Miles Maeda on a 2024 flyer, via RA
As noted below, I do go back to certain epochs and eras and styles a lot, notably early-nineties drum & bass. And a few editions of the newsletter back (cf. BC128), I noted that I’d been pointing out sets with definite and specific UK hard house selections or even focus for a while, and showed my work by putting them into their own SoundCloud playlist. Well, I’m going to do it again here—three times. On all of these, the mixes are presented chronologically by first appearance. The first playlist is devoted to Nineties D&B from the 90s and has sixteen selections that I’ve written about here. The second is devoted to 2020s D&B, and currently has nineteen items. And the third crosses the two: 2020s Old School Jungle, six sets from the BC write-up archive that are new excavations of older (usually nineties) material. This is not exact—plenty of the 2020s D&B sets concentrate on older material—but the breakdown will help you find what you might want faster, I think. (This isn’t counting the eleven-and-counting D&B sets I’ve clocked here thus far that are not on SoundCloud.)
You can hear the five sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.
Ralphi “The Razz” Rosario & Julian “Jumpin’” Perez, 102.7 FM WBMX, Chicago, 1985 (Manny'z Tapez, rec. January 28, 1985, uploaded June 11)
Ron Hardy, Live @ The Muzic Box, Chicago (Manny’z Tapez, rec. June 15, 1987, uploaded May 8)
Chicago at two ends of the same line. At the start of 1985, “house music” was a playing style as much as a genre, per se, and the Rosario-Perez back-to-back shows it off to stunning effect. It’s the mélange of tracks that built the house, including the era’s au courant rhythmic pop (a term that would come to the fore of radio programming in the latter eighties) like “Point of No Return” and particularly canted-keyboard-bass-line Italo, which the two of them either EQ the living hell out of (cf the long undergoing-the-knobs section @ 6:00) or scratch cunningly atop. And then, @ 24:00, “Time to Jack” comes in—the old giving way to The New.
Two-and-a-half years and a lifetime’s worth of changes for the music later, You Are There, right in front of the speakers at the Muzic Box. Actually, it sounds like it was recorded about mid-back from the speakers, in the air rather than from the board though I may be wrong; the fidelity could be better and could also be a lot worse. You can hear it all anyway, and what you hear is like nothing else, including any other Ron Hardy set I know. The crowd is low and heavy in the mix, grounding things, responding with a minimum of fuss but fully in the moment—the woman calling out, “Ronnie!” @ 4:15 deserves to live with you forever, too. Hardy is using everything he has in terms of technique and trickery—the aforementioned shout comes in the midst of a lengthy stretch of what sounds (again, I may be wrong) like a drum machine going it pretty much alone. That reads dull and basic; it isn’t—the crowd’s real-time reaction, the audible and indelible sense of sweat pervading the room, the way the DJ blends the automated foot with his records, all adds up to spine-tingling presence in the recording. There is (@ 20:00) a “Magnificent Dance” edit—Hardy’s, it sounds like—I previously hadn’t known existed; it goes into motherfucking “Love Sensation,” just in case you thought he was kidding around. I don’t mind calling it the definitive Hardy set. Every night, this is what a DJ like Traxx (cf. BC132) is going for.
DJ Persuasion, 93-94 Hardcore Mix for Berceuse Heroique (uploaded June 2, 2015; cassette rel. May 16)
This one gets in on a technicality: the mix, ten years old, was recently released on cassette, and it deserves the second life. I do go on quite a bit about this era of drum & bass around here, but it’s for good reason, and this mix is one of the best of that type I’ve heard. Per title, the emphasis on the “hardcore” side of things, meaning tracks that took things into darker terrain while also carrying some of the old rave energy (and “Mentasm” synths), more than on the “incipient drum & bass” side, meaning even when the drums predominate little of it is strictly minimalist. It’s fugue-state music, hip-hop breaks played at techno speeds and audibly in the process of going from being one thing to being something else. The edges are a little messy, aurally and conceptually alike, and the music is more alive as a result. (HT: Arpad Okay.)
Miles Maeda: Gee, Your Beats Sound Terrific!!! (1999) (HD Mixtapes, uploaded May 25)
In our 2013 interview, Davey Dave Mason described Miles Maeda as a coequal member of “the loft scene” and “the rave scene” in Chicago during the early nineties. (More here.) In the latter, he added, “Guys like myself, Mystic Bill, Miles Maeda, we closed out the parties—4, 5, 6 a.m.—with our blend of Chicago house and downtempo house and whatnot.” By decade’s end, Maeda had become one of those redoubtable names you saw on flyers and whose tapes were readily available behind the glass cases in 12-inch shops and rave boutiques. (The car staple I recall was A La Peanut Budder Sandwiches, from 1995.) This re-upped old tape makes the case for his ubiquity with ease. His filtering is subtle and imaginative, his blends are long and steady, the vibe is echt-era largesse, the ingredients are familiar as pie. You won’t mind revisiting it a bit.
DJ Sabre, Rude 88.2 FM—30 December 2001 (Deep Inside the Oldskool, uploaded June 11)
Notably, this is one of only two sets from 2001 on Deep Inside the Oldskool’s archive; the other, Fabio on the radio that February, was uploaded eight years ago. But they call themselves that for a reason—2001 is late by old-school drum & bass standards. I won’t pretend that my D&B overview after the late nineties is anything like comprehensive, but this generous chunk of the pirate airwaves at year’s end nevertheless holds up. It's surpassingly breezy—relaxed, approachable, sounds good background or fore. It’s a radio show first, complete with an end-of year overview, i.e., when he isn’t mixing tracks for the first and (brief) final portions of the show, he is counting down his top ten tracks of the year, from old hands like Omni Trio, Nookie, Blame, J. Majik. The latter is here versus Hatiras on “Spaced Invader.” A sleeper, a deep cut, a welcome surprise.