BC180 - Five Mixes: Early 2026

Wine bars and alternate universes

Madlib—photo by Carl Pocket

I’ve been busy, not least with this look back for Racket at the life, career, and impact of Conrad Sverkerson, the rightly legendary stage manager at First Avenue (that’s a gift link). I have another long look back with loads of interviews coming up for the same venue in a few weeks, as well, and some of that will overlap more directly with my DJ-mix remit here, so stay tuned.

You can hear all of the sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.

Carlos Souffront, Live @ B.P.T. Jan 2026 (Bar Part Time, San Francisco, rec. January 24, upl. February 25)

Right at the top of the Instagram bio for the corner nitery where Souffront played this loose, limber, lengthy amble from back in the winter, is this quote: “Probably the best wine bar in the world.” I’ll have to take their word, but this ridiculous four-and-a-half-hours crate-dig makes the case that it might be on its selections alone. Mixing’s a little rough early on, but it feels here like just more scene-setting; stuff skips and that’s life, and besides he isn’t worked up to getting the floor moving yet. But he will—oh, will he.

Souffront going long is pretty automatic, and this one was nudged along twice over: Michael McKinney included it in his February-March mixes roundup for the newly relaunched POW. He calls this one “wry, playful, and wild-eyed”: yes. And in March, Brittany Denison interviewed Carlos for Cleveland Review of Books, a sharp and thorough roundelay she keynotes with this note from a party: “Souffront played what I recognized as Detroit techno, but funkier and melty. ‘Wow,’ I mouthed to a friend. He whisper-shouted into my ear, ‘He’s a cheesemonger too.’”

A mere recapitulation of the tracklist seems inadvisable a few different ways—the power of surprise and also of recognition are paramount to hearing it. Given the length, I cannot imagine a lot of people playing it more than once, but I can also absolutely see somebody doing that, myself included, though not this time. And once is all you really need in order to fully savor a smorgasbord. Especially one that favors the best kind of collectorama—the sorts of rarities or alternates that illuminate every other part, that make explicit the kind of alternate universe a DJ as learned as Souffront regularly makes in a set.

In a mix full of great moments, my favorite is the original twelve-inch “Jenifa (Taught Me).” Just as resonant, given the action in my feed from numerous friends who’ve seen the Whigs on tour this spring, is the weird dub-house edit of “Milez Is Ded.” But over and over, he finds canonical-ish stuff and wrings new outcomes from them, or at least introduces us to them. Plus, this is a friggin’ wine bar. Nobody cares about the volume tweaks, and you won’t either.

And hey, what do you know? B.P.T. also has a podcast. Stay tuned.

Souzo, Hyperterranean #034 (LYL Radio [Lyon, France], February 19)

I’ve mentioned Souzo here recently (cf. BC170), and this one is more straightforwardly psytrance-inflected techno, less art-school and more charging, than that one. That means it’s more powerful and concentrated. Menacing but fun, with overtones that disturb the synapses in useful ways. At two-third-ish point the long line seems to snap, but then it rises from below again, newly emboldened.

Martha, NTS Radio (March 13)

This is one of those shows that jumped into my ear space unbidden, and stayed there because I became intrigued—such an outlier that I didn’t collect it at an earlier time, suspicious of my own experience. It’s easy to hear why: This is a radio show, not a mix, per se, so it only builds so much and so far before its back-announcements signal a reset. But each of its genre hashtags (techno, bass, dubstep) do indeed build, for up to twenty minutes at a time, woo-hoo. Only at the end do we get anything like a theme: all the tracks were produced by women. I’ll take it.

Vainqueur, ITPS125 (Ilian Tape, March 18)

“A true pioneer of dub techno,” goes the notably brief bio on the mix page. That doesn’t mean René Löwe always mixes cleanly—there are some fluffs here. I’ve noted it before (cf. BC145), but older DJs making an increasing number of audible errors in their mixing feels like a trend, not a coincidence, a front-faced human touch that spits in the face of AI. Most of what he plays isn’t dub or even necessarily even techno, but not buying advertisement at face value is also a form of backlash. Highlight, as it is in all settings: “Altered States.”

n/a, NTS Guide to: Madlib’s Beat Konducta (NTS Radio, May 7)

This is as close to a gimme as it gets. Since falling hard for Quasimoto’s The Unseen in 2000, I have time for anything he makes. (Sleeper favorite: Strong Arm Steady & Mitchy Slick’s “Two Pistols,” 2010, a record whose clatter drove my girlfriend at the time nuts.) And this introduction is only to one series, and thus confined to 2005-09 only, but its huge, rapturous sweep—or maybe I mean its suite-like movement—is as good an introduction as exists to his work in toto. Even when it’s disjunctive, it flows.