BC190 - Five Mixes: Cool-Down, April-July 2026
Battling the heatwave(s)
Ciel (via Bandcamp)
You need it, I need it—ambient and downtempo sets to combat the insane heat so many of us have been experiencing of late. If you haven’t, congratulations, you lucky duck! I hadn’t considered a whole grouping of these until last week, when I briefly went without air-conditioning. That’s something I use sparingly: I’m fortunate to have good insulation, so it tends to stay cool for a while. But when the northern Minnesota wildfires started blowing smoke toward the Twin Cities and rendered the air nearly unbreathable, my AC was useless: it doesn’t filter the air, just cools it, and I’d rather sweat than poison myself. To paraphrase my colleague Dara Moskowitz-Grumdahl: “Minnesota: We’re Number One!” Happily, it passed. But ugh. Stay cool, friends.
Also, the debut of a new feature! For a while now, I’ve been using parenthetical cf.’s to denote previous entries about specific DJs. But this time around, in three of the five cases, it would have looked more obnoxious and interruptive than I prefer. Hence, the newly installed Further Listening, at the end of each post, with short links in case you like any or all of these sets in particular. There’s a lot to listen to here, just saying.
You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
D. Pain, My Eyes Glaze Over: Mego’s First Phase—1994-2005 (NTS Radio, April 9)
Part of the NTS Supporter Radio series of deep-dive one-offs from listeners—is this “ambient”? Not exactly: too unsettling, too weird, too noisy, too microtonal, or at least it goes places where “tone” isn’t the point. This hour-long version of Editions Mego’s deep catalog of experimental electronic glitches and alien refractions (Discogs) is strangely soothing, emphasis on the former word. If you can’t beat the heat, you can at least program something whose timbres compete with the sound of the cooling units and win.
Vicki Siolos, Bright Patterns (The Lot Radio, April 30)
It takes thirty-seven minutes for the first beat to enter, and when it does it’s a surprise, not because it’s abrupt but because its entrance means that all the liquid tension had been leading up to something. Prior to that, the liquid tension had been an end in itself. It stays so even after the pulse’s input.
Ciel, Outsiders: Understory—Liquidub (Kiosk Radio, May 10)
Not a dance set and not a showcase, like her trip-hop RA Greenhouse Session from a while back—but the one I like more. Concentrating, as she says in the intro, on “small and deep and underground” sound to be found “on the forest floor,” this one is all aquatic all the time. Piano chords submerge just enough to cover their eyes. Bass parts float through the ether and/or anchor the waves. Sea breezes spritz by. Oxygen tanks bubble audibly to the surface over reconstituted R&B. As it goes, the drums get heavier and then lay back, to make way for the subs.
Lou, Lithium Radio (Paris, July 11)
A humdinger. It’s labeled #triphop, but by the time it gets to that point, it’s gone through a stretch so shattering it obviates anything in its path. By turns grave and hypnotic and knife’s-edge and blistering, the common severity of the first hour is what sticks. The overtly experimental stuff here can make the Mego set sound like it’s laying back. Somehow, this buffers the skin of my soul (HT: Bob) so acutely that it acts as a decompression, though I know my readers’ ears can vary. I miss certain friends when I encounter something this out and this chakra-realigning. Even after the beats start to fall where you expect them to, not much else does.
Erika, ITPS129 (Ilian Tape, July 15)
Not unlike her February Lot Radio set, this was, I said at the time, “cloudily avant-garde and hypnotic,” and also, yay, “weird.” Those are basic truths here, as well, but this is stitched more tightly and closely than that one was—and also overtly experimental at all times. Of this selection, it may be the most purely lovely, the one you want to come down to.
Further listening and reading
NTS Supporter Radio: BC050, BC066
Vicki Siolos, Bright Patterns: BC069, BC113, BC178
Ciel: BC016, BC035, BC067, BC113
Lithium Radio (Paris): BC170