BC114 - Five Mixes: Ben UFO’s first decade, 2008-15

Portrait of the DJ as a young man

Ben UFO, 2013, via XLR8R

I’ve been listening to Ben UFO’s mixes pretty much since they began appearing online, so I’m decently versed in them. And still I’m daunted—his MixesDB page lists over 300 sets, nearly as many as the page for the Hessle Audio show on Rinse FM. That said, it wasn’t hard to pick these five—or more. A few years back, looking back at the 2010s through the lens of 20 mixes for Mixmag, I wrote this, about LWE Podcast 115 (Mixcloud; March 2012):

A “20 Ben UFO mixes of the decade” list would not have been difficult to conjure. Hessle Audio, which he’d co-founded in 2007, was a key label in UK dubstep’s glorious late-’00s experimental phase, and as he started playing across the board, genre-wise, like a lot of his peers, he carried that try-anything sensibility into the 2010s. He’s the ultimate DJ’s DJ, seldom playing the same thing twice, consistently making connections across time and genre that seemed intuitive only after he’d done it. This set for the late, great Chicago dance site Little White Earbuds is pointillist, minimalist techno, with enough bass weight to shudder a boat, offering the eager, refined Ben UFO sensibility on a silver platter.

That’s basically still true.