BC138 - Five Mixes: Optimo (Espacio)/JD Twitch, 2004-23
R.I.P. Keith McIvor, a.k.a. Twitch
via 5918mins.
Crushing news over the wire on the weekend from JG Wilkes, Twitch’s DJ partner of three decades: Eleven weeks after his diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor, Keith McIvor, a.k.a. JD Twitch, died on Friday, at 57. The man’s taste and ears have been a guiding spirit for a long time, and the decision to undertake this list—a tiny fraction of what I have no trouble believing is a uniformly superb DJ-set output—was and is a no-brainer.
Initially, I was going to repeat three items of Twitch’s/Optimo’s that I had already discussed in the newsletter. But McIvor and Wilkes were passionate about discovering great music above all, and in that spirit I’m going to pick five new to here, instead. But those items all deserve a curtain call, so I’ll outline them here again before we get to the main five. (All of the pages are public.)
I wrote about Optimo’s Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, November 2006) early on (cf. BC007), as part of a consideration of a Guardian list of greatest BBC performances, taking note of Tony Naylor’s blurb, which called attention to its then-new use of “software that enables DJs to tempo- and pitch-shift any music into mixable form . . . this was the first mainstream platform for their highly influential eclecticism, which made natural dancefloor bedfellows of Prince, Crass, Divine, and Ricardo Villalobos.”
I first encountered Twitch’s RA.087 (January 21, 2008) only recently (cf. BC134), but it immediately took me right back to its moment: “Much of it is quote-unquote ‘minimal.’ But this was also a period when that kind of pared-down approach was meeting a headier and beachier type of sound; think of Studio’s West Coast (2006). This mix is expansive and intimate at the same time.”
The most recent Optimo set I put a spotlight on (cf. BC023) came from a show on NTS Radio (February 21, 2023), which featured “a bunch of new stuff that shows off a diffuse and also wide-open landscape that zigzags hard, with intent . . . . The set is all over the place, just the way you’d want it.” Including in tempo—Twitch slows the tempo on several tracks down to near-nothing, to hypnotic effect.
Optimo, How to Kill the DJ [Part Two] (Tigersushi/Kill the DJ Records 2CD, rel. September 8, 2004)
First up, a confession: I never loved this one back in the day, even though so many of my colleagues rate it so highly. The simple fact is that I never bore down on it, nor did I make enough time to until now, and I’m glad I did. It’s a real achievement—“the grid” here is both permeable and absolutely ironclad. Almost fifty tracks in an hour and a quarter is already a goal, but these selections are truly all over the place. You can certainly point to their commonality as, to quote Mark Richardson’s Pitchfork review of the album, “tracks that have all been labeled ‘cool’ at some point” by record-collecting cognoscenti. It's not a moot point. But a number of them are also genuinely bonkers things for a DJ to pick, then or now. It’s one thing to reach for “Damaged Goods” or “The Word,” which throb like mad in any setting. The genuinely avant “Night” and the genuinely noisy “Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks” are reaches, period—and they come off without a hitch. The whole thing does.
Disc two is not often discussed as part of this set, understandably so—it’s a compilation, not a mix, per se, and so seemingly secondary to the story of Optimo as DJs, per se. But it’s every bit as sharply cut, moves just as assuredly, as the rigorously beat-mixed first disc. The tracks are deliberately paced, stark, noir-ish, violin sharpness here echoed by feedback skree there (all tempered, of course). It’s a mood. If anything, it’s aged better than disc one. It’s not the only time they made something like this, either—see below. In a similar edges-melting-together vein, and also recommended, is Sleepwalk—A Selection by Optimo (Espacio) (Domino CD, rel. October 27, 2008) (YouTube; Mixcloud), a Twitch-led project which expands its purview to Duke Ellington and Raymond Scott but peaks with “Something on Your Mind” by then-recently-rediscovered sixties folkie Karen Dalton.
Optimo Present Psyche Out (Eskimo Recordings CD, rel. April 22, 2005)
If I weren’t spotlighting Twitch, I’d be tempted to place another old favorite from this period here: JG Wilkes, Beats In Space Radio Show 302 (WNYU-FM, New York, February 28, 2006). In fact, this might be a good time to note that both halves of the Optimo duo often went out alone while being billed under the group name—seemingly a measure of their trust as a pair. (A good partnership is hard to come by—just ask the now-permanently-split Daryl Hall and John Oates.) As that Wilkes set demonstrates, wildly eclectic, casually brilliant Optimo sets were almost routine in the mid-2000s. But the mix that has come up the most on my feed since Twitch’s passing is this one, without question—and it’s the one I reached for immediately, as well.
It's also the one I played last, because it reaches such an insanely heavy peak late in its run that everything else, in a sense, was building toward it. It’s intense from jump—and its titular focus really gives it an edge. It’s one thing to line everything up brilliantly regardless of genre—to also illustrate the broad musical idea of “psychedelic” with the same enormous palette, and also genuinely offer nearly as many types of trippiness as there are songs, is a rare gift. Silvery-metallic machines and stompy live funk, prog and postpunk-verging-on-gamelan and acieeeed, it all builds up to Temptations/Koening Cylinders/Dinosaur/Chambers Brothers climax that stomps like a demon. Honestly, this CD is the reason I never got around to cut-by-cutting How to Kill the DJ—this was out mere months later and rang my chimes so hard it obviated its predecessor, and much of what was around it. Still does.
Optimo, Boiler Room x AVA Festival (June 4, 2016)
There’s always an air of mischief in a Twitch and/or Optimo set, and that holds even when they’re playing straightforward dance music. Take this hour-long session, a real crowd-pleaser that’s also pleasantly and persistently weird. The filters on these tracks get a workout before the DJs even touch them, just the thing for music defined by robot voices to even more robotic snares. They even go ravey for a spell. Great crowd noise/reactions, too—just in case you forgot that, first and foremost, these guys worked a room like nobody’s business.
JD Twitch, 5918mins. (August 25, 2020)
A couple of days after this went up, McIvor made a public Facebook post in which he linked it, and noted the passing of his thirty-third year as a DJ. “I have been fortunate to do something I love so much for so long,” he wrote, calling it also “a curse because I have few transferable skills . . . Anyway, my love for music remains undiminished.” You can hear that in full on this listening/opening/#personal (per SC tag)/“dance (not dance)” (per FB) ninety-eight minutes, the usual deliciously moody stuff, revs up to a boogie, and opens with something from disc two of How to Kill the DJ [Part Two] because it had been sixteen years already and because he had to set the mood correctly and only one selection would do. You can feel the time passing in these tracks, but you can also sense the timelessness and weightlessness the DJ experienced in them, and transmits in full.
JD Twitch, Crate of Jamaica (Optimo Music Tapes cassette, rel. September 3, 2021; Bandcamp, rel. August 17, 2023)
My friend Ned Raggett’s Bluesky feed included a post a few hours after Twitch’s passing noting that he had died holding hands with his wife and listening to this cassette compilation. It was part of a series of ten tapes (Discogs) that he’d made during lockdown and which he re-released two years ago. It’s a free listen and a pay-your-choice download; all money goes to a Glasgow food bank. It’s modest and glorious and impeccable; it hits you in the tender places. All the selections were Jamaican seven-inches—about half of a box of sixty he’s hoarded over the years and bonded with his partner’s then-eleven-year-old daughter over—“from across the decades; from Ska to Dancehall and all points in-between . . . This is perhaps the most personal of all the tapes. I hope these songs bring you some of the same joy they bring to me and my family.” They do. R.I.P.