Just in case it’s possible that anyone thinks I’ve been making things up about UK hard house revivalism in DJ mixes lo these past couple years (cf. BC058, BC062, BC078, BC108, BC109—and exhale), Armada Music has backed me the eff up. They uploaded their ten-minute documentary, The Comeback of Hard House, on June 5. (Hat tip to RA.)
You are, of course, forgiven in advance if you don’t care about this revival; UK hard house is some of the tackiest, whitest dance music on earth. But the best of it has a fizziness that’s hard to resist in the right setting, and the doc’s talking heads note that the post-pandemic crowds wanted to rage, DJ tempos rising across the board. The music’s roots are adroitly drawn by one half of Club Caviar/Mass Medium, who follows up clips from Nightcrawlers and Crystal Waters thusly: “Suddenly it combines with some raps and sirens and beeps and everything you normally use to evacuate your building. And that kind of became the hard house genre.” We learn the origins of the “donk, or bamboo bass” sound: Take a bow, Yamaha TX81Z FM Tone Generator (I didn’t know, either).
Incidentally, I have gathered the sets noted in the five posts parenthetically linked above all together as one SoundCloud playlist. It’s a bonus Five Mixes; I may gather those blurbs into a bonus post—open to feedback on this idea, should you wish to share it. I’ll note that none of the big sets that the documentary highlights are represented here, both a quirk of taste and a demonstration of just how far-reaching the revival has been.
And you can hear four of the five sets below—none of them, for the record, has zip to do with hard house—at this SoundCloud playlist.
gyrofield, RA.987 (Resident Advisor, May 4)
The method of much of the music from this set is small-room in excelsis—a lot of brainiac-IDM mutations of drum & bass, a lot of up and down with the tempo, a lot of minute timbral shiftiness. But the set is also maximal—the musical gestures, from the free-jazzy drums that kick it off to the glitched out broken beats at the finish line, have a grand, energetic sweep, and that’s to say nothing of the mix’s leg-stretching two-hour running time. Also adduced: Steve Reich, techstep filtered through Sanrio, classic James Brown loops being sent through a cave full of glitter. Drop the cursor anywhere and it will grab you and also make you wonder.
Metro, The Final Set @ Watergate (Berlin; rec. Jan 2, uploaded May 6)
Tobias Rapp, author of Lost and Sound and a longtime friend and comrade, writes in about this set, the final three hours recorded at the now shuttered Berlin club Watergate:
I used to go there a lot in between 2005 and 2010. It was a really great place by the river, you danced just above the water, it had two dance floors and beside Berghain and Bar 25 back then it was the club that did not had the difficult door. It was a great druggy club.
The thing with this mix is: it really reflects the history of the club, the Watergate sound. It was never a Technotechno space, like Berghain or Tresor. And it wasn't minimal either. Watergate was never about purism. It was more part of a ravey Chicago House continuum.
I knew the founder a little bit, he organized illegal parties in the nineties. When [COVID] came, he disappeared. He was very paranoid. We emailed from time to time. He travelled to Africa to be safe from vaccination duties. And I think he stayed there.
I already had this on the shortlist for this edition well before receiving that communiqué, but Rapp’s note helped me to place it—and settled a bet I had going in my mind. This plays like a historically weighted mix, but not a hugely predetermined one—it doesn't have the kind of bounding musical arc, from one end to the other in an unending wave, that a big finale would seem to invite (cf. BC110). It all works but it bounces around musically—it’s agreeable more than manically intense, which has its own kind of charm. The mix description (and please note, both SC and YT both offer a full tracklist) notes “a few beautifully imperfect transitions”—and yes, that’s it exactly. See also the encores, as you’d expect from the built-in backstory of the title (cf. BC062).
