BC157 – Beat Connection’s Mixes of 2025
The year the subs took over techno
There’s nothing good to say about the way much of 2025 has felt for anybody with an ounce of compassion or sense. Hell, I spent as much or more of the year writing not only about old mixes (not necessarily newly uploaded ones, either) but also about other media. But a funny thing happened on the way to cultural irrelevance in the face of an ongoing horror that has not meaningfully lessened despite some major victories against it. Concentrating on what matters to you is a good way to sharpen your lens, and so is broadening one’s intake, historically and otherwise. I heard many superb mixes in 2025, but winnowing it to a numerically apt (and, as you’ll see, flexible) twenty-five wasn’t difficult. Yes, there was competition. But the ones I’d gone back to, happily and voluntarily, long before I was thinking about year-end list-making were easy to spot. They’re the ones I want to hear again now. Here they are, with comments following.
Top Ten Mixes of 2025 by preference, with honorable mentions
LOIF, via KLS Bookings
1. LOIF, Untitled 909 Podcast 219 (April 9) [BC126]
2. RP Boo & Sherelle, At Dekmantel Ten (rec. August 2024, upl. March 10) [BC118]
3. DJ Fuckoff, The Mix 069 (Mixmag, August 11) [BC139]
4. basic chanel, Kiosk Radio (London, October 10) [BC143]
basic chanel b2b OL Drift, Untitled 909 Podcast 220 (Live from Ormside Projects) (rec. December 2024; upl. April 11) [BC123]
basic chanel, Sure Thing Mix 139 (April 16) [BC126]
basic chanel, Live from the Garage @ Horst Club (London, October 5) [BC147]
5. Mark Broom, Autechre Tour Mix_2025 (November 17) [BC154]
6. PLO Man, RA.988 (May 11) [BC148]
7. Richie Hawtin, Boiler Room Paris (May 3) [BC130]
8. Ayesha, RA.983 (April 6) [BC148]
9. Four Tet, Lightning in a Bottle 2025 (May 23) [BC139]
10. Leesh, Daisychain 360 (January 17) [BC110]
Numbers 11-25, chronological
11. Metro, The Final Set @ Watergate (January 2) [BC128]
12. Camille Rae b2b Ābnamā b2b 131 BPM, Whole Festival (Leipzig, rec. August 2024; upl. February 7) [BC116]
13. Katie Rex, Bound001 (March 12) [BC120]
14. Breaka, Rinse FM (March 20) [BC120]
15. [uncredited DJ], NTS Guide to: Databass Records (March 28) [BC129]
16. Anastasia Kristensen, NTS Radio—Season Finale (April 10) [BC123]
17. gyrofield, RA.987 (May 4) [BC128]
18. Greg Beato, Injection Box 003 (June 27) [BC132]
19. The Blessed Madonna, Whole Festival—Beach Stage (Berlin, July 18) [BC145]
20. Vinvar, Whole Festival—Forest Stage (Berlin, July 20) [BC147]
21. Identified Patient & Mia Koden, Dekmantel Festival—The Nest Stage (Amsterdam, August 3) [BC147]
22. Tim Reaper, RA.1000 (August 12) [BC140]
23. Mike Gervais, Sequence (Minneapolis, August 16) [BC143]
24. Fred again.. b2b Thomas Bangalter b2b Pedro Winter b2b Erol Alkan, Because Beaubourg, Centre Pompidou (Paris, October 25) [BC145]
25. Sasa Crnobrnja/DJ Sascha, Kombe 83 Mix (Codek Records, rel. November 21) [BC150]
You can hear most of these sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
Honorable mentions, chronological
Halina World, Oramics 237 (January 1) [BC109]; Caribou, RA Live: The Cause, 2024 (Resident Advisor, upl. January 24) [BC111]; Bell Curve, SWU.FM (February 8) [BC113]; Roman Flugel, Rinse FM (February 8) [BC116]; COSMOS & Lamunai Records, Indonesian Underground (Refuge Worldwide, March 10) [BC115]; Logic1000, DJ-Kicks (Studio K7, rel. March 28) [BC123]; Laurel Halo, RA.992 (June 9) [BC130]; Berlin Bunny b2b Eyes Dice & Andi, Synthicide (The Lot Radio, July 6) [BC132]; Jacques Greene, Rinse FM (July 10) [BC139]; Theo Parrish, Mixmag Lab Bali (November 13) [BC154].
