BC111 - Five Mixes: January-February 2025
Suitable escapism five ways, old and new
DJ Solar, via ninetiesDJarchives and the S.F. Disco Preservation Society
After being a little bit afraid of listening to new mixes after the election—they seemed too escapist—I have been listening to them again a little more ardently, specifically because they’re escapist. That includes a lot of items not included below. I recently took a longer look at the pile-up of unfinished drafts in my folder; it numbers well past a dozen now. Most involve older sets of the type you’ve seen me tackle before here. I added some writing to several of them—in seeing them whole, I was able to flesh out specific procedural and critical notes for a few. Escapism though work—not a first around these parts, but seldom has it felt so plainly useful.
You can hear the first four of these sets at this SoundCloud playlist, which also contains a link to the fifth.
Katie Rex, Bound 8-Year Anniversary (The Lot Radio, January 15)
Dungeon techno—yum. Some of the very heavy kicks have that crumbling feel, cave walls giving way crack by small, consequential crack, as dust and/or percussion goes sweeping past your head. It’s dark, but it also transmits the many fun things the dark is good for.
Caribou, RA Live: The Cause, 2024 (Resident Advisor, uploaded January 24)
A “Silent Way” edit is not a terrible place to blast off from, and a rather good one to officially launch into nearly four hours of steadily ascending rapture. It takes a few minutes for the edit to arrive, but it provides the right air, foreshadowing the way the beats and tracks flit about without seeming merely willful. The steadily ascending rapture, as indicated, has some parameters—it’s arty dance music geared toward body much as head, the human touch alive and afoot, as when he audibly pushes the BPM during a beatless oscillation roughly half an hour in. And sometimes it’s just well-chosen old hits given a new dusting, as with the “If You Really Love Me” edit somewhere near 90 minutes, or the baile funk regurgitation of (I think) the Ms. Pac-Man death theme with roughly an hour to go. There and elsewhere, the drums and instrumentation are remarkably clear, the mark of a DJ (and EQ’er) paying attention to communicating as closely as to groove. And lest you take him merely as a smart old guy, he offers just enough from the more squeakily produced and/or sound-designed end of things to make it seem enticing and not just overly cute. Four hours, all used well.
Krystal Klear b2b Kim Turnbull, Rinse FM (January 27)
Picked this one at random—a fruitful day, which not all are; Katie Rex uploaded her set on the 27th as well—based on remembering the first-billed DJ’s name from about fifteen years back; I recalled something vaguely high-pitched and excitable. I didn’t know the second-billed at all. Now I do, and have a new correlative for both, or at least this pairing—dreamy disco edits, paired with vintage speed garage and/or Italo synths, all subject to the same creamy EQ’ing. RIYL: bubble baths.
Robag Wruhme, EG.1011 (Electronic Groove, January 27)
I had my doubts at first; really, more hazy gurgling, even from an old master? Only there’s little of that here and more of something else—something focused and sinister, something that rises to the moment. A lot of it is disruptively bumptious—at times, the bass jumps at you like a kangaroo even as the rest of the track’s ingredients are putatively minimalist. It has teeth, as does the set.
DJ Solar, Sunset Boat Party 1997 (Jim Hopkins Remaster) (ninetiesDJarchives, uploaded February 7)
Another goodie from the S.F. Disco Preservation Society, a.k.a. Jim Hopkins, whose remastered audio of Bay Area sets (and beyond) from the early seventies (cf. BC008), eighties (cf. BC051 and BC108), and nineties (cf. BC057) has been a boon to this space and our ears, not to mention our understanding of lived dance-music history. This one immediately leapt to my eye and ear—the title promised something suitably escapist, and so did the recording date. Sure enough, this is house music redolent of its period, bubbly and hazy in a lazy-bones, nouveau-riche way, riding around the city’s perimeter in a new boat while dressed in long shorts.
You might be tempted to call it tech-house, but at this remove it feels more ingrained as house than as something else. There’s a lot of freaky, crafty digital flittering-about here; to my ear, it’s beginning to find its way toward the incipient minimalism that would take off just a few years hence. But it’s as much state-of-the-art as future-forward, if that distinction makes sense. When someone declaims a blues-classic lyric over quivering synths and bongos, the fit is fetchingly odd, and about as late-nineties as it gets—not just before Play but before “Honey” as well. The mid-set trio of eighties Chicago throwbacks are well timed, well chosen, and well played, though the DJ makes one clam going in that he swiftly recovers from, the only one here. Later in the set, some tracks range closer to the kind of era-specificity reminiscent of a FSUK volume while some get freaky and minimal in an early-Chicago manner.