BC174 - Five Mixes: February 2026 again
Playing a little catch-up
DJ Marfox and friends at The Lot Radio (via SoundCloud)
There is a lot of current-moment stuff to catch up on, and I will, soon. I try to dip into the feed at somewhat evenly timed intervals, frequently refining and refilling my private listening playlist while trying to keep it to twenty-five, thirty at the most. But some bucket-dips into the sea of possibility are also more packed with incident than others, and February’s been one of those months. When the two NTS Guides below—among a number of others from March and April—proved too promising to resist adding to that queue, and then scooting everything else on it, I noticed they had company from the same month. Mostly retro, not unlike every other damn thing right now, but I’m still learning a ton.
You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
The Criminal & DJ Style, Pulse FM 90.6, September-October 1992 (Hardscore, February 1)
Brockie & Det, Kool FM 94.5 [19th December 1993] (Hardscore, February 5)
I am always grateful when Hardscore brings new-to-me goodies into my life, and so are you, I hope. The first one really nails the euphoria-chaos nexus of its period. A lot of spooky cries in the dark given just enough reverb, over ever more defined ruff breakbeats, and with subs that resonate as a cultural marker as much as to rattle the floor. The riffs are still well bleepy, too. Around @ 20:00, the Criminal comes on and asks someone to come round his house—hmmm. The top of the second half is even crazier, more overtly carnivalesque, right up to the first real stirrings of happycore, “Time of Our Lives,” which utterly detonates. Style takes it out with a half-hour of early darkside jungle classics, but it’s the less settled-upon stuff before it that keeps me hooked. (Static and dropout alerts—a big curling ball of crud and occasional silences both feature here, though not frequently enough to be a nuisance.)
Fourteen or fifteen months later, Brockie & Det courted a lot more static, at least in this version. This selection is a squib, just nineteen minutes. But the five selections (Q Project, Dextrous and friends, Potential Bad Boy) define that moment’s Jamaican side nicely. MC Det’s smoky voice makes the multiple rewinds and rampant sloganeering all feel part of the fabric. If I’d heard this even two years later in the States, it would still have been far ahead of me in terms of what I knew—but also loved—about jungle.
n/a, NTS Guide to: French Touch House (NTS Radio, February 19)
n/a, NTS Guide to: Italian Library, Soundtracks and OSTs (NTS Radio, February 25)
I can’t deny that I wanted to help reset my fondness toward the French Touch sound/era after the excesses of Fred Again../Thomas Bangalter (cf. BC173), so I pushed the NTS Guide to it up the queue and waited for the filters to overwhelm me. To my delight, it started with something left-field, holding off on the disco drums for at least a few minutes. What’s more, they don’t necessarily bathe us in them. There is lot of a patient building here that I admire. Appearing unobtrusively enough past a half hour, “Feelings for You” can sound like the golden mean of it all, or maybe just that’s my overexposure to later remixes at EDM festivals of the early 2010s.
Thirty-three tracks in two hours and ten minutes: not too many, not too few. Nine of them, more or less, by Daft Punk: not inapt. Waiting until forty minutes have passed before introducing them: wise. Doing so by way of a classic remix: smart. Adding voiceover of a French musician being interviewed on the radio about how good Daft Punk were live: educational. Build to a froth? Yes.
One week later and one country over, the same series offered an overview of something equally heady and dramatic, aimed the opposite way from the shameless disco floor. This was for sitting audiences, not dancers. The early, symphonic selections are pure perfumed air, each more extravagantly humid than the next. There’s a depth of seriousness to this music that is almost comic out of situ—yet so committed you can only be, I think the word impressed works here, by it. It climaxes with drums so luscious you want to sample them for something, just because.
DJ Marfox, The Lot Radio (February 26)
I hadn’t programmed this one—it came on while I was playing through one of the other Lot sets from February I’ve detailed earlier (cf. BC171), and I didn’t think to turn it off. Glad it chose me. It opens quasi-classical, pizzicato woodwinds and soprano voices, before they’re quickly blown up and replaced by cyborg approximations. Those dance around for a while, and set the tone—high processing and filtering are here to stare the natural world down.