BC118 - Five Mixes: February-March 2025
The ultimate happy hardcore introduction—yes, really—and more
Paula Tape, via Mixmag
This grouping of sets, and the next, have been ready for a minute, but the impending book (more here) takes up ever more time, so thanks for bearing with it. I was feeling down about being behind, I admit—and then, nine years after it ran, I came across Sam Backer’s Afropop Worldwide listicle of classic pirate-radio DJ sets. It names eight, including a ringer, and of them I've heard maybe two. The sea is endless.
You can hear all five sets on this SoundCloud playlist.
Pearsall, There & Back 012: December, Early Happy Hardcore 1993-1995 (Sonic Rampage, February 9)
This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read this newsletter consistently—I’ve written here before about liking happy hardcore before it became boingy and codified (cf. BC017). Well, this DJ, whom I’ve long admired, writes about it better on his website, linked above. “What differences do you hear?” Pearsall asks about the difference between happy hardcore and his usual bailiwick, drum & bass: “The earlier stuff features breakbeats more prominently, the basslines are a bit funkier, and the sound is more connected to the early 90’s breakbeat sound, whereas once you get a few years down the line, the 4/4 kick drum has become the dominant element and the general sound is more akin to hyper-speed pop music melded with Dutch gabba than the original rave sound.”
Even better, Pearsall has selected and mixed the single best introduction to the style I’ve heard, not least because it slots into such a circumscribed area. He doesn’t mix it like a happycore jock, either, which is to say all climaxes, not much variation. Or is that just the records getting louder and stompier and staler? Either way, this set has a ruminative side, or at least sections where the keyboard riffs don’t triumphantly hammer. When they do, it’s cartoon Valhalla, not overdone gloop. Secret: keeping the soul-diva vocal samples intact from D&B even as the ragga-ruff ones were cut or backgrounded.
Ben Sims, Run It Red 119 (NTS Radio, February 23)
Le Motel, Hessle Audio: Recorded live at Horst (Rinse FM, March 3)
These two deserve to be considered together. They’re both two-hour techno sets for London radio stations—well, the second of them originated as part of a live set, but so do many of them—and they both create their own weather. With some DJs, it can feel a little like cheating. The British techno DJ Ben Sims is always good, always worth hearing, so it’s a typically more a matter of when I tune in, not if he’s going to deliver. He cuts his tunes together with real personality—gregarious, ready to lead and be led—that applies as well to his occasional voiceovers (there are also shout-outs from other techno heavy hitters: DVS1, Kevin Saunderson). It clanks and it growls but it’s also, adamantly, a party. Le Motel’s set was part of a 24-hour event in Brussels put together by Ben UFO, who then excerpted it for the two-hour Hessle Audio show. It displays the same kind of hurtling energy as Ben Sims, but Le Motel cuts it with a surprising amount of speed garage—another sound du jour I keep noticing coming back into audio earshot a lot of late.
Paula Tape, The Cover Mix (Mixmag, March 3)
This newsletter began with a pronounced wariness toward sets exclusively of material produced and/or remixed by the DJ/s themselves. By now, I think I was overreacting to someone else’s overreaction in the opposite direction. Anyway, I’ve made too many exceptions within this space alone for that to hold much ground now. I’ve played this one, by a Chilean DJ now in Milan, with pleasure many times, always wondering why its Italo take on late-eighties New York, and/or the other way around, its keyboard riffs both moody and prancing, the stalking left-handed keyboard-bass the ultimate in strutting fluff, all held together so well. Duh.
RP Boo & Sherelle, At Dekmantel Ten (rec. August 2024, uploaded March 10)
I threw this on pretty much immediately on sight on name power alone, and then remembered what people, including myself, don’t mention enough about footwork: it’s fucking annoying. But name power isn’t what kept me hooked—it was that this set made that needling factor into a positive, how it made the annoying alluring. That’s what drew me in, what cinched it: The blithering percussion and stuck-on-repeat samples are so heavy-going that I couldn’t not pay attention, so I zeroed in and grew hypnotized, not to mention delighted over and over again. I’d say this twosome is playing clearly in the lane of the first-billed, except that would shortchange Sherelle’s deep knowledge and always active sense of mischief. Something about the back-to-back seems to inspire selectors to reach for the most minimalist and freakiest stuff they have. There are many reasons I wish Greg Tate were still around, and this is yet another. What a fucking riot.