or throwing the records on the floor with a flourish, for one thing—but it more than gives you the idea.
You can hear all five of the following sets on this SoundCloud playlist.
Four Tet, Under the K Bridge, Brooklyn, NY (May 5)
First time through, I figured you had to be there. That’s not unlike what a lot of smart people think of DJ sets in general; for the next issue of Love Injection (number 70, due soon) I spoke with Jesse Rifkin, the author of the great This Must Be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City, who told me, “I do find listening to those kinds of DJ mixes sort of like listening to a live bootleg of a band, something where I think something is lost a little bit from not being in the space. It’s not something that’s being made to be listened to as a recording. It’s something that’s in communication with an audience. You’re missing 50 percent of it when you listen.” And although I listen to sets as a matter of course, I also know what he means.
But it was the second listen when things opened up—and that wasn’t surprising. Sometimes you encountered a piece of music and know you weren’t catching everything the first time through, that you need to sit with it to process it fully? That tends to be the case with Four Tet sets and me. First time through this one, I could tell I wasn’t hearing it enough. Or, really, I wasn’t hearing what I was expecting to, which was . . . what, exactly? Who knows? I think what I was hoping for was something that felt as differently-new in form as his recordings tend to be. In fact, Four Tet is quite a straightforward dance DJ—a quite good one.
Of course, he starts appositely (and smartly)—but it’s apposite in an expected way, and therefore heartwarming even as it bristles. A lot of what’s here—his own stuff as much as anyone else’s—hits my ear as big-room tech house, elevated well above the usual stuff that designation implies but also not immune to the usual. It’s telling that his heavy hitters tend to be so glossolalic: “Groove La Chord,” “Jaguar,” a remix of “Circles.” The bass lines are practically speed-garagean in places, and that plays a big role in putting things over. I think it’s the relative thinness of the recording that takes getting used to. But there’s no doubt that if I’d been there I’d have been screaming my head off.
DJ Voices, Live @ Nowadays Nonstop (Brooklyn, May 10)
A lot’s gone on since I last checked in with Kristin Malossi. She’s left Nowadays, where she was a booker as well as resident DJ; she refers to this as her final set there, at least for the foreseeable future. She has posted a fair amount about it, and about her frustration that more people aren’t speaking up more consistently about Palestine. (I’m one of those people; I don’t feel I can speak effectively or knowledgeably about it so I don’t talk about it a lot, but I am, I hope explicitly, for a ceasefire and a free Palestine.)
What I didn’t know going into this mix—it’d been a while since I’d checked in on DJ Voices as well—is that she would weave her positions into the set, as Siri-esque voiceovers, and that it works as DJing, meaning that it adds to the music. I didn’t even notice it until it had already begun happening; it sounded like part of the set, because it is part of the set. That said, the voiceovers here certainly intend to draw blood, and they do, nowhere more than @ 1:13:30: “I would totally support this anti-genocide campaign, but for self-care reasons I have to keep my career in a place where I’m able to post content from at minimum seven global arts cities per month.” It gets less kind from there. Ouch.
Magda b2b Mike Servito, Honcho Podcast Series 129 (May 17)
Pretty sure she starts it—the name order, for one thing, but also the post-punky thunk of it (cf. her Groove Podcast, covered here). And I'm pretty sure it's him pushing things toward the freaky and jacky, as is his wont. That’s only at the beginning, though—by the time this thing really gets rolling, they’re of one mind. Two old friends trading good stories—it sounds like what it is.
Polygonia, The Lot Radio (May 17)
I put these in chronological order out of simple expediency, but my comparison point is to the Govor below—this is less magnetic but it’s of similar ilk, and offers a similar charge. They’re not much alike rhythmically: Govor makes techno, Polygonia (Lindsey Wang, a Berliner) utilizes (and selects) all kinds of beat patterns. I seldom think about sound design, per se, but it jumps out at you—the flickering clickering percussion, the long-toned endlessly-bowed pseudo-cello that stretches to infinity under the drums and distends everything it undergirds. There’s enough drum turnabout to satisfy even a psytrance fan, though this isn’t that, thank God.
Julia Govor, RA.937 (May 20)
Everything she does is so dialed in. A lot of these selections are Govor’s own, naturally—I’ve said before that she is one of the most crystalline producers around, in or out of techno—and all of it has a delightful but precision-tuned slipperiness. It’s that early-Mills effect, with enough elements placed just off enough from the rest of the rhythm to make the whole thing jump. It’s also deeply trippy: seriously messed up as well as finely finessed, and loaded with surprises. You’ll swear that was an elephant.