BC098 - Five Mixes: September 2024

Sets that work the air like diamond cutters

Kampire, via NTS Radio

I know, it’s been a minute. There’s a manuscript to write, a job to attend to, plenty else. Without further ado, you can hear all five sets below on this SoundCloud playlist.

jaql, Daisychain 346 (September 3)

Drum & bass the way I tend to like it—on the even slightly arty side, the rolling breaks abundant and thoroughly worked. There’s a lot of stuff here you might class as wonky, or bass music, or maybe half-time, is that right? In any event, this is a set made with someone with a good level of control over her materials, or at least the appearance thereof—good enough. Its seeming weightlessness is what stays with me; by the end, the beats seem to have evaporated, but the rhythms are inviolable.

Hekt, Bleep Mix 286 (September 4)

Goodness, am I glad I stayed with this one, because the beginning made me wonder. It’s heavily cut up sound art, determinedly abstract but with a pulsating groove that took a good long time to arrive. Too much of that kind of thing can be deadly. And I don’t believe in skipping around on a mix unless I’ve already played it through once.[i] Anyway, this starts out really shard-like, jagged, then makes its way to the infernally cute within two segues. This is made to sound perfectly natural, just as the big smiley track is replaced by a curio that mocks “James Brown Is Dead” rather deliciously. Left turns galore; no two cuts remotely alike, but every follow-through works. It’s frequently gorgeous—glowingly minimal in much of the first half, full of candy-colored latticework. The second half moves through dubstep, footwork, and hyperpop with nary a backward glance. Primary themes: fucked sonics and subwoofer damage, plus the usual soupçon of trance builds that the young like to mock us with.

Bennet, Multisexual Mix 19 (September 11)

I hesitated about this one around the middle—it started out vertiginously enough but was becoming pretty pro forma tribal—a hot sound, I realize, but not always a shrewd one. But the hissing-vent noises over pseudo-“Voodoo Child” grooves do have their overblown black-lace charm, and soon after, about the halfway point, Bennet noticeably nudges the BPM up. Good call—this stuff travels better faster. And that mid-point aside, the groove here is juicy and varied—tribal chants, slow-winding tech-house, swirling disco patterns, bass lines working the air like diamond cutters.

Ben Klock, Boiler Room x Glitch Festival 2024 (September 12; rec. August 15, Malta)

I’ll take Ben Klock just throwing together an hour of whatever for a corporate gig over a whole lot of things. Not that I have a line on his thinking, of course, but I have a hunch—this is more Whitman’s Sampler than smooth-line rendering. The final third or so does proceed in a more linear way, rest assured, techno fans.

Kampire, NTS Radio (September 13)

Eighteen minutes into this Kampala dynamo’s Mixmag set, I wrote this down: “Where has this DJ been all my life?” Five plays later, I no longer recall quite what I was talking about there—the set ran out for me fairly quickly. This one keeps on bubbling, maybe because it simmers more than it boils over—the Mixmag does a lot of the latter. In any event, listening to Kampire is an education all the way around—almost everything from the above sets gathered here could conceivably make its way into one of hers without a batted eyelash. Little of it has the buoyancy of the bass patterns she goes for, though.