Vault/Retrospective Top 10, by preference
1) Mickey Mixin’ Oliver, WBMX 102.7 FM—Saturday Night Live Ain’t No Jive (1985) (Ivory Joe from Kokomo; upl. September 23) [BC142]
2) Ron Hardy, Live @ The Muzic Box, Chicago (Manny’z Tapez, rec. June 15, 1987, upl. May 8) [BC133]
3) DJ Harvey & Andrew Weatherall, RA.1000 (rec. October 20, 2012, Truow, Amsterdam; upl. August 14) [BC137]
4) Graeme Park b2b Mike Pickering, The Haçienda, Aug 4, 1989 (Apple Music, upl. November 7) [BC146]
5) Frankie Knuckles, RA.1000 (rec. 1989 and 1996; upl. August 14) [BC140]
6) Stretch Armstrong, Def Jam 40—1984-1994: Origins (Apple Music, November 21) [BC149]
7) Tony Vaughn, Live on The Vibe 107.5 FM WBLS, NYC 11-12-94 (Manny’z Tapez, upl. May 4) [BC127]
8) DJ Gloor, smylonylon 001 (rec. March 22, 1994; Bandcamp upl. April)
9) DJ Solar, Sunset Boat Party 1997 (Jim Hopkins Remaster) (ninetiesDJarchives, upl. February 7) [BC111]
10) Mike Pickering, The Haçienda, Dec 6, 1991 (Apple Music, upl. November 7) [BC146]
You can hear four of these sets (2, 3, 5, 7) at this SoundCloud playlist.
Clearly, to my ears, 2025 was the year of the subs. Over the year’s course, the low end took over techno. The sound that dominated my listening was low-end psychedelia, the preferred term for a number of producers and DJs who are fitting psytrance production styles and tricks into a more straightforward techno framework and reinvigorating it by DayGlo injection.
basic chanel
And my obvious VIP of the year was basic chanel, aka Chanel Kadir, the London-based PR person, proprietor of the Untitled 909 newsletter and podcast, and, for good reason, an increasingly busy DJ. She wrote a definitive piece about the style; she also did PR for sub-alchemy, a head-turning compilation from November on CCL’s label Subglow. Getting the hint?
I chose basic chanel’s October hour on Kiosk Radio as my number four on its own merits, but the three that accompany it there would have easily occupied space in the chronological 11-25 spots had good sense not interfered. Hence, number four is accompanied by three honorable mentions. I chose the Kiosk over the others because it’s the most purely concentrated dose of what I like about what she plays. But if you want to see it as a tie, I won’t mind—these sets deserve to be heard, on their own terms or in tandem. Not to mention that the Untitled 909 Podcast is responsible for my top mix of the year, by Australia’s LOIF. (I’m delighted to note, as well, that I’ll be interviewing Chanel about all this and more in a forthcoming edition.)
It wasn’t just them, either: There’s chirrupy percussion and active subs in places all over the place elsewhere, from Ayesha (eighth) and Four Tet (ninth) on down. But even without the latter two, and hints of it elsewhere as well, low-end psychedelia dominated my list—counting everything separately, basic chanel times four, LOIF, Ayesha, Kristensen, and Identified Patient & Mia Koden (the latter three featured it prominently, though not wholly) makes up eight sets out of twenty-nine, a healthy and dominant 28.5 percent. Dig around the archives a little and you’ll find even more good ones in the same vein. Hell, I’ve been avoiding certain podcasts of late just so I don’t overload the list with more. And it hardly mattered, because subs have become the norm in techno.
Low-end psychedelia (which I have frequently referred to as “psy-adjacent techno”) is a very head-fucked, insular sound. It has enormous appeal to a big crowd, and it also sounds killer close up at home. (I haven’t played music on headphones in years, for the record.) There’s a built-in escapism to this music; it can feel like a spiral to nowhere. But it also charges. It feels Right Now, a distillation of the current temperature, dread turned into a womb, similarly to the way jungle did in the mid-nineties.
