BC176 - Five Mixes: March & April 2026
A rock-star Essential Mix from a surprising source—and more!
Voices from the Lake (Bandcamp)
I’ve been taking to writing out schedules for my own listening on the back of the pages of an A24 desktop calendar I got for Christmas. (Thanks again, Paulette!) I like to use what’s around me and making something secondary of the pages has fed into my OCD tendencies and my creative ones: some of their imagery will fuel collages to come. I often post those daily lists—which are sometimes slightly askew of what I actually get to on a given day, though not criminally so, I always catch up—to my Instagram or Bluesky accounts. Also recently, I’ve been subdividing some older SoundCloud playlists into potential posts. You’ll see those in due time.
One of the listening lists includes a live performance from last year that Piotr Orlov put in my view: Cécile McLorin Salvant at Blue Note Tokyo doing “Oh Snap—I Feel Love,” a medley. The first half is the title song of her most recent album, the second half is a song we all know. And she performs it, and not as a jazz singer turning a pop song or a dance song into jazz. This isn’t a mere adaptation—the quartet is faithfully covering “I Feel Love,” according to “I Feel Love”’s rules. Even playing to a grid, the musicians—keyboardist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, drummer Kyle Pool—are clearly live players used to continually shifting their phrasing. It’s amazing—a landmark, even.
You can hear all five sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.
Voices from the Lake, Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, March 21)
I was sorely tempted to start just sending this one direct to people (and did in one case) because it struck me immediately as a blockbuster, in a way that confused me. The scope of it is immense—even capped at two hours, even as it never cracks a smile or breaks a sweat. The tracks are rich with detail and are arrayed with real power; you can look at the tracklist but it will still move you around in ways you aren’t expecting, even if you spoil the surprise that trots out @ 84:00.
It is, of course, truly fascinating to me that this is not just Voices from the Lake in the mix but that it’s them doing the friggin’ BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix, but that it’s them absolutely owning the Essential Mix. It’s practically a rock star set, comparable to Nine Inch Noize, except for minimal techno and nineties breakbeat. I know—I didn’t think those things would be conducive to a rock-star set, either, and I definitely didn’t think if one came it’d be from Voices from the Lake, but live and learn.
The set is basically constructed as three movements—the first quarter, the middle half, the final quarter, give or take. The opening half-hour or so has a slow-crawl build, nature taking its course but definitely gaining mass. The last half-hour is airily and joyously downtempo. And the middle is sinuous and detailed, arty and full of production detail while still pitched for a big screen, so to speak. Sometimes it’s dissociative, but that’s an honest mode right now.
Doubi B2B Missy Da Kunt, La Creole (Rinse France, April 3)
Brazilian-Jamaican dancehall-plus from French radio, played by back-to-back DJs who care a lot less about perfect blends than I do, and make something of even the sole imperfect one; the rest are mainly things I don’t see coming all. But every one works. Just when I think the vocals are too slick, there’s a slight handmade shift in the rhythm that builds suspense during the few seconds it occurs. Gauzy intros are given extra rosin thanks to the DJ’s hard spin-back. The energy in the studio—the DJ talk-over, the singers and MCs sitting in, the manipulation of tracks—springs out of the speakers. It doesn’t supersede them—the tracks have a lot going on individually and as a group, in particular a sampled string quartet as heady and humid as Italian library music (cf. BC174).
Fcukers, The Cover Mix (Mixmag, April 6)
I’m glad I played the mix before I played the album, and I’m even more glad I played both. They differ in noticeable and interesting ways (as, you know, an album and mix might). The album is buzzier, synthier, and of a new wavier bent. The mix is—and please don’t mistake what I am about to say for a complaint—a goddamn hour of filter-house, as an ideas as much as a sound, finding some congruent but surprising wrinkles in the concept. But in short, I was surprised by the mix even without having even heard the album yet, which is some kind of triumph of messaging. What connects them? The voiceover at the mix’s beginning, about a couple making time for each other, from a duo that is a couple, is rather moving.
basic chanel, Untitled 909 (Refuge Worldwide, April 13)
A self-described “downtempo, trip-hop and R&B special,” and right on time. As also indicated by that 85th-minute drop in the Voices from the Lake mix—not to mention the recent mixes by Ciel for RA, as well as the Massive Attack/Tom Waits and Boards of Canada tracks, trip-hop is back! But this one really got the mood right, in particular for including both “Confide in Me” (I have long dreamed of hearing it in a set—and playing the Abbey Road Sessions version in one) and “Rebirth of Slick,” both of them crucial links I hadn’t quite put together myself and are now firmly implanted in that sphere.
Jenö, Live at Hazy Daze Conspiracy (Dallas, rec. June 25, 1994; upl. by HD Mixtapes, April 24)
Sometimes I will hear older things for the first time because they’ve just been uploaded—to YouTube, in particular. That was the case with the fifth item below, the most recent to my ear even as it’s over thirty years old. I did a little digging and, lo and behold, I don’t see anything else of its like, on MixesDB or Discogs or Google.
And a find is what it is. There’s a fizzy-lifting quality about this one, absolutely redolent of the film of psychedelia that touched so much San Francisco DJing from the mid-nineties, even if the set was recorded at a party in Dallas.
In fact, the first few minutes belong not to the Brit but rather to the end of a previous set, by (I assume) local opener Luke Sardello, which is mostly here (and is unheard by me). Actually, that little bit of disco Sardello finishes with offers an effective contrast to what Jenö does here—I was actually kind of hoping to see just how he would extend that particular line of ripely colorful groove. In fact, what Jenö does is go daringly, artfully the opposite way—without breaking the line, but by altering it entirely while making clear its links to what came before, historically and in real time.