BC104 - A pre-Christmas roundup
Fifteen goodies sourced this fall, plus some in-house announcements
Dalston Superstore images via DJ Mag; Photo credits L-R: Courteney Frisby, Jimi Herrtage
So: I have not been keeping up with mixes in any meaningful way for a minute. That will change—in fact, it already has begun to. But mixes alone won’t be this space’s only priority going forward. If anything, it may become a co-priority. Some of that has to do with the way I’ve been apportioning my time—namely, a music-film roundup to be published in the near future, as well as other sorts of listening and watching that have taken priority in recent weeks, not to mention a book that I’ve fully, at last, gotten to grips with. What this means is that I’ll be doing occasional (maybe frequent) posts about other media than just mixes. Mostly those will be for paying subscribers.
There is also my day job, which does not allow for any listening at all, and which has gotten more intense of late—the holidays do that in retail. Also, the election had the chilling effect on me that it had on a lot of people. It’s not even that I didn’t listen—it’s that I didn’t write, at least not here. And I had a whole bunch of picks made—what follows began originally as four separate Five Mixes drafts. Out of them, a whopping two had blurb drafts, and even those were festooned with “TK”s. So here are the survivors all at once, a bumper crop I was too fogged up to devote myself to in full. It’s going to be a lot like the NTS Thanksgiving round-up from last year, in other words. (All are from 2024 unless otherwise noted.)
As for BC’s future with this host—after seeing this, that question is very much up in the air.
Anyway, let’s begin. You can hear all but one of these sets on this SoundCloud playlist, in the order presented below; the playlist also contains a link to the Mixcloud offering at the end.
In late September, the British author and DJ Joe Muggs published a guide to UK ampiano for Sound of Life, and I earmarked some of its suggested DJ mixes. (I even wrote a cute Brit-mag subhead: “A teeming style, guided by an expert—our verdict!”) Between them, these three demonstrate a wide and tantalizing range. Taylah Elaine’s Boiler Room Festival Amsterdam: Rap Fantasy (January 25, 2023) (above; SoundCloud) was/is a stellar introduction, not least due to the DJ interspersing shameless crowd-pleasers (“Hot in Herre” early, “Better Off Alone” late) with genre classics, showing, as Muggs puts it, “how amapiano and other Afro-house styles glue together every other style under the sun.” His most recent recommendation, See No Evil’s SWU.FM (August 11), is a two-hour seething beast, redolent of the heavier stuff on the station as well as the lither charms of Elaine’s Boiler Room, and comes complete with a shout out to “the head-nodders and the neck-snappers out there.” Scriptonyte’s Ampiano Marathon (Mode London; May 31) (SoundCloud, YouTube) comes from a day of programming and leans toward a dusty-jazzy ambience that connects to this owner of both volumes of Headz 2.
Speaking of Afro-diasporic dance music, a few weeks back I got a nice note from Gilb’R about BC101—he passed along an old Chateau Flight track featuring Diblo Dibala, which I’d been unaware of. He also linked me to his Rinse France mixes, and since I’d wanted to focus on that station anyway, I decided to take it from there. His Versatile—Episode 1 (November 11), above, hit the spot in pretty much the way I hoped: good, EQ-heavy, very French house with a lot of musical variation and a cameo by “Spastik” that’s hilarious because it’s perfect. Hewan Aman’s Dub Delights XIV (November 7) connects the dots between the foggy dub techno of yore and the emergent sound that occupies the same beats but applies snorkel-bass post-psytrance FX. And The Bass Society invite Noia (November 10) isn’t just two hours, it’s two and a half hours, because more is more: vintage speed garage, oddly elegant breakcore, wormhole techno, stab-pattern rave throwbacks, the works. I’ve played Whitney Weiss with G I N A’s It’s Whitney, Bitch (September 7), above, a lot, trying to get to a fuller insight to how it works or why. I’ve given up—it’s just two unfailingly entertaining hours, courtesy of an American in Paris and an emergent Philadelphian; romps top to bottom, genuinely wide array. Soyoon b2b Belaria’s Pitchfork Music Festival Paris 2024 (November 4) leans way more toward techno, but its peaks have a Gothy cast to them that matches it well with the Weiss/G I N A show.
Speaking of live sets, I’ve spotlighted Ben UFO before and will again, and speaking of subs, Hessle Audio (10 Years of Sinai Soundsystem at Trinity Centre) (Rinse FM, November 4), above, is a surprising low-end workout—you don’t often hear this guy just go for it the way he does for the first quarter. It peaks early, with “Mood Swings,” but that doesn’t mean it quits, even when it gets more thinky—indeed, the beats edge up on ampiano by the end. Rachael’s set from Jaleo Real 2024 (upl. September 9) has the alluring lo-fi feel any Ben UFO fan would recognize, only the vantage is vintage rave—another of those play-a-lot-and-feel-no-pain mixes. Gabs Leyton’s Live at Paloma Bar (Cologne, rec. November 11/upl. November 28) is, forewarning, four and a half hours long; it is also a clinic, from vintage disco to early house sampling it to modern tracks referencing it that are EQ’ed to heavenly fuck.
From mixes played for crowds to mixes made for series: Michelle Manetti’s 15 Years of Dalston Superstore (September 12), above, was commissioned to accompany a DJ Mag feature by Kelly Doherty on the East London queer party; from conspiratorial bathroom dialogue and vampy synth-house to liquefied neo-trance, it hits plenty of staples without once veering, huzzah, into hard house. My friend Andi’s RND 119 (November 17) does a similar traversing of EBM and darkwave that’s both decadent and lively. And my colleague Chanel Kadir’s always reliable Untitled 909 Podcast recently offered up an hour from Kiara Scuro (November 26) that’s consistently minimal, bent, pointy, discoid, and alluring.
And finally: Wet’s Gardens of Chill #1—Japanese Garden (November 14) (Mixcloud) came in over the transom, via a Bluesky post by John Darnielle. I was halfway through it when I realized what I was hearing—a straightforward nineties downtempo set of CD length (touché), from a Kraków DJ who specializes in, per bio, “minimal, deep house, drum n’ bass,” and has posted, let’s see, twenty sets over the past month alone. In fact, let’s be formal—by day three, this set’s stated Mixcloud stats were: 1st in abstract hip-hop and lofi hip-hop (separate categories); 2nd in trip hop; 9th in chillout; 10th in lounge music. Now, you and I can argue till the cows come home about the niggling aspects of these finely separated things, but still: that’s a hell of a consensus, and he earns it.