BC100 – Five Mixes: September-October 2024

Drum & bass, creeping minimalism, modern shoegaze, and a five-hour masterclass from No Way Back

Jeffrey Sfire, via NTS Radio

I’ve contributed to plenty of 100th-issue extravaganzas, but the backlog (and delays) demand forward motion, which suits the aims of this venture just fine. Not as forward looking as Kieran Press-Reynolds argues people like me are missing in a superb polemic for Resident Advisor. Naturally, I read it two months after it appeared—rim-shot! Nothing below is anywhere near the edge he describes so well—it’s more in the mold of the old guard he’s disinterested in. I’m not on most of the social channels he cites. I don’t know any of the music he mentions. I’m old and comfortable with it. That aside, his passion is convincing, and I am learning things here and there through his Spotify account. You don’t have to be invested, though; it’s worth reading, period.

You can listen to the five sets below on this SoundCloud playlist.

Mike Servito x Jeffrey Sfire, The Bunker Podcast 233 (rec. May 27, uploaded October 15)

No bells and whistles for 100 issues, then, but this should suffice—it’s five hours long, for a start, and it’s also got a great backstory. To wit, the pairing took place in Detroit at the No Way Back party; it was scheduled for two hours but was going so well that the venue management let things keep going. “It just kept getting better and better,” BMG writes on the SC page. “The crowd was totally locked in, the feeling was ecstatic, it was truly a beautiful moment.” Right at the two-hour mark, you can hear just what he means—they were on a roll, and you could sense that they were only just beginning to get comfortable, that they were ready to really pull some shit out.

By that point they already had, though I certainly was not expecting “C’mon and Get My Love.” Hits like that one and, much later in the set, “Respect” I’m guessing came from Sfire’s arsenal, just because I had never imagined Servito playing them at No Way Back. But then again, I never imagined anyone playing them at No Way Back until now, so carpe diem. Whoever chose them, they open things up the set’s range considerably. Terra firma is vintage Chicago house, acid and not-acid but mostly the former, all of it just obscure enough to not have been overplayed lo these many years, some of it un-obscure enough for me to have known it already, e.g. “A Path.” I’ve played it many times—during this past bad week, it’s been my go-to, all hours, from whatever point I left off—and while the laziness that accompanies bad times have helped keep it in rotation, the music did that by itself too. It’s a masterclass, easily my set of the year thus far.

agraybé, Great Beyond 2024—Kajunga World (Franklin, Minnesota, rec. June 27, uploaded September)

I hadn’t planned on hearing this one at all. “Minimal” just about covers it, but there’s more of an intentional menace going on. It jumps around determinedly between tempos and styles but is all of the same mood, like cloud formations from an airplane seat. It seeped out of the speakers one very late and loaded night, one tab open among many, and it took a while to register that it wasn’t what I’d been playing previously. But it was so playful and subtle and liquefied that ending it would have been criminal—particularly after a half-hour in. Then, a week later, the same thing happened again! So, this is hereby designated my 3 a.m. coming-home set, or thereabouts.

dBridge, The Sound of: Exit Records (DJ Mag; September 4)

Obviously, you expect a mix from this DJ and this label to showcase drum & bass, and for the most part, it does. But that’s not all it does, which you’d also expect, as dBridge explains in the accompanying Q&A, linked above: “We gave people the belief that drum & bass can be many other things, and it set off a whole load of new experimentation.” That basic groove gets (time)stretched into new patterns all over these 95 minutes, in ways that ingratiate and engross. It’s not a potted history of the genre—more like a map of a back alley with more scenery going on than the main stem.

[no DJ], NTS Guide to: Shoegaze 2k24 (NTS Radio; September 12)

I’m sure somebody was behind this, it stands to reason that the hour didn’t program itself or that, LOL, AI did it for them; hell, maybe it did, since there are audible pauses between some selections, however brief. Either way, this is the intro that I, and maybe you, have been looking for. That doesn’t mean it’s the best one imaginable, just that it’s handy and far-reaching enough to seem broadly useful. For one thing, that reach seems right insofar as “shoegaze” could be bent as many ways as a guitar could be manipulated; then or now, few of the bands in the style could touch My Bloody Valentine at their most third-eye grandiose, and a few bands here are more bubblegum-skree a la the Jesus and Mary Chain, which seems sufficiently different to me. Anyway, tomayto, tomahto. Also recommended if you like this one: the October 30 episode of my old friend DJ Nstop’s long-running Seattle indie-pop show, Cycles Per Second, on Hollow Earth Radio (Mixcloud).

Critter, Daisychain 352 (October 17)

No real theme here, just an hour of buttery grooves from a Toronto DJ who co-promotes the Pucker Up! party there. The grooves I’d shorthand as tech-house on the minimal side, very early-2000s, particularly the “Ring the Alarm” version, which turns Tenor Saw’s buzzing exhortation into the final scene of 2001.