BC181 - Five Mixes: April-May 2026
A near-four-hour mix-of-the-year candidate, and more!
via MixesDB’s page for the Shhhhh set
I’ve been working on some very interview-heavy assignments, which means time taken away from sets in favor of re-playing interviews to tighten up transcripts. There’s other work afoot as well. But hearing the first item below is what prompted this edition. I’d planned to try and get through a longer list of possible before making selections, but I had to stop myself from sending the four-hour set that kicks it off to more than one friend rather than do it this way. But there was already plenty in the chamber.
I freely admit that the David Feldman set slotted into my mind easily thanks to my concurrent reading of Barry Walters’ Mighty Real, the richest and most eye-opening music book I’ve read since . . . Melvin Gibbs’ How Black Music Took Over the World, the one right before it, which also really rewired my ears and mind. (My interview with Gibbs is at this gift link.) It’s a little like whiplash, honestly. More here on Mighty Real in due time.
You can hear four of these sets (with a link to the fifth) at this SoundCloud playlist.
Shhhhh, Live @ B.P.T. April 2025 (upl. April 22)
Nearly four hours that never stop giving. Deeply patient, crazily variable, dialed the fuck in, this is the most ridiculously fun wormhole I’ve been to for a while now.
Because it is so long, minimal, tweaky, and insane, it bears noting that I first heard this one absolutely sober. It knocked me sideways on the merits. My mind was framed quite differently the next time, when a friend came by and we grooved to its first three-quarters while catching up and diving into Prince lore. The second time was more enhanced, but it was not more real, because the first time it ended, I literally thought, “I want to hear that again right now.” I’m glad I waited for a riper time. But I would not have blamed myself, or anyone, for playing it again instantly.
For me, there was a very specific moment that kicked it into that area. A little over an hour in (I won’t spoil just when), he mixes in a track I know and play, “Şenlik.” (As I’ve noted [cf. BC002], I avoid listing artists so as not to feed copyright bots.) It is likely that Shhhhh and I both heard it on the same Turkish jazz-funk compilation. A fleet roundelay between piano, saxophone, and drums, springy in rhythm and melody alike, bluesy but not downcast, and deeply rhythmic, it’s a small masterpiece. Follow my clues and track it down, you won’t regret it for a second. I’ve played it as is, with non-dance music. It gets comments. Shhhhh plays it not just alongside techno, but as techno. It doesn’t jar in the slightest. It slots right in, gives the proceedings a new texture, spritzes the room. Sometimes what you need in a techno set is a jazz trio playing at 152 BPM. If I hadn’t pointed it out, it’s not likely that you’d even notice it.
Except that here, the listener notices everything—here’s minimal techno with a lot going on, and not just theoretically. The empty spaces are cavernous at times—the better to notice the in-your-face audio contouring. The DJ’s pacing and selection are almost merciless; no two tracks are alike but they lock so hard together it’s as if they were all built for this specific set. He keeps it up right till the very end. In the final fifteen minutes, the hypnotically shifting landscapes give way to giddier tones, like locking eyes with the person you hadn’t quite seen all night but now see whole. It’s lithe and curvaceous, its edges highlighted by disco-ball color, its morsels of tune like oranges at 6 a.m.
Tsaifan b2b Peace Ramen, No Signal 100 (May 1)
Hashtag: #newyorktechno. From SC writeup: “For our 100th release: a mix entirely of New York tracks from New York producers we love. 💙” That’s thirty-two tracks over an hour and forty-eight minutes, a generous showcase that almost doubles as a tourist incentive. Good news: per this iteration, New York techno is weird and seemingly in touch with the wider world. Or at least it’s not terribly doctrinaire; the “No Scrubs” edit summarizes it but the tendency is not limited to that track. There’s a some delectably severe minimalism, particles of sound sent through and made steelier by the filters. Some tracks are allowed their slow fades before the music starts up again—in the case I’m thinking of, by something as glitch-noisy as stompy, by my way of hearing.
Ada, Letter from Nowhere #2 (Pampa, May 8)
Telling a story through records would, indeed, seem to be a Pampa Records guiding spirit; it’s DJ Koze’s label, for starters (cf. BCR003). This one seems to come from some overheated afternoon-after (“morning” having been slept through) when you want something to engage you, but from a remove. The instrumentation is reliably soft-focus throughout, but the beats get louder. “Minimal” is an understatement—”weightless” might be more like it. Two words from the SC description will do: “intimate and elusive.”
Kieran Press Reynolds, Ethereal Mix 105 (Ethereal Grooves, May 8)
Press-Reynolds is one of the only vid-clip music critics I can stand to watch; moreover, they are consistently enchanting and often hilarious in a deadpan laid-back way that underscores the frequent “yikes” moments. And I’d always kind of hoped they would do something like this: an hour of the outré stuff that is Press-Reynolds’ specialty, hyper-futuristic and aggressively digital (cf. BC100). But here, all that forbidding-zone stuff comes across as . . . cute! Friendly! Ridiculously abstract in places, of course, but when was this ever a problem—OK, apart from one reader—around here (cf. BC046)? The component parts are whatever Press-Reynolds says they are. I say that added up, this has a lot of easily recognizable charm, new world or old.
DJ David Feldman, Winter of 77—Disco 20 (Jim Hopkins Remaster) (SFDPS; upl. May 22)
Not every night is a great night, but sometimes the good nights tell us just as much, maybe even more. This one has real charm, as well as coming to us from a real hinge point: Disco (and then pop) was about to become permanently automated. Up to this point, various synthesizers and even metronomes had featured on plenty of records that discos played—itself another hinge point: “disco” in 1977 would be cemented on the public mind as a specific musical style, a real in-or-out proposition. It was high-end, not lo-fi. It used electronics fully coequally with live playing, rather than being coloring or a building block for hand-to-instrument arrangements. This was the first quarter of the year, when none of that had happened yet. You know-and-love plenty of the picks, the early-days-of-slip-cueing mixing has its period charm, and late in the set, a real revelation—proof, first, that one of the most overplayed (and perfect) records of all time really did receive contemporary disco club play, and second, that Carol Douglas covered it, too.