One of the pleasures of this particular project is getting to cover things on my own timeline. Though I want a fair amount of what I’m writing about (and listening to) to be at least recent, one of the earliest pieces of feedback I got also helped clarify that it won’t always be new. A very early boost for Beat Connection came from Aaron Rupar, whose great news analysis site Public Notice steels me in the morning for the world. He called it a look at dance-music history through mixes—which I quickly realized was pretty much my lens anyway, and something to lean into. Especially when the newer stuff explicitly concerns itself with its place in history.
I waited nearly a week to get to the ten sets that make up Resident Advisor’s thousandth-podcast extravaganza (cf. BC134), mainly because I was busy with other things but also because I like to let hype cycles cool a bit before I mosey in. But the parameters of the RA.1000—ten sets “tied” for one position, also doing business as an overview of the site’s (and dance music’s) history, present, and hopefully future as a taste-making powerhouse—were too easy to assimilate into my own parameters here, so I’m going to be writing about all ten of them over two posts—good, bad, or indifferent. Stuff settles differently outside the immediate hype cycle, I find.
It's worth noting that RA.1000 is not the first of its multilevel type the RA Podcast has offered of late. Each podcast from RA.995 to RA.998 was a “two-part” set of separate “sides” by a pair of mixers congruent in different ways. RA.999 was a “four-part” conglomerate of four separate back-to-back sets. Counting the ten RA.1000s, that’s twenty-two sets in seven weeks. Here at Beat Connection, one set is one set, unless they both occupied the same cassette or CD—and even there the rules are fungible. In a sense, the RA.1000s constitute something us old-media heads would have once called a box set. But they’re worth considering individually.
The ten RA.1000s were issued over four days. I tend to be strict about release dates, and I’ll note them per usual here, but to level the ground a bit I’m also going to tackle them alphabetically by DJ—it seems like a way of hearing things freshly, or at least outside the order that RA’s own playlist of the full ten (SoundCloud) has them in.
You can hear the five sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.
Sama’ Abdulhadi (August 12)
People who don’t like techno point to its triumphalist tint, derived from art-rock and fusion, where size trumps all, as a reason why they don’t, and sometimes I can hear that even in the music I like. But this set’s consistent ratcheting up of scale is something to behold even if your tastes don’t necessarily lean toward big-room anything. At no point is the music modest, per se—nothing “minimal” even when the tracks are relatively spare. But it’s also not bombastic even when it’s exploding in the sky. It’s got that tinge of trance that’s become not just acceptable but almost de rigueur, offered up with a telling touch of e-gush. People call sets like this one “a journey” for a reason.
Bicep (August 13)
These guys have become arena stars, though not anywhere near where I am—the arena I can walk to has Benson Boone and Jason Aldean as recent non-hockey headliners, if that helps. But this mix makes even a landlubber like myself understand how and why they made that leap elsewhere, because it’s structured, and hits, like an arena show. It’s a display of power—the subtleties are real but also beside the point. Delicious, as displays of power go.
Mark Ernestus (August 12)
After letting this settle in the background twice, I was ready to write this one off completely—the apostasy! Ernestus is one of several never-does-this legends-of-the-art who said yes to an RA.1000, and he offers two hours of ampiano with—what did I decide before I bore down on the music again? Oh yeah—“the juice bled out of it.” Not quite, but a more sympathetic listen makes me understand that position nonetheless. The tone here has a more melancholy tinge than the limited amount of ampiano I’ve heard before, which (cf. BC104) has tended to be sonically boisterous, availing itself of the brightest parts of a wealth of historically significant Black music. Ernestus’s mix has a telltale dryness, even when the bass erupts in square waves across the stereo span—a kind of announcement of his reverence for and also distance from the point of origin, which is fair and canny both.
DJ Harvey & Andrew Weatherall (rec. October 20, 2012, Truow, Amsterdam; uploaded August 14)
Confession: I put the photo at the top of the page before I listened to a second of this set. So would you have. I was pre-programmed to love the shit out of this one: Each DJ had, by themselves, already put together memorable RA Podcasts: Harvey’s RA.300 (February 2012) and Weatherall’s RA.470 (May 2015), among so much else. (Here’s me on a Bandcamp-available mix of Harvey’s in The New Yorker; here’s me on Weatherall’s best mixes for Mixmag.) Six and a half hours together—particularly given the depths and raunch of their crates—was a no-brainer deluxe.
So, if it takes a little while to rev into gear, that’s OK. It’s not just that this was the only time either of them had gotten together with another DJ in this fashion; Harvey, in the bio Q&A, vows not to do it a second time. But the gear is also easy to mistake or mishear as one-note. It’s not—it mutates plenty over its course. It just takes its sweet time doing so, and I only partially mean that it’s six and a half hours long. There’s a lot of matchy-matchy going on sound/vibe-wise, two heads in deep concentration—how closely can they follow the previous track(s) while also nudging the intensity and/or tempo along?
It’s a swerve before the first hour is up (MixesDB) into “Doing It to Death” that marks the terrain for me. But raunch isn’t much on the menu here—what stands out is the groove-heavy eighties rock that was produced by the likes of Chic during that decade, though nothing here has that kind of clattering hookiness. It’s very lean and persistent, and it eventually loosens you up—particularly when it gets into liquid-mercury bass lines of the (again) post-Chic variety. Eventually they get up to house tempo, and the goods there are every bit as what-was-that? God, this is so much fun.
Helena Hauff (August 13)
Hauff is always a welcome presence here (cf. BC078, BC081), and as was the case of those two mixes noted in turn, this one starts out super-electro and has a heavy dose of Detroit—she even notes it in the Q&A. It’s a mix of old and new, she explains, “a celebration,” and with a sci-fi-tinged first half and a second half keyed to UR’s “Riot,” that’s how it hits.