BC117 - Five Mixes: The Algorithm Speaks, 1979-2021
Old favorites, new finds, conclusions foregone and otherwise
DJ Shadow; via Brooklyn Bowl
Sometimes it’s not quite the algorithm—it’s an old list. Two of the goodies below came off my list of YouTube “favorites” from over the years—not large, an arbitrary grouping to say the least, but also a good place to go hunting. You can listen to four of these sets on this YouTube playlist.
GrandMaster Flowers, Brooklyn Park Jam (Tape Deck Wreck; 1979; uploaded August 2, 2018)
I favorited this one some time back, for instantly legible reasons—who doesn’t want to hear hip-hop in its DJ-led prime, prior to the Sugar Hill Gang, who came along late in the year and truly broke in 1980? How different is it/was it from disco, anyway? Not especially different, musically speaking—“Hot Shot” slots in early and sets the tone for splashy bionic boogies to come. But there’s also sparer post-James Brown funk, not very in vogue in the big discos of the time, to open things up. Flowers’ beat-matching and transitions are very assured for the time (he quickly corrects for occasional timing muffs), but it’s his expertly handled overlays—of f/x, of percussion, of spoken voices over a track’s breakdown—that mark this one out. There’s even an MC horning in to announce the party—not in rhythm or anything, a straight voiceover—for extra period verisimilitude.
DJ Trace & Ryme Tyme, Kool FM 94.5, July 1994 (Hardscore; uploaded there November 13, 2013 and on SoundCloud in 2024)
Two upload dates, yes—Hardscore often waits a decade between uploading a vintage jungle pirate tape to their website and adding it to their SoundCloud account. This came into my purview recently courtesy of the latter, when someone else re-upped it. It’s ’94 all the way, the pads wafting skyward, the ragga vocal samples retaining their menace and thrill. The drums are minimalist and tricky, the atmosphere starry, the future long and bountiful, the sound utterly time-bound, the bloom intact.
DJ DRC, Audio Picasso (Jim Hopkins Remaster) (ninetiesDJarchives, rec. 1998/uploaded March 30, 2019)
HearThisAt (Hopkins remaster)
Mixcloud (The World Needs More Music, uploaded 2019)
YouTube, above (HD Mixtapes, uploaded 2023)
The S.F. Disco Preservation Society fed this one to me immediately after I first took in another Jim Hopkins remaster: DJ Solar’s Sunset Boat Party 1997, whose tech-heavy sheen, undulant playfulness, and yacht-readiness was just what the doctor ordered that minute and this moment. It was also not the only available variation on this mix, so I’ve been careful to note the sources of the others I have linked to here.
DJ DRC was a hugely popular DJ in the U.S. scene during the late nineties. I saw her a few times—first, I think, in 1994 at a Minneapolis party. She sold a lot of mixtapes; I certainly heard a lot of them in cars. The phrase “acid trance” often figured closely to her name. “Acid” implied 303-led techno and house, not a more general kind of psychedelia. What DRC played wasn’t psytrance, per se—although some of it was in that wheelhouse and could credibly be played by a psytrance DJ of the time, that wasn’t the angle DRC played it from. She was after something less cosmic, a promised-and-delivered stomping good time.
Such was her status around 1998, when this particular title came out. I claim no special expertise about Audio Picasso as a listener prior to now—though I note that the J-card looks familiar enough, the music has a similar air, and that when it got fed to me it play-count was nearing five hundred, popular for this sort of thing. Figure that this one lived in a lot of cars—its road-ready, night-out speed (143 BPM, per the play page) crisscrosses techno, darker house, electro, and drum & bass, all of which show up, often in notably plus-or-minus their home speed. From DJ Dan to Sandra Collins to Rotterdam Termination Source to Freaky Chakra is quite a journey. But “acid trance” remains the vibe—futurism spiked with danger. That admixture grew toxic; this music mostly hasn’t.
DJ Shadow, Boiler Room London DJ Set (June 1, 2012)
Not long after the release of Endtroducing, in the spring of 1997, DJ Shadow went on tour and made a handful of in-store appearances, including the one I went to at Let It Be Records, then on Tenth Street and Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. The deal with the in-stores was that Shadow would make a DJ mix out of records fans/customers brought in, so I decided to try and stump him with a quarter-bin dud, Hot Ice’s Stone Disco—studio anonyms cut Rolling Stones songs with ca-razy disco arrangements—and when his assistant handed it to him mid-set, Shadow declined to even place it on the turntable, precisely what my selection deserved, a tribute to his good taste.
In some ways, the idea of a DJ so good he could take whatever you handed him and work it in somehow was similar to the nonce’s idea of what a club DJ does—a human jukebox with Spotify ready to go—as well as a sharp, anything-can-happen gambit. DJ Shadow’s recordings and sets are fraught with the latter element—you expect long dramatic pauses, empty spaces filled with vinyl-crackled atmosphere and scratched-in ruptures as much as you do hard rhythms and cut-up drums.
This Boiler Room appearance is in the long dramatic pauses camp, pretty much the whole way. “This is not meant to be a floor-rockin’ contemporary set, right?” Shadow tells the crowd up top. This, he explains, is a cut-up of the source material from his newest album, The Less You Know, the Better. “I wanted to take it back to my essence of DJing”—storytelling, basically. Which in this case means a long build-up that eventually cascades into lightning-quick appearances of an array of unknown dirt-rock records with good breaks on them. The precipitating blow: a back-and-forth roundelay with side one of Live-Evil. Bless us all, everyone.
Titonton Duvanté, Distant Future 007 (March 9, 2021)
As chance would have it, this selection begins and ends with the items from my Favorites list—the oldest and the newest, fancy that. Titonton Duvanté has been a Midwest stalwart since the nineties, a Detroit disciple who seems to follow no one’s path but his own as a DJ. This set was a livestream for Intellephunk’s answer to COVID, a series dubbed Distant Future, featuring some of the promoter’s favorites. The sets I caught—not many—were more in the listening vein than the harder-pumping style you often find at Intellephunk’s parties. This is an elegant example of that tendency. Indeed, when Duvanté closed out the Communion season a few years back, he pumped from the word go, though he was still plenty arty. This set reverses those polarities a bit. It takes a while to get going, and it’s arty in ways that don’t always get a party going, but keep the listener hooked. Set and setting, every time.