The cover of the book Jean-Michel Basquiat, published by Taschen
A methodological note: Apparently, 1001 Tracklists now makes you input a captcha in order to allow a visit to any of its pages. Not ideal, but I suppose it is one easy way to keep the bugs out. You can hear all five sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.
[no DJ], NTS Guide to: Databass Records (NTS Radio, March 28)
[no DJ], NTS Guide to: The Music of Basquiat (NTS Radio, March 31)
The NTS Guide to . . . series bugs me, for this reason: It almost never credits the people who did the work of putting together and, in the case of the Databass showcase, mixing the tracks on them. It’s insidious—the idea of NTS claiming sovereign knowledge over the impossibly wide array of eras, geographical specialties, and stylistic pockets that the Guides net. Some recent editions: Hare Krishna Music, 2010s Vaporwave, Mid-Western 90s Space & Post Rock, Indian Classical Influence on Jazz, Panama Soul, Modern East Asian Shoegaze, Mexican Discoteca (70s-90s), and Euro Thrash Metal Demos—it boggles the mind.
No, NTS the organization in and of itself does not know all about those extremely varied things. It hires people who do. No algorithm exists for most of them. Of the ten sets mentioned here, including the two under consideration, imagine ten different people made them. NTS credits a total of two for their work: Coco Maria for Mexican Discoteca (70s-90s) and Phil Geraldi for Hare Krishna Music. Note that these are two of the most recent examples here. That’s good—it likely means that others have already complained about it as well.
In black and white: For NTS—whose identity rests upon its reputation as a tastemaker because of the on-air talent it attracts, without whom NTS would not have any reputation at all. The brand is not all. To cut out the middle person in such a way does not portend a bright future. Especially as AI is jammed into every cranny of life that nobody wants it in, this is a seriously bad look.
The Databass mix is frustrating in particular because it is a frankly great DJ set qua DJ set, full of smart choices and hairpin cuts that give the form a good name—for example, leading it off with tracks built on loops of familiar material, a practice here done with both wild abandon and genuine historical nous. It helps when you have good music to work with. A ghetto-tech imprint out of Detroit, Databass’s catalog is unapologetically filthy high-BPM ass-shaking shit-talking music of the highest order, and as this two-hour deep dive demonstrates, it’s also got serious range. Somehow it took this long for me to realize that “Sperm Doner” is a stone-cold classic, particularly as showcased here. How many dirty jokes gain musical heft and urgency over a quarter-century’s time while also remaining dirty jokes?
The Basquiat mix is a wholly different animal—as much an audio documentary as a DJ mix, and the latter mainly-mostly-solely of the kind you’d typically find on a public radio station. (Which, as we all know, credits the people who craft the work.) Of course it’s great—look at the tracklist (linked above), which lists a couple-dozen of the greatest musicians ever (Ellington, Parker, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Art Blakey, Miles, Mingus, Bowie) plus a definitive overview of the teeming early-eighties downtown NYC scene Basquiat lived in and around—he played in Konk and produced “Beat Bop,” both here. Maybe AI could have put it together—it’s not like Basquiat’s musical tastes were unknown; you’d almost have to try harder to make something bad than good given the brief. But there’s an editing savvy here that, damn it, deserves a credit line, however buried.
John Talabot, Making Time 2024 (Philadelphia, September 20, 2024; uploaded April 15)
“Disco Set,” promises the schedule for this three-day festival from the tail of last summer. That’s cute—both mischievous and, while also misleading, also kind of apt. I remember nigh about two decades ago beginning to wonder at younger clubbers stretching the definition of “disco” as an era/sound/style/something all the way up to house music, even as many of them were also interested in variants on a specific groove. But Talabot isn’t pining for anybody else’s received purism, he’s trying to rock a big crowd, and if he’s got to get cutthroat about it, so shall it be. I’m being fanciful, obviously, but that’s the music’s effect—the bass lines growl like they’re heading for the psy tent, and the final quarter kicks off with an un-ID’ed track (cf. 1001 Tracklists) that has the grit of what in the mid-nineties people (in my neck of the woods, anyway) called “acid trance.” You might just hear it as techno, which is every bit as apt. It almost doesn’t even work during daylight hours.
Eli Iwasa, Gop Tun Festival 2025 (São Paulo, Brazil, April 19; uploaded May 26)
A satisfying slow-winder with a sense of brightness throughout, a buoyancy that had me smiling repeatedly, particularly when the bass lines go thunk. Somehow, throwing “French Kiss” into the first half-hour of a two-hour mix isn’t the most memorable thing about it. Instead, it’s almost a keynote—the synths throughout have a similar gritty neon aspect to them.
Donato Dozzy, Boiler Room: Rome (June 6)
Nearly six hours of pleasantly undulant minimalist techno—when the volume goes up, the details swim around. Playful, patient (duh), essayistic, a total pile-on, this one inches its way to its peaks, but they’re dizzying, and they’re high—though it’s more about consistency than chain-yanking. This makes it basically useless at low volume, just FYI.