BC178 - Five Mixes: 2020

Listening back to a lost year

Martyn, via Ilian Tape

I’ve alluded to this a few times here, but it recently occurred to me that it might be worth listening back through a few sets in what I consider a “lost year” in my listening: 2020, lockdown year. Even though DJs were stuck at home with nothing to do but make sets, I tuned out. It’s the weird purist in me—if it wasn’t chronicling a living and live party culture in some way, my interest died out. I spent months not even looking at SoundCloud.

Part of it was purely professional. I was writing stuff for The New Yorker and instead of previewing now-nonexistent events, we pivoted to reviewing releases, which still had a direct pipeline that live events did not. I was thrown, because I hadn’t monitored new releases for a long time at that point, but I made do. Doing more of that meant less of the other; I still listened a lot. But what I listened to in 2020 mixes-wise would have been surpassed in total by two busy months in a previous year.