It’s not every month where you get two genuinely newsworthy DJ mixes in close proximity, both playing pop-up in lieu of any kind of official unveiling—so far. You can hear four of these sets (with a link to the fifth) at this SoundCloud playlist—with a note that this may change at any moment, and already has, multiple times.
The Blessed Madonna, Whole Festival—Beach Stage (Berlin, rec. July 18; uploaded late September)
Nene H b2b Badsista, Whole Festival (Arena, July 20; uploaded late September)
Like most events of its type, it’s not likely I’ll ever attend Whole—United Queer Festival in Berlin—not unless someone’s paying for a junket so I can write about it in a newsletter, which I doubt is ever going to happen. But the lineup! It looks absolutely incredible. (The full schedule can be viewed here.) These two are, of course, merely the tip.
Not said lightly: The Blessed Madonna’s set is genuinely don’t-give-a-fuck—I mean, who went to this thing with “John the Revelator” on their bingo card? Who goes to any dance music festival at all anticipating that one? Never mind “People Are Still Having Sex” (God yes, I remember the paranoia in the air when this one came out) or “Losing My Edge” (happens to everyone) or “Louder Than a Bomb” (self-explanatory) or a finale so hilarious and cynical and apt that I wouldn’t dare to spoil it. None of this plays out like it’s accidental or flippant or mere. It’s targeted, specifically aimed at the present moment, and the disjunction of many of the segues—even when the mixing is elegant, which it occasionally is not—demand that you notice them, demand you pay mind to their context. She’s mad as hell and she’s not going to take it anymore, so here is lots of disco to help get us through. People must have gone nuts. Ditto for Nene H and Badsista’s big whoosh of a back-to-back, which exudes a looseness that close listening demonstrates isn’t really there. The mixing maintains a steadiness of flow even as the tracks themselves evoke body highs surging through one’s system. Three hours of pinwheel eyes; you can practically see people’s jaws grinding.
Wednesday, NTS Radio (October 9)
I thought about saving this for a Not Dance Music roundup—there are pauses between selections here, for starters—but before it was halfway finished I’d already DM’ed it to a bunch of friends, so in it goes. And as usual, in my blinkered-but-expansive way, it took this set for me to finally give the band itself a chance. Turns out I like Wednesday—of course I do, I was eighteen in 1993, when stuff like this was as much my bread and butter as stupid rave noise. And of course I like Wednesday, because as its frontwoman, Karly Hartzman, indicates in her final voiceover of the hour, they really do evoke an amalgam of everything she plays here—noisy-tuneful nineties indie with lots of gruff twang old and new. What can I say? I love it when smart artists also have good taste—the inverse, as well. I’m not always into the chalky-voiced stuff Hartzman highlights during the second quarter, but hearing it alongside “The Door” and (holy fuck!) “I Never Lie” helps contextualize it not just stylistically but also in terms of one individual’s sensibility, one that’s as legible in her selections as in her band’s recordings. The whole’s the thing.
Fred again.. b2b Thomas Bangalter b2b Pedro Winter b2b Erol Alkan, Because Beaubourg, Centre Pompidou (Paris, October 25)
Jeff Mills, Live at Super Dommune, Tokyo (November 15)
[Note: set taken down Nov. 24]
I trust you know about the first of these two items already—its very existence has gotten write-ups from all kinds of music-site news pages. It appeared and then dipped out no less than a half-dozen times on my watch. As the DJ listing indicates, it’s defiantly boisterous, two hours of The World According to French Touch that’s both up to date (the theme to the newest PTA, as yet unseen by me, is utilized to highly dramatic effect) and like nothing had happened in pop in a decade, which in a sense it hasn’t. So much of this stuff is so timebound. It is always the endlessly cresting turn of the millennium to these guys, seemingly. But it works, still—Daft Punk and its epigones created a style that feeds on itself and remained consistent even as it advanced.
To say I was “expecting” anything from Mills’ set is to credit that any time elapsed between knowing it existed and hitting play. Flatly, it did not. It happened a half-hour after a Facebook friend posted a version from YouTube; the set was on SoundCloud an hour after that. None of this was through official channels, and all of it was within a few hours of Mills’ performance. This timeline is worth iterating, both because it helps illustrate for the record how quickly these things can travel, and to demonstrate that this is one of those sets one drops everything for.
This is a most unusual thing, a thirtieth-anniversary DJ set. I’ve long been a believer that great DJ sets are found as much as they’re announced, but there’s no denying that this one is important on its face. Thirty years ago—off by two weeks—Mills played an incendiary headlining gig at Tokyo’s Liquid Room that would be released in May 1996 as Mix-Up Vol. 2—Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo in Japan. In other territories, the second half became the full title. As previously discussed here (cf. BC073), Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo (Discogs) has achieved talismanic status, so its sequel is of automatic interest here.
What’s most impressive at first pass is that, far from the tightly coiled focus of that October 28, 1995 set, this one is something of a career overview, and not just because “The Bells” arrives at minute seventeen, almost surgically in the same place it usually occupies in a Mills set—“It’s something I can use to say hello to the people,” as he once put it. But he throws in a lot of stuff that nods to his earlier days, stuff he doesn’t often play. Not only does he drop “Dominator” (!) he (gasp!) mixes it somewhat shakily for a moment or two, in and out—and when he goes into “Strings of Life,” well, frankly, that warhorse once worked a lot better than it does now.
There are, in fact, a surprising number of timing errors here, all corrected in an instant, but noticeable. Sometimes that’s a complaint, but not here, because precision isn’t the point and was never the point with Mills—as Gabrial Szatan pointed out, Live at the Liquid Room had plenty of off-rhythm moments that Mills strong-fingered into being.
What I’m hearing on this set is an aggressive emphasis on the human touch, and if that creates mistakes on the fly, so be it. The original Liquid Room CD was in three sections; did he edit out mistakes there? Quite likely. Might he do the same with this set at some juncture? Possibly. But what I’m also hearing is a lightness of spirit—a willingness not to make things perfect all the time, a loosening of the coil.