BC177 - Five Mixes: April 2026
How the future contains the past (special guest appearance: the past)
My recent habit of finding a YouTube of one of the sets (where it’s also available on SoundCloud, quite often) and using it as the header continues apace. It’s got use value; it saves me the hassle of sourcing photos: win-win.
I was happy to see Keith Harris, my main editor at Racket, say nice things about my pieces for them in a recent editors’ email to subscribers. Gift links: I wrote about Melvin Gibbs’s astonishing How Black Music Took Over the World, a book everybody who cares about the topic at all should read, and I spoke with David Roth, the Ken Burns of Twin Cities punk, who is a quote machine. A pleasure to write both, each perfectly suited to the outlet. The editors’ email also pointed out Jay Boller’s feature on the booming local economy for Twin Cities cover bands. Keith wrote in part:
This week’s coverage obviously had a historical bent, but Racket does not live in the past. I forbid it! . . . Basically, I’m here to encourage you to keep your ears open. Though I turned 56 this year, my desire to hear new music hasn’t dimmed a bit—really, why would it? Curiosity is a lifetime habit.
Hear, hear! I mentioned recently that I put together a slew of potential posts based on some mouthwatering sets I’ve saved up over the years, ripe for revisiting. And yet, having just solidified this edition’s makeup but before I’ve really begun writing about them, I’m already scheming on the next edition of stuff from the play pile. And the edition after that. Maybe even a few more. That play pile just looks more mouthwatering than the old stuff, honestly. I want to hear it all right now. Maybe I’ll do that before I get to what’s below. And maybe I’ll diligently and with pleasure go back through these five. Maybe I’ll listen to something else. Never say never, and/or it never ends.
Another thing: about 20 percent of that list of mixes were made years ago and recently digitized and uploaded, just like one of the goodies below. But as with last time (cf. BC176), it’s not just a cool old set but one not otherwise findable online. As Harris also notes, the past continues to be a bounty, as even the most future-forward of us know. The endless enlarging of the whole picture is what drives the present tense, and the future. And, of course, the future always contains the past.
You can hear four of these sets (with links to the fifth) at this SoundCloud playlist.
Bok Bok, The Lot Radio (April 6)
Paloma Colombe b2b Tatyana Jane, Rinse France (April 12)
“Grown and sexy club pressure” is how Londoner Bok Bok advertises his hour. Translated from the French, the back-to-back’s squib trumpets “An hour of cross-pollinated selections—free from genre boundaries—ranging from bass and Jersey club, and sprinkled with Latin American vibes.” As the Lot show’s verbiage suggests, its roots are in UK garage, with some rave synths peeking in near the end. It’s on the more minimalist end of that, with heavy subs and deep kicks—which brings us to the Frenchwomen, who do the same thing, only with a filled-in sound picture with antic goings on and a greater array of serrated riffs. You won’t mistake the one for the other, but they have things to say to each another.
Erika, Sound Metaphors TV—Electro | Live from Berlin (April 7)
Yep, I’m a fan (cf. BC048, BC171), and yep, this is another set that seems to beam in from a better place than this one, a place where the sky is aqueous and the scenery is beguiling even when it unsettles. This time around it takes a while to go from the one to the other—the progression is gradual but noticeable. It starts out plainly beautiful, but by the middle you’re smack in the twilight zone. By the end it’s bubbly and weird, like fingertips on the edge of the wineglass. Yep, I’m a fan.
DJ Dan, Live at DNA Lounge (S.F.) 7-12-02 (Jim Hopkins Remaster) (SFDPS, upl. April 15)
Remember this guy? Of course you do (cf. BC169a, BC169b). Jim Hopkins, half of Electroliners with DJ Dan, is no stranger around these parts, either (cf. BC051, BC121, et al.) DJ Dan, of course, is a mixtape guy who became a mix CD guy, but this one has not been online in decades. “Captured by Jose Toro from a Real Audio live stream from DNA Lounge (S.F.) in 2002,” Hopkins writes on the mix page. Considering the number of sets of this type—in particular, the RealAudio streams of S.F.’s Beta Lounge (cf. this old NPR piece)—that need cleaning up, we can hope someone with a similar interest in remixing/remastering old sets as Hopkins makes a project of it. In the meantime, Hopkins himself is now, in his words, “searching for rare and one-off recordings” of DJ Dan’s sets to add to what looks to become one-stop listening for his entire recorded-set opus. (You can reach him here.)
Yet I can’t lie: I’ve also been thinking about the old friend who was especially turned off by DJ Dan’s sets circa 1999: “hard and unmelodic,” in her phrase, followed not long thereafter by the much more vivid “BOIING BOING BOING DUNK DUNK DUNK BOING BOING BOING horrid.” I respectfully disagreed in the moment, but listening to some of his mixes from that era, I could see her point. Part of it is that she hates filters and I don’t. But this is also a period-specific nettle for both of us: house music, and house mixes, in the years surrounding the millennium are often filtered to death, or at least more than is necessary.
You can hear that on the 1998 Moonshine CD Beats 4 Freaks and his December 1999 Essential Mix alike. The filters do get tiresome fast. Yet I don’t hear that nearly as much on the 2000 Moonshine CD Another Late Night (on Moonshine, not part of that downtempo series); it does that sort of thing, just really well. The same thing applies to this Beta Lounge set from July 2002—which, make no mistake, is filter disco loops ultra-supreme. Yet it’s fetching; it works. You can sense the idealized version of the room he’s playing it to, even if he was doing it in front of a couple-dozen people. Often, it goes full-on tribal, Tenaglia-style. That can have its limitations, too. But here it’s akin to the gym rat on the floor flexing their muscles mid-set and being hypnotized by it, for once. And if the filters are still heavy here, they’re also fizzy and lifting.
Jim O’Rourke, NTS Radio (April 16)
Experimental music: ahhhh. An hourlong Whitman’s Sampler: gorgeous minimalism meets grinding minimalism meets skree meets glitch meets jokes, the latter at their best when reconstructing and/or dunking on AOR, which happens a couple times. In sum, the kind of mix your learned friend once made for you, if you were lucky.