For years, I’ve been fascinated by the lore surrounding the Smylonylon mixtapes, a group of thirty cassettes selected and mixed by Alex Gloor and sold at the boutique of the same name. Gloor outlined the series’ history for Interview’s Mel Ottenberg this April, which has been a boon in filling in blanks that I’d only understood somewhat ambiently before. Moreover, he uploaded the entire series to Bandcamp.
And since the Smylonylon series ended, Gloor and his creative partner Sasa Crnobrnja have made music and DJ’ed together as In Flaganti, issuing their and others’ work on Codek Records, which is nearing thirty years in business. Codek also very recently issued a striking DJ set, as a colleague made sure to tell me—and within days, I had a conversation with a different colleague in which the Smylonylon tapes came up. It didn’t take long to connect those dots; et voila.
DJ Gloor, Smylonylon: Un-easy Listening Music, Volume 1 (March 22, 1994; upl. to Bandcamp April 2025)
Long before Gloor re-released the Smylonylon trove onto Bandcamp, I had acquired several (nowhere near all) of the tapes in the early 2010s, when I was doing book research. But I didn’t listen to them for the book; they lay just outside of it. As Gloor told Ottenberg, he wound up selling six thousand tapes altogether—with thirty volumes, figure two hundred per, not bad for a series of mixes you could only buy at one store. But they made an impact, both within a small cult of listeners (Ottenberg, Interview’s editor-in-chief, is one; Chloe Sevigny another), but also more broadly after the fact, as an early example of just how much one could fit into a semi-beat-matched DJ mix. “What I intended to do back then was to educate people that there is more than just hip-hop and house music,” Gloor said.
The first volume accomplishes this with real zing. Originally subtitled Un-easy Listening Music Vol. 1, it crossed paths, culturally speaking, with RE/Search’s pair of Incredibly Strange Music books, full of interviews with collectors of, as Gloor put it, “easy listening, disco, lounge music, and obscure Moog records,” among other récherché goods, at least according to orthodox rock sensibility.
Tape covers via Discogs—please note, the sides are reversed on the Bandcamp version
No chance of finding the latter here. Martin Denny, Enoch Light, Esquivel, Heino—dime-bin stuff no critic cared for, reborn as readymade kitsch. Jerry-built, bright and bouncy and patently silly, much of the music on Smylonylon 001, as it’s re-titled on Bandcamp, has aged shockingly well, and it travels especially well in this guise. It delivers a giddy rush—and electronics!—that beats many a house or techno tape from the same period. It also goes perfectly with the holiday cooking.
DJ Gloor, Smylonylon 018 (May 10, 1997; upl. to Bandcamp April 2025)
Gloor professes in the Interview sit-down that this was among his own favorite editions of the series. Vol. 18 takes the outré leanings of the early, loungier tapes—askew orchestration, dub effects—into smearier realms. But most of all, it really leans into the sleazy cheapo synth disco, which is a good reason to make anything your favorite.
DJ Gloor, Smylonylon 023 (August 20, 1998; upl. to Bandcamp April 2025)
Later re-aired in its entirety on L.A.’s Dublab—the source of the file I acquired long ago, and the one replayed at the Mixcloud link—this one’s one of the series’ most musically accessible. Though almost none of what’s on it is “new” in the 1998 sense of the term, it chimes with a lot of what I recall about that year, musically—likely because the sensibility of the early Smylonylon volumes had become part of the lingua franca, cf. the so-called “lounge revival” and an increasing interest in internationalism and Moogs, sometimes but not always in tandem. Also, post-punk usages were beginning to sneak back into indie at that point—think 5RC, Troubleman Unlimited, the early Rapture records—and that is also the glue for several of Gloor’s nineties tapes. Nevertheless, the stroke of genius here is “Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out).”
In Flagranti, Aged & Unplayable DJ Mix June 19 2007 (Codek Records, rel. December 13, 2023)
This isn’t the first time I’ve reckoned with one of Codek Records’ officially released mixes—in 2003, I wrote about D’Afro Disco: Garri-Mix, a mix-CD of some of the Codek catalog, for Time Out New York, a review you can (for better or worse) read in full on that album’s Bandcamp page. But this one, recorded only four years after D’Afro but not issued until two years ago, tells a bigger story—a straight line from the disco- and post-punk-bred sensibility of the Smylonylons, in fact. Gloor and Codek co-founder Sasa Crnobrnja, working as In Flagranti, played this hour at a Lower East Side club; it features lots of edits and dubs of shameless dance classics, many familiar, all revealing themselves gradually and almost never seeming as obvious as they would were you to look at a track list. I remember reading about the halcyon disco-revivalist NYC of this period and having my doubts, but this makes me see it.
Sasa Crnobrnja/DJ Sascha, Kombe 83 Mix (Codek Records, rel. November 21, 2025)
“A massive invocation of a particular moment” is how Piotr Orlov introduced this to me via DM the day it was released. It’s an hour of Sasa Crnobrnja looking back to his “first DJ residency in Basel, Switzerland, at a club called Totentanz—though no one ever called it that. To us, it was simply Kombe, short for Katakombe, a name that perfectly captured its underground spirit,” with “the stark, minimal glow of white-tiled floors and walls that gave the space a raw, almost industrial feel.” Reverberating guitars as much as taut rhythm sections are the rule here; surely, the time has come for the full-on revival of “Hungry, So Angry” that the song deserves.