BC173 - Five Mixes: March-April 2026
It's official: Mixes are releases now
Above and below, you will see two of the most well publicized electronic-music releases of this or any other year. In both cases, the links are not default, added for broadcast by a label ready to maximize views/listens through all the channels possible. The links are where each release lives natively, on YouTube. Others have put them on SoundCloud, which do fine in the playlist and earns them my thanks, but it seems apt to include their original platforms here, too. I say it above and below, too, but I’ll say it here as well. It’s official: Mixes are releases now.
You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
n/a, NTS Guide to: Golden Age of Malian Music (NTS Radio, March 10)
I didn’t plan it this way, but this selection is kind of a sandwich: three doses of heavy energy, with something very sonically and energetically different at the top and bottom. In this case, “golden age” means 1970 to 1983, because of course it does: that’s the default golden age for post-World War II, live-instrument music. Especially if that music is electric and carries a lively pulse.
This selection from the NTS Guide series (cf. BC129) carries a groove, but it’s far more undulant and contemplative than the next three below. It’s also unfailingly gorgeous, and it, too, builds. A lot of it is guitar-centric even when the bands get large and the spotlight falls heavily on the vocalist; horns are there for color, though sometimes they and not the lead axeman will state the theme. The spare solo-ish opener from Ali Farka Touré sets us up for the lengthy and steady-building full-band Kassé-Mady Diabaté.
Often in these selections, the bass lines don’t glide but rather poke through, in equal conversation with everything else—not a legato supporting role but something bumptious that buoys the rhythm from the middle rather than below. There’s a ruggedness to this music that’s deeply appealing, the way pretty guitars work against rough rhythms. The drenched tonality of the amps has its own appeal, as well.
Melvin Gibbs’s incredible new How Black Music Took Over the World (Basic Books) has helped expand my understanding of, for example, the differences in tuning systems of African musicians and those of Western musicians. That’s not to say those differences are necessarily manifest on these songs, but thinking about that has led me to listen more carefully and thereby opened the music up to me in a new way—and I’d already been a fan of Ali Farka Touré, Salif Keita, the Rail Band, and the Super Rail Band (separate groups!) prior to this. (I won’t be reviewing Gibbs’ book here, because I am writing about it for Racket; link soon come.) That said, something I’ve always loved about Malian music in particular is that, even to a relative nonce like me, the guitarists may nod to American blues or British rock but they are playing their stuff—it’s manifest. I think often of what Ali Farka Touré, during an Invisible Jukebox interview for The Wire, said when he was played a Robert Johnson song: “That is African, purely African.”
It is to the credit of the (yet again . . .) unknown assembler of this feast that it plays so beautifully, but the truth is that any order can work with stuff this effulgent. I know a lot of people who consider 1977 the greatest year for recorded music, and this track list backs them up completely—eleven of its seventeen selections came from that year. (Concordance upon request.)
Mark Broom, Ekho Radio 020 // 13 Feb 2026 (upl. March 26)
Mark Broom’s shit swings really hard, noticeably. It’s not just the speed of his tempos or the way the kicks push the beat forward—to compare it to another world, like a CBGB’s band. It’s the way he builds up to that swing—there’s a long pause before you notice it, which helps dramatically, or do I mean theatrically? When the disco vocal pulls in close to the end it sends everything into the stratosphere.
Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter, USB002, Alexandra Palace, London 27 February 2026 (upl. March 28)
When this first went out to the world, it did not return in full (believe me, I spent days looking for it) until the PR folks announced, with a press conference, that they’d be uploading it on YouTube on a specific date. It’s not new; loads of podcast sets have been accompanied by emailed releases; I learn about good things that way. This is one of them. In fact, I bet you’ve heard about it already. I bet you’ve already read other people mention it. Some of those include places that don’t often cover DJ sets. No shade here—it all validates my stance on all this. It’s official: mixes are releases now.
The piece to go to first, of course, is Ben Cardew’s deep dive. I can’t recommend it enough; he really goes in with track-by-track analysis. I admit, I was tempted here to do a kind of “dj mix har har” quote-down of it for my own ends and call it a day. But there is a lot to pull apart here, so I decided to not look at his while I did it. Apologies if we overlap; it happens.
There’s a lot of smart decision-making here. The transitions and blends, the pacing and surprises, are utilized for maximum effect, and hearing the crowd go along with it transmits that excitement. It’s expert entertainment—not always what I’m going for as a listener, since it’s conversant with the larger sound of pop in ways that purists tend to frown upon. I certainly have a purist ear in some ways, but I also like pop, particularly now. I’m not likely to return to it full-time, but I like knowing that when I tune in, I’m hearing something interesting, and I know pop fans who feel the same way about dance music.
I don’t love crowd noise as a rule—especially when they start singing along with “One More Time,” right after they tee up with “My House” (cf. BC006), but I don’t blame the audience for being excited, either. I don’t love “One More Time” nearly as much as I used to, but arena rock, sure. That helped me tolerate “Doin’ It Right” and its cyber-Beach Boys vocals, which work in this context. Ditto the Weeknd. Also, Bangalter really knows how to work those EQs. It’s paced like a show rather than a set, too—stops and starts galore.
But if anybody is going to play “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” with a straight face, it isn’t going to be these two—and not into or (especially) out of “Yeah,” which is great on its own but sounds specifically mindless coming where it does here. Just a completely pandering, no-excuses-terrible passage, the absolute pits, clueless every way. I’d say “how could you?” but it’s not like anybody serious should take these people to be anything other than entertainers. Bringing “One More Time” back in near the end is unforgivable.
Eric Prydz, Ultra Music Festival Miami 2026 | Resistance Megastructure (March 28)
Cannot and will not lie: the first track had me on the friggin’ fence—airy diva, arrant nonsense; if the Fred/Bangalter ending is unforgivable, the beginning of this one is. But I’m glad I waited it out, because while this is not musically consistent (though it is more so than the big-room curiosity above), it does peak musically in startling ways. There’s a lot of hands-in-air filters, sure, but there’s also a lot of acid and other kinds of wormy low end. He shifts gears a lot, and although he succumbs to bathos sometimes, he does it less often and with a better hit rate than the above. “Hit me with those laser beams” followed by the Space Invaders FX you’re hoping for—and then the most obvious acid line ever, a.k.a. the best acid line ever. He does it with more patience and surprise than most main-stagers. Anyway, the real through-line is eighties synth-pop, which a lot of his selections recall in a lot of ways. Finally, an M83 track (well, remix) that snaps into place for me.
Solma, Kiosk Radio (Paris; April 3)
Building from zero to a deep simmer—the bubbles at the edges of the pan are getting larger—this is a, let’s see, downtempo/dub techno/ambient-tagged hour so cohesive that it seems like one long composition rather than a bunch of records. Starts purely environmental, albeit in outer space. Eventually the pulse quickens and the bass thickens; when beats appear it’s almost invisible. Skittering percussive details jump out from deep backgrounds in every setting. A Jamaican accented voice sings of “roots and culture” at the end, and the carefully wrought weirdness that precedes it makes another kind of sense.