Speaking of which, another of my other favorite things to bubble up this year was not merely UK garage, but specifically late-nineties speed garage of the Tuff Jam and Armand Van Helden style—cf. DJ Fuckoff’s freewheeling Mixmag cover set. The hard-house revival of yore (which even got its own explainer documentary from Armada Music in June) pops up here and there, too—see Camille Rae b2b Ābnamā b2b 131 BPM and Vinvar, both at the same festival but at different times. Lots of straighter techno as usual: Not just Hawtin and, after a fashion, Mark Broom (who leans just as hard on IDM and jungle, hallelujah), but also Metro, Katie Rex, Greg Beato, and Mike Gervais. If you want to count PLO Man separately, you can—that’s a minimalism showcase more than a techno one, per se—but you can count him along with the others, too.
Just as often, I went for wild ambition: Leesh (pictured above) rounding out the Top 10 with a sweeping three-hour envoi to the self-built Daisychain enterprise; gyrofield packing two hours full and Tim Reaper packing seven and a half goddamn hours even fuller, both for RA; the Blessed Madonna bringing Blind Willie Johnson and Leonard Cohen to the disco, where they belong as much as anyone. Her set swung as widely and wildly as anything I heard this year—if there’s a number 11, it’s that one. As for my number-two mix, listening to it again recently—being lit up from within by it—made me once again curse the fact that Greg Tate is no longer with us to hear it.
Communal listening—it means something. These lists are mine alone, but they fit a pattern, which is that, despite every horror we face right now (hell, maybe because of it), 2025 has felt like an extraordinary year culturally. Even when I wasn’t trying, I felt like the work I came across, by whatever means, somehow meant more than usual.
Some of the other writers’ lists I’ve seen, be it the highly idiosyncratic Jessa Crispin or the broad-focused Keith Harris (whose 100-song Minnesota playlist, on shuffle, has also been a recent highlight) or David Fear’s documentaries list for Rolling Stone, seem to touch something vital, even on the surface—they pull me in, make me want more, whether it’s the stunning clarity of Crispin’s prose or the promise of more stuff I think I might love from the other two, and, I assume, others to come. They connect me with others, somehow.
That’s what the movies are for, too. My old friend Jody Beth LaFosse thinks 2025 was even better for cinema than for music. I saw only a handful of films from this year, and I have to concur—The Secret Agent, Black Bag, Sinners, Wake Up Dead Man, and KPop Demon Hunters, in roughly descending order, is pretty good going for the occasional toe-dip, and that leaves out the music docs: both Questlove films and Becoming Led Zeppelin, to say nothing about films that debuted last year or earlier but that I saw in theaters in 2025, like Pavements and We Are Fugazi from Washington, D.C. I suppose it’s enough for a top ten. But I know there’s a lot more. That’s what keeps me going.
When I began this newsletter, I’d gone through a very rough breakup, and my mother died a few months afterward. I’d gotten a day job for the first time in almost two decades—I’d somehow made it alive on ever-slivering freelance rates—and that job has now just ended, by my decision (long story, not fit for here). I decided to write this newsletter because I wanted to write about mixes again, and nobody else was going to pay me to do it. If a few people did, great. (A few people do, and yes, it is great.)
I realized, the closer I got to pulling the trigger, just how much I’d wanted to do it, to commit myself to this specific but real area of coverage. It wasn’t the first time: I’d been writing about online sets since the late 2000s and mix CDs a decade earlier. But a focus on mixes alone became not only a lifeline but a viewpoint that allowed a lot of vantages. There are inevitably major holes in the coverage, per any number of others’ vantages; but that’s what those vantages are for. Nobody can cover it all—nobody. We all pick and choose. This year, I listened more assiduously to the recommendations of others, and that made my listening better—I heard more good stuff that way. Hopefully, my readers have gotten something similar out of me. Sometimes—a gratifying amount, of late—I receive feedback indicating that they do.
I don’t mind saying that I’m proud of all that, and proud of what I’ve built here. I’m not a magazine with a staff, I’m a person who loves film and comedy as much as I do music, and who until recently for professional reasons was unable to listen to music for thirty-plus hours a week. However long I can manage it, I’m looking forward to having more time to listen.
I’m also fifty years old and as such am less inclined to spend most of my waking hours around much younger people. Nothing against them, of course. I’m going to greedily partake of their music as long as I have ears, and I’ve even gone out dancing again after a long spell in what I have termed (and am proud to say some of my author peers have picked up on) #bookjail. (A couple holiday parties excepted, I’m still there, for the record.)
But in whatever guise, all of this is, ultimately, its own reward, and not because it has to be—because it is. Thanks for reading.