BC120 - Five Mixes: March 2025
Black is the new orange
Breaka, via Rinse FM
Praises be, SoundCloud has finally updated its fucking interface. I discovered it while listening through this grouping—in fact, I discovered it because I’d accidentally hit refresh, and suddenly the whole thing looked totally different, black border instead of orange, ah well. And I wondered, with great hope—would I have to continue to worry that, if I clicked around within the website while a track played, my selection was going to just suddenly stop playing, and not only that but completely disappear from the screen when I’d go back to the playlist screen, along with two-thirds of the others on it? The answer, a few days later, is still yes. Doesn’t anybody over there know what they’re doing?
You can hear all five of these sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
Nectax, SUNANDBASS Podcast #154 (March 3)
One of the things I love about drum & bass sets from the music’s developmental stage, particularly on the UK pirates, is the eerie, woogly sensation of hearing what seems like four or five records going at once (cf. BC105). You don’t get that very often in contemporary mixes, but there are moments on this one where that rushing vibe comes clear into view. Only moments—the set has a longer, more linear path to run, almost a timeline of the music’s development before techstep’s arrival. All of it has the same jouissance, even when the Fender Rhodes settles in. And at a trim, brisk 51 minutes, it never outstays its welcome.
DJ Fuckoff, Rinse FM (March 7)
The problem with trying to cover DJs is that they’re so prolific and there are so many of them and there is so little time. (It was that way even before I worked a job where I basically cannot listen to music.) It’s easy enough to put someone in a particular lane based on one set or show, even two. That’s what I’d been unconsciously doing with DJ Fuckoff—historically unbound, tuned ear, but manic in essence—until I played this set, which is not manic at all. The tempo varies—starts slowly, gains speed, decelerates—and its tones tend to be grainy rather than bright. Lots of 303 to be heard throughout, as well. Thus, another lane I can file her into mentally—she’s a hell of a good opening DJ, too.
Lyra Pramuk, RA.979 (Resident Advisor, March 9)
Art electronica heard through a thin film of noise, all over the shop rhythmically, tones and textures to the front—the turn-of-the-2000s wave of laptop fritz comes to mind, but here it builds rather than petering off into indulgence. When “Jupiter Jazz” enters it too becomes de-centered and pebbly. It’s hugely ambitious, compacting dozens of selections into “a blast of sound collagery,” as Michael McKinney puts it. The last five minutes put the words “shattering climax” into relief—it’s a climax that sounds like it’s shattering before our ears.
Katie Rex, Bound001 (March 12)
A good techno set will make its own warehouse in your mind. A really good one will make you long for one to be in along with a few hundred (or thousand) true believers. On a recent work morning, I put it on while working on book stuff for an hour—the music helped it sail through—but when I got home after wanting to blindly kill everybody in my path for reasons too stupid and short-lived to enumerate (I was extra nice to the customers today—it always helps), this first edition of a new series made me want to push my head into a speaker case and hug people. Not the first time I’ve heard one of Rex’s sets and thought it definitive, probably not the last.
Breaka, Rinse FM (March 20)
This edition’s surprise—I hadn’t heard of him until my DJ friend RheAnnon, late of Denver and now in Minneapolis, posted this show. As his moniker indicates, breaks proliferate, though they’re not the music’s sole focus by any means. It’s dubstep-derived in places, techno-adjacent in others, instrumental throughout, and I notice John Carpenter synths in a few places. Probably not definitive, but a valuable snapshot at the least, and it flies by.