BC091 - Five Mixes: Summer 2024
Mimimal, maximal, and everything between, plus an envoi to John Corbett’s ‘Vinyl Freak’
deep creep, via The Lot Radio
“As advertised, I am an equal opportunity ear-filler,” John Corbett writes in Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017):
Give me music via LP, single, shellac, cylinder, cassette, reel-to-reel, DAT, radio, boom box, iPod, or mp3. I refuse no medium. Preferential treatment is awarded to hearing music in live performance, without mediation. As far as formats go, I have my playback hierarchy, but I am a freak, not a snob. Audiophilic concerns are always secondary; the focus for me is on obtaining the content. I want music any way I can get it.
Corbett’s words obviously sing to me, and I imagine to a lot of you reading this. Vinyl Freak is a longtime companion; I’d set it askew of the rest of my books, which I then organized without it. I recently came across it again and it’s full of stuff like this—passionate envois to the listening life that somehow manage not to grandstand.
Corbett’s entries are not the usual jazz canon items, though there are titles by titans. Instead, Vinyl Freak is about records that were not, at the time of writing, available via CD reissue, despite the boom of the latter during the nineties. The selections go afield of jazz—see entries on Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Double-7 (Black Heart, 1974) and the Residents’ Play the Beatles 7-inch—but that’s Corbett’s locus. Charlie Parker, for example, is represented by a quartet of acetate recordings of radio recordings, complete with homemade, collaged-with-tape cover art, from a notorious bootlegger. There is much from various Sun Ra personnel.
Small press titles like these were the lifeblood of small improvisational and compositional scenes at the time vinyl was beginning to shrink away, and Corbett makes every encounter fresh. I did not realize until I re-accessed it just how much Vinyl Freak serves as a model for what I do here, but it is one, and I’m happy to acknowledge it.
You can hear all five of these sets on this SoundCloud playlist.
JAK, SpkrBox Memorial Day 2024 (Minimal Detroit; uploaded June 19)
Minimalism is a sub-theme this time out, signaled by this podcast series’ name, same as the party the set comes from, which took place during Movement weekend. But this two-hour showcase seems full-bodied, not lithe or emaciated, and it makes a difference—unlike the deep creep set below, this one feels like prime time, even as its minimalistic aspects are clearly recognizable. Which also makes it very Detroit—not just the locale, the sensibility, though JAK himself is from Portland, Oregon.
Tony Humphries, Kiss FM NYC Summer of 1984 (Manny’z Tapez; uploaded July 10)
Hip-hop is coming into view as both the leading edge of dance music and as a potential breakaway, the cult disco that’s kept the underground afloat while (cough, ahem) Disco Died (ahem, cough) signifies like the house music it’s on the way to becoming, electro is everywhere, and this is as apt a snapshot of my favorite year as you could ask. I also love the way this one is shaped—it has an honest-to-goodness ending, and no, it doesn’t finish on the year’s biggest hit the way it looks like it’s going to. In fact, the on-beat cut from the year’s biggest hit into the real finisher, with its echoed hard stop, is a small act of genius.
deep creep, pi pi pi (The Lot Radio, August 13)
Two hours of minimalism that unfolds like an epic; kicks off with a dub-techno feel and then keeps expanding and/or contracting, always fetching and occasionally rapturous; a few times a tune inched in that was so distracting I nearly dropped the lighter or the mouse, whichever I was holding at the time. Gradually, it expands, the way minimalism eventually has to lest it disappear completely. No chance of that; this one’s definitive.
Small Crab, Daisychain 343 (August 13)
This Dubliner’s set for the now-venerable weekly podcast carries the hashtag #Bass Music. That applies, but what leaps out, and stays in the memory, is its vast, mouthwatering array of percussion. It’s as minimal in its way as JAK or deep creep, but it’s also a lot more future-forward. Some of these tracks would have been thinkable in the nineties or early 2000s, but this set wouldn’t have been—we’ve seen too much production savvy and a lot of that is embedded here. Small Crab’s recent contribution to the Untitled 909 Podcast is currently in my queue.
Bruce Tantum, Summer Mix 2024 (August 13)
I’ve written about Bruce here before—a valued colleague as a writer and dancer alike when I was in New York, one of the great nightlife people I know, and also a very sharp and solid selector. I invariably like his sets, too—the stuff I know tends to be in the minority and also ace. Here, I said a charged hello to “Disco Cubizm (Daft Punk Mix)” and ”House Nation” both before I heard them in situ. Tantum makes them feel like parts of a whole—not easy to do with obvious classics like those.