BC095 - Five Mixes: July-August 2024
Old acquaintances and algorithmic finds: Plastician, Small Crab, Pearson Sound, and more
Small Crab; image via Four Four
This one’s late for personal reasons—personal injury, to be correct. I now have six stitches in my right thumb thanks to an error of judgment at work. (Never, ever trust a slicer blade.) I also got a big assignment to write about a very long box set, which took up some ear time. Nonetheless, I have a few things planned in the immediate future, starting here. Four out of five of these are DJs I’ve previously written about, albeit not all here—the 2015 Plastician mix I mention below got a mention in a top-ten-mixes thing I was doing every month for Beatport. I wasn’t previously acquainted with Ben Hauke, but he sailed in on the back of something else I was enjoying, so good enough. You can hear all five of these sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
Pearson Sound, The Lot Radio (July 15)
Right, this guy again. The Rinse shows at that link are two hours each, and while that’s a rich body of mixes, this one is only an hour and has its own allure—namely, that it plays more like a concentration of his longer sets than a simple deviation from them. The sensibility is the same—rooted in dub, always danceable—but here it moves without hesitation and doesn’t dwell in any one area for longer than a couple tracks, tops. In a way, that not-lingering helps restore the music’s menace.
Small Crab, Untitled 909 Podcast 191 (August 7)
Tighter and edgier and just as arresting as The Lot Radio set I recently rightly praised, this is another percussion feast, slightly narrower sonically but with an even clearer aim. There’s a swagger to this one I quite like—the sound of a DJ who has figured out who she is and can offer you specific facets of it with seeming ease.
Plastician, Balamii (August 14)
This show is, the DJ explains up top, “something old, something new,” the set he didn’t get to play at a cancelled festival. Nearing the hour mark, he says: “This is a fun tempo to be playing in, I’m not gonna lie.” Then he plays an edit of fucking “Spin That Wheel” and praises his listeners for recognizing it (“Shout out to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack!”). Either you figure that all walls of taste have fallen for good, hurrah, or that this guy is well and truly shameless but also knows what he’s doing. I am definitely biased toward the latter—Plastician is one of the more sheerly fun British DJs around, and his 2015 set of eighties R&B, All the Right Moves, is in my pantheon. This isn’t in that league—that one is full of songs by artists, this one full of tracks by people who were thinking of that night’s floor and also much more nineties—but it sits in its company.
Ben Hauke, Club Cute: Japan Special (Rinse FM; August 19)
Blessed be the algorithm, sometimes—this had been going for a decent while before I realized the source had changed, so I just heard something that sounded good and hung together decently before realizing there was a concept at work. Or, anyway, a focus point: this is an eclectic hour’s worth of tracks from Japan, a radio rather than dance set. Surveys of this sort can be catnip as a writer—you get to talk about something concrete rather than allusive, which is what a DJ set oftentimes is. Do the tracks seem to “say” anything about Japan, in particular? Maybe if you know way more about Japan and its music than I do. What I do notice is a bubbly playful spirit that’s consistent throughout, but—note show name—that seems to be the DJ’s ear at work, not a nation’s music.
Devnull, BTTO Radio (August 25)
Right, this guy again—I’ve written him up twice, for a February 2023 Lot session (when he billed himself with a slash in his surname) that ended up in my year-end top-ten, and more recently this January’s ’92 Special for BTTO Radio. (It stands for Blog to the Old Skool, which hasn’t been active in seven years.) Both of those sets gloried in real rarities, stuff I’m basically in the tank for. This one has a lot of newer tracks in the same vein—I’m in the tank for those, too.