Adrian Sherwood, via JunoDaily
This one is old-school by default. They came in as strays over time—the first item was planned to go a while back, in fact—but they cohere as a series of history lessons. You can hear three of these sets at this SoundCloud playlist, which also contains links to the other two.
Traxx, The Definitive Articles of House Music Chapter 6 (August 12)
As promised (cf. BC132), Chapter 6 has a lot in common with Chapter 5 on paper, but in the air they’re like two similar but obviously different patterns. That one was spare in a tool-like way (cf. my “The Primer: DJ tools,” from The Wire 438, August 2020), but this time around, rather than shortened-time samples as the primary instrument, we get a lot more piano and synth riffs, deliberately minimal and cumulatively hypnotic, often overlaid with a variety of spoken voices. It’s still got that private-workshop feel; smooth is never the point.
On-U Sound, Bleep Mix #307 (August 17)
Adrian Sherwood, RA.1001 (August 24)
Released exactly a week apart, these came to me, and I would imagine to some of you who pay attention to the RA Mix, in reverse order. (Yes, they changed it from RA Podcast, starting with this one.) But in fact, they’re not all that different in makeup, even if the results differ. On-U Sound tends not to be Adrian Sherwood alone, but the two are inextricable anyway.
Bleep Mix #307 is identified as being made by “the label crew,” not Sherwood, per se. Who knows what this actually means? It plays like radio, like a mixtape, not a dance session—contrast and variety and varying the tempo and pacing is the prize attribute. A quote cited in the RA Mix (I’m practicing!) about Sherwood’s approach to music-making actually echoes throughout the Bleep Mix: “’What on earth are you doing to reggae?’ David Rodigan once asked after listening to African Head Charge.” He’s tweaking it continually, is the answer—so continually and over so many releases through the years that it can daunt a non-initiate like me. This ninety-minute survey does a lot of helpful work as well as being a pleasure listen—you can hear it as a charming and variegated post-punk sampler, among much else. The one that stays with me, for blindingly obvious reasons: “To Be Rich Should Be a Crime.”
RA.1001 feels more through-composed and more rhythmically aligned than the Bleep Mix. On both, the parts come straight from Sherwood himself, on or off the On-U Sound label. But here he conjures more of a singular mood—head-nodding melancholy with a lot of delectable production trickery. Who’d have guessed, right?
Spun, Live at Pure Space (1994) (HD Mixtapes, rec. April 14, 1994; uploaded September 22)
An early alias of Rong Music’s Jason Drummond, Spun was one of the San Francisco DJs orbiting the Wicked crew in the early nineties—psychedelic, breakbeat-driven, acidic, baggy, party-ready. There isn’t a second of this old tape that isn’t broad and not a moment that isn’t suffused with pleasure. The line between this and the rise of big beat a few years later could not be more direct—this is a Skint Records party a few years early.
Mickey Mixin’ Oliver, WBMX 102.7 FM—Saturday Night Live Ain’t No Jive (1985) (Ivory Joe from Kokomo; uploaded September 23)
If you have an unnatural attachment to “the eighties,” have I got a tape for you. Opening gambit: “Just Be Good to Me” > “I’m a Wonderful Thing” > “Rapture.” Mandatory Jacksons recording: by a pre-Jam & Lewis Janet, it fooled me into thinking it was some circa-’80 Michael-fronted disco hotness I’d somehow missed. (I had missed it, it just wasn’t what I thought it was.) Mixin’: smooth unto invisible. Result: addictive like crack.