Interplanetary Criminal, EDC Las Vegas 2015 Live Set
Walker & Royce, EDC Las Vegas 2015 Live Set (both Rave Tapes; Electric Daisy Carnival, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, StereoBloom Stage, May 18)
I noted in the intro the second half of my 2015 Top Ten look-back (cf. BC125) that part of my remit in writing about DJ mixes every month for Beatport was to monitor possible-looking commercial-EDM radio shows and live sets along with my usual look-ins. That impulse faded some over time, but with that period now on par with any other in terms of historical weight and/or what the new people came (and come) up on, when I saw the Walker & Royce set pop up—I follow Rave Tapes on Facebook—I took a leap, followed fast by, what’s this, someone I just praised in this space for playing a very different venue (cf. BC126). What would I learn?
From Walker & Royce, I learned that I can enjoy and even admire a set while finding a good one-quarter to one-third of it actively embarrassing. I’m talking learning-your-ABC’s “rapping,” I’m talking fluttering b-lines that are more cutesy than powerful, I’m talking bro-nhomie that nobody who is themselves not on supplements needs to be around. And yet, and yet: that bro-nhomie is often playful, and the builds and drops do so with a discreetness that doesn’t preclude an ecstatic response. You can hear the crowd losing it—this is a captured radio broadcast, complete with audience noise, rather than a straight PA recording from the DJ—and it adds to the effect, much as it does with Metro above.
And from Interplanetary Criminal, I learned that the heads-oriented selections that suffused his great recent b2b with Main Phase for Rinse FM (cf. BC126) translate quite well to a festival crowd. The same propensity for FX and sound bites suffuses both; when the beat drops to a crawl (@ 14:00) for a short moment, it’s exactly the kind of thing he did on the other set, too. Again, hearing the crowd’s reactions in real time adds to the voib.
Quantic, DJ-Kicks (Studio K7; rel. May 30)
Back to the small room—the plushest imaginable. The DJ is the credited artist on five of these tracks, and collaborated on all the others. Everything is exclusive to the mix. Does that make it an album in disguise? To my ear, it sounds more like a set than an album, per se. Not because it’s stuffed full of deft segues, per se—they’re mostly offhand, though I quite enjoyed the breakbeats trailing off from “Dialect” and picking up at “In My Defence”—but because of the way it coheres. It’s the showcase of the producer’s sensibility as much as his talent.
The mixtape-as-album, of course, has its own kind of lineage—the immediate go-to in my mind are the nineties Beastie Boys albums—Check Your Head (1992), Ill Communication (1994), and Hello Nasty (1998)—which were consciously structured to operate as grab-bags, the kind of “pause tapes” that the Beasties’ members crafted for themselves and each other, only entirely with music the Boys themselves had performed. And sometimes their guest stars—Biz Markie, Lee “Scratch” Perry—served not only to add to the song at hand but also to take the spotlight while the Beasties proverbially changed outfits, even as they were also performing on the songs (“The Biz Versus the Nuge,” “Dr. Lee, Ph.D.”) themselves. Another example: the Clash’s triple album Sandinista!, which frequently turns the microphone over to others, particularly on the third LP, some of them singing new versions of old Clash songs, effectively turning a band album into a revue.
Quantic’s DJ-Kicks differs greatly from the above for obvious reasons—Will Holland, the producer behind the alias, has overlapping but very different ends than either the Clash or the Beasties did: “cumbia, salsa, disco, house . . . infused with Latin and global influences,” per the PR. He’s also working in a format neither of those artists really tried—though I’ve covered it here, the mid-’10s Beasties/Green Lantern mixtape doesn’t really count (cf. BC082), and the DJ set as mass commodity (cf. my RBMA finale) were just getting on its legs when the Beasties were headlining Lollapalooza (cf. WA008).
In many ways, Quantic’s DJ-Kicks really is an album in disguise. You can move to all of it, of course—not all in the same way(s), but the music has a singular viewpoint even though the landscapes change. And it moves as one thing—that’s probably the most set-like thing about it. Voluptuous soul balladry (“The Mind Is a Palace”) gradually ascends in tempo to laid-back jazz-funk (“Twang”) and upward and onward to bassy global-south maxi-minimalism (“Throw Dat Azz”). It’s small room music that blossoms into big room music, but it could work in almost any space, intended for dancing or not, and its coherency speaks for itself.