There’s no grand aim here: My listening can be peripatetic—occasional, not systematic—at the best of times, but themes emerge, and one of them lately has been, Oh yeah, that’s local. That adds up. This isn’t an overview or a survey; it’s not representative, per se. Just sets that have kept my attention, and I bet yours. A lot of good DJs here, you know?
You can hear four of these sets on this SoundCloud playlist (which also contains a link to the fifth).
Alexis Rose, Carbon Sound (April 17)
Listening to the Minneapolis DJ Alexis Rose over the past couple of years, one thing kept coming to mind: She must have grown up on house music. When I interviewed her this summer—more on that at a soon-enough date—she told me the opposite: House music is something she came to fairly recently. But playing this mix again makes me forgive myself for thinking it. It’s soulful more than funky—a few lyrics explicitly say so. Rose’s ear gravitates toward classic seventies lushness, though she also likes things a little twee, meaning that it sometimes skirts Naked Music terrain. But sometimes, you’re in the mood for a vibes solo.
Private Guy, Kajunga Program SE.8, EP.10 (June 1)
Wonky and charming, misty and expansive, this lo-fi but lush hour is an essay in buried high-eighties aesthetics—you can see the slicked-back hair, but the Polaroid has faded. Cymbals crumble around the edges; string stabs get truncated before they leave the gate; the bass lines roll; the filters get a judicious little workout. “Underground & Black” makes a welcome appearance two-thirds of the way through, one of the few records here with legible words, but it’s not really a mission statement—more of a rare feet-on-ground moment.
Ternion Sound, SWU.FM (Bristol; June 24)
As was recently covered in the Minnesota Star Tribune—my friends at Racket have been making fun of its recent name change, from “Minneapolis” to the whole state—the biggest local electronic music festival is Infrasound, coming in September, which showcases bass music (nebulous term but it gets the job done). It’s where the trio Ternion Sound formed nine years ago. I haven’t been; it’s not quite my scene. But I still have lingering affection for dubstep, and after all this time there’s a lot of variations out there.
Each time I’ve caught Ternion Sound, both at Communion, has been head-turning—they found (and made) the good stuff and presented it with a collective gift for pacing—and I wolfed down this two-hour radio set, their second of a residency for a Bristol offshoot of the London Rinse FM, with relish. It shifts gears frequently and elegantly; there’s light and shadow as well as bass galore. (Their IG page shows the full, tiny-printed, 103-song tracklist.) Their ears are geared to genuinely creative tracks. It’s heavily psychedelic; a lot of it hits as dub, rather than simply dubstep. And it’s often arresting—especially when the wubs carry the tune, which is sometimes queasy as well as cute, a fine line in this realm. They carry it all the way off, though. I know Ternion Sound has done another SWU show since then. It’s queued. But there’s a lot to absorb on this one and I like going back to it.
TML, RND 110 (Research & Development Mix Series; July 12)
TML is one of the local DJs I can rely upon not to repeat pretty much anything from set to set. For example, I caught him back in February at 7th Street Entry, a reunion of Too Much Love, the party the DJ, aka Peter Lansky, put on every week at First Avenue for eight years from the mid-2000s to mid-2010s. That was slow-rolling and endlessly cresting, a sustained mood, a love offering to the faithful. This one is scragglier and scratchier, black-and-white to the February set’s Technicolor, and as it plays though the rhythms gradually begin to subdivide. Breakbeats abound in the second half, but it doesn’t become a breaks set, per se—it just fills out that sharp monochrome picture more handsomely.
Jen-E, Home Series (Flyover Sound; August 14)
This Minneapolis favorite—she’s had a longstanding weeknight residency at Mortimer’s—has, whenever I’ve caught her, played with a limber friskiness that seemed tailored to a loud and ready clientele. Her entry in the Flyover Sound series—a substantive archive of good Twin Cities talent, including some of the DJs above—starts relatively subdued but sheds its shell quickly enough. I’d always heard Jen-E as playing more house than techno—though she always plays plenty of both—but this leans more in the latter direction. It also romps—it’s not made for stroking your chin but for working off the effects of that last trip to the john.