BC101 - Five Mixes: October-November 2024
Catching up after the November disaster
Lena Willikens, via Crack Magazine
Recently, I’ve been thinking of the “covert right-wing” members of my little world with even more disgust than usual—to say nothing of the highly dubious cultural dynamics of what they play vs. what they believe. If that makes you, or somebody you know, feel called out, good.
You can hear the first four sets on this SoundCloud playlist, which also includes a link to the fifth.
BMG, IT.podcast.s13e04: No Way Back 2024 (Tangent Gallery, Detroit; rec. May 26, uploaded November 3)
Escape is our theme this time out. Psychedelia is the through-line of the first three selections, and all quite differently so. This one broadcasts its intentions by opening with a snippet of “Maggot Brain” and building up to tweeter-shattering intensity within five minutes. BMG just keeps bringing out the guns from there—it’s epic in its entirety, even if the parts seem less so as they pass, a steadily ramping collection of giddy peaks by someone who clearly loves what he’s doing.
Upsammy, Polifonic Festival Puglia 2024 - Stone Stage (Italy; rec. July 26, uploaded November 6)
This is the trippiest of these sets by far—for some reason, I first heard it as a species of psytrance, except it’s really not. It’s not festooned with zigzagging thousand-mile-a-second 303s, for starters. Instead, that kind of frippery tends to be minimalist and contained. But the drums have the head-down tunneling-into-earth feeling of that music, only regimented rather than exploratory. It’s deeply hypnotic, something it sustains at a dauting pitch through its entire running time.
Lena Willikens, Forge 02 (Forge.FM; October 17)
I recently turned a friend onto Willikens’ Dekmantel Podcast 070 (May 16, 2016; Discogs) over a jay, and it reminded me just how up-front she can be—boom, the mood is set and will sustain, with all kinds of wild variation. She’s my favorite psychedelic-techno DJ and has been for a while. This one is a touch more user-friendly—there’s a more straightforward impishness than her usual, a blurry playfulness that hits like a tonic after the pressures and panic of recent weeks. That said, labeling it #trance is clearly intended humorously.
Edna Martinez, Champeta: Diblo Dibala Special (NTS Radio, November 5)
Sometimes you want to sink into the past. This is the set that I played the Wednesday after D-Day, the one that put me back into myself. My own relationship to Diblo Dibala’s music came primarily, of course, through Robert Christgau’s recommendations; I was the sixteen-year-old nerd in my state (my radar tells me there was about one per) who owned Extra Ball, the 1991 Loketo album Christgau named his fifth-favorite of the year. (Nevermind was thirteenth. He amended it to second in his nineties book.) Later I picked up on Kanda Bongo Man and acquired Diblo’s earlier albums: the solo Super Soukous (1989) and Loketo’s Soukous Trouble (1990). The title track of the latter remains one of my absolute favorite recordings, a record as joyous and intense as anything you can name, Dibala’s insanely loopy guitar its irresistible core.
Dibala plays so fluidly and piercingly he can make Franco seem rustic. (Yes, I know: Franco’s rusticity was essential his genius.) You could hear sweat flying off Diblo’s guitar, but there’s little sense of toil. Yet it’s not automatic—it’s simply unbeatable technical command at the controls of music that’s exciting unto itself. Sometimes that could turn me off of increasingly synth-heavy late-eighties African titles, but Dibala played like he was programmed, and that made it exciting (and beautiful). Hi-NRG guitar! Not the first link of that sort I’ve noted, either; I’ve heard eighties soukous and nineties house and techno as kin from go. Martinez doesn’t quite play it that way; this music has its own rhythmic byplay, but what’s most powerful, most immediate about it is that it’s an hour-long font of melody. I didn’t know most of it before, and I’m grateful for the introduction.
Centuries of Sound, 1949 Part One—The 7” Mix (November 13)
And sometimes you want to sink into the past some more. If the Dibala showcase is an hour-long font of melody, this is a near-three-hour font of history. Nineteen forty-nine was the year the 7-inch single came to market—and they weren’t all black by a long shot. “The idea,” James Errington, the man behind the Centuries of Sound project, writes, “was that each genre would have its own colour, with red for pop music, green for country, yellow for children’s records, and a confusion of other shades for jazz, R&B, classical and so on. As should be clear to anyone listening to this mix, the differences between these genres were particularly muddy in 1949, and the idea was soon dropped.”
Were they, though? The DJ undermines his own thesis by playing these far-flung recordings, a great many classics among them, for delicious contrast. I dunno, what do you call “Saturday Night Fish Fry” straight into “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”? Centuries of Sound calls it January. The music is run together with radio bites and speeches, like a newsreel, more or less chronologically; the best of these tend to come from You Bet Your Life, naturally. There's always a point with these things where I question how much I'm enjoying it versus how much I feel the pages turning in a schoolbook, and I guard against the programmatic—such as Truman taking the oath into “Prelude to a Nightmare”; a little on the nose, no?
But mainly, this transmits the American forward motion of the era, increasing amounts of electricity in the air, and the sometimes-tiny sound bites are good for, e.g., bridging parts one and two of “Butcher Pete.” Rock and roll—modernity—is plainly coming into view. The old world, the recent-ish past, is also in earshot. This was a period of early trad-jazz, or Dixieland, revivalism—the fourth volume of That Devilin’ Tune, Allen Lowe’s massive multi-box excavation of recorded jazz through the early fifties and its enormous number of tributaries, features plenty of this stuff—and it’s part of the fabric here, too. But mostly, it’s one freakin’ banger after another: “Mardi Gras in New Orleans”! “Devil’s Jump”! “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”! On it goes, and it ends in June.