BC186 - Five Mixes: May 2026
“And some Florida breaks—shocking!”
As mentioned last time, I’ve got more coming from May and early June, starting with these—a clutch I’ve wanted to tell you about longer than most. You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
DJ Marfox, Live at Expert Death, Ormside Projects London 17.01.25 (upl. May 6)
Freakin’ relentless. It’s cheeky and it also hurtles; there’s as much playful noise-qua-noise on these tracky tunes as there are tunes, per se. The beats-first (and often only) quality here does not make it monolithic, because the rhythms themselves are interrupted constantly by the DJ’s ministrations—stuttering a bar with the push of a button, quick-cutting or undercutting with lightning precision to juice another, layering the unalike yet compatible almost nonchalantly. That endless refinement, gregariously applied, keeps the whole thing bubbling.
Patrick Russell, IT.podcast.s15e04: No Way Back 2025 (Interdimensional Transmissions, upl. May 7)
Patrick Russell, Sound Metaphors TV—Downtempo, Techno, Acid | Live from Berlin (May 21)
One of my favorite days working on The Underground Is Massive involved spending three hours with Patrick Russell at his Brooklyn apartment, piecing through old flyers and probing his resilient memory. The book is hardly the only place some of those quotes went: see also my Motor oral history and my EXAT oral history. Someday I will post a fuller Q&A—he’s a very thoughtful and rigorous thinker, and you can hear it whenever he gets on the decks.
These two sets play together like a straight line, but they’re actually not too alike. The No Way Back mix is a derange-making party rocker—probably not in that order—that enacts its setting (partying in Detroit, with Detroiters, as well as with everyone else) to a tee: sending “Trapped” through heavy glitches, for example. His hour on Sound Metaphors TV isn’t as widely expansive, but that focus suits Russell’s temperament. The tracks have a heavily sci-fi tinge to them, almost post-punky, even when the music is closer to the chittering undertones that I also enjoy in e.g. recent Untitled 909 mixes.
Jubilee, Magic City (The Lot Radio, May 20)
The DJ talks a lot on this one, which is part of its appeal—not usually the case around here, mind. What makes this an exception is how much fun she’s audibly having—how comfortable the setting is—greeting listeners from her home county in Florida, shouting out her collaborators. And it’s grafted onto an hour of new tunes a great selector can’t wait to show us: fuzzy-voiced early-house redux, skinny-tinny electro, and “some Florida breaks—shocking!” Community radio: yes.
Icarus Redux, Charas 046: Persian (May 23)
The DJ is a friend, Sarvesh Ramprakash, formerly of Minneapolis and other places, currently in Washington, D.C. I’ve seen and heard him absolutely slay in a few rooms; this set, from the opening night of Communion, in Minneapolis, five years ago, is a good example. But I hadn’t connected with a handful I’d tried in recent years, until this one, whose mission statement is: “A short essay on Iranian liberation in the shadow of nuclear war.” The music is uneasily oceanic, the FX and overlays unsettling, the spoken excerpts didactic and powerful. I also note this tag line: “[ai] - AI-extracted or -synthesized,” applied to seven items. This may, then, be the first musical performance I admire that credits AI usage—of which I am aware—thus far.