BC193 - Five Mixes: July 2026
Trusting your ear and your eye pays dividends
Azzi on the Beat, via Dour Festival
What are my open tabs? On Sunday, July 26, at 2:35 p.m., they were:
Gmail inbox, always open.
Ray Padgett interviewing G.E. Smith about his time playing with Bob Dylan. I’ve read it before and am reading it again for pleasure.
The All About Jazz review of the new Ma Rainey box set, which looks amazing. Next to it is a tab with the official Black Swan Records webpage about the box.
A year-old piece from Racket that pertains to something I’m writing for them, next to their main feature from this week, about the history of fishing on Lake Superior.
The Prisoner, the British TV show, is on Criterion Channel and I have the landing page for it open.
The Five Mixes playlist on SoundCloud for the selection below. I am playing one of them as I type, followed by two pages of information about DJs or sets in that playlist; further over is Substack edit page for this entry.
MixesDB page about an older set I am writing about for a different edition of Five Mixes.
For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music, episode five, on YouTube, paused mid-episode. They’ve finally, literally halfway into the series, gotten to classical music!
Facebook followed by Bluesky; always open.
You can hear all five sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.
deep creep, RA.1047 (Resident Advisor, July 12)
In partial response to where and when the mix was recorded: “I overthink mixes.” I knew I liked this DJ! An aesthetic that connects, as Henry Ivry says on the RA page, “Perlon to Fade to Mind via a pitstop in 4AD” is just going to do that, I think. This one doesn’t sound overthought, though—just carefully considered, including its length, which strikes me as a hat-tip to the format mixes like this one used to arrive on, regularly, in shops. In conclusion, I am proud I didn’t use the “m” word once.
DJextreme, 1993 Hardcore Jungle [Jungletrain Mix EXT109] (Hardscore; orig. July 13, 2008; upl. July 13, 2026)
Sometimes when I see all the re-uploads that I sometimes grab and talk about, I feel like at least a few of my readers cast a skeptical eye, and I understand it. I used to think Greil Marcus was literally just repeating stuff when I would read his Top Ten column every month or whatever it was. Then I read the books collecting them front to back and what did you know: He talked about the same artists a lot, but he seldom discussed the same works, and he almost never did so in the same way. Themes were constant, but so was variation. I try to do that here as well, but I won’t claim that I always succeed.
What I will say is that when I come upon something like this—something already old when it goes up, but that grabs me and seems to tell a different version of a story I think I know—it’s sometimes an opportunity to talk about things I haven’t quite gotten to say elsewhere. Either that, or I have to try and articulate what, precisely, is new about music that was fifteen years old when the DJ played it, never mind eighteen years in the past as a performance. Or, at least, what differentiates it from other performances.
Maybe the difference is in the DJ style itself. DJextreme does a lot of fast cross-cutting, more of a regular feature in DJing of this type before digital came in; even if these tracks are indeed coming from digital sources, the way he mixes them evokes something closer to the recordings’ age. But there’s a real level of squealing excitement here that catches me up, and that also strikes me as retrospective in itself. I listen to loads of sets of this stuff made during this period, and lord knows they offer things that nobody who wasn’t in the room can precisely replicate.
Just because the Hardscore site offers a way to do it, I searched to see how many of these tracks were also on pirate sets he’s uploaded over the years. Short answer: most, but not often. Only six showed up on more than one other set: “Beyond Bass” (on nineteen sets), “The Brain Records Crew” (six), “In the Shadow Part III (The Stalker Remix)” (four) were much in the lead. Five more had one apiece. The rest, six of them, had not appeared there at all. And in a few cases, those mixes were also by DJextreme, looking back.
What it means in his particular case, in 2008, was that the DJ located and utilized stuff pitched to this particular dizzy level to make something with. It wasn’t just whatever was new—by definition it couldn’t be, right, even if all this is what the DJ had acquired that week. Even so, the dice are been rolled, the cards still shuffled, and the result is an hour that’s precisely dialed in. It’s an argument that this stuff maintains its shine even when it isn’t the well-known stuff—especially then.
Dorisburg, Zenaari Mix 027 (July 16)
I’ll use the “m” word here, then: This is an hour of classic minimalism served numerous ways, all of them wispy and deep: fourth-world, systems-music, deep listening, spa bath OST, you name it. They form a gorgeous line together, instantly ingratiating but also standing outside the room even as fill it with sound. RIYL, I dunno, DJ Marcelle, Jim O’Rourke, and Lou, though it’s as different from those as each of them are from each other, as nature intended.
Akira, Acid Chess Club (Om Radio, London, July 17)
Not gonna lie—my eye was drawn secondhand to the psychedelic op-art Om Radio logo, which led me to the archive, which led me to this title. (Granted, there’s also a DJ named Acid Chess Club in Australia; but that’s the show’s name here.) My hunch played right: this show is whimsical, psychedelically tinged, moving along the ledges of downtempo-D&B-electro-IDM-indie-experimental-fusion-whatever. A cloud nimbus seems to follow the tracks around, whatever their point of origin. A listening show rather than a danceathon, sure, but who can dance and play chess at the same time, never mind on acid?
Azzi on the Beat, Nyege Nyege (Kiosk Radio, July 19)
I’m cheating a little with this one—it’s not a DJ set but a live set, all the material the act’s own, something I generally don’t cover here as a matter of principle. (When I say “DJ sets,” I try to mean it.) But I was already hooked when I found out, and my rule is to include things my readers should know about. In particular, I’m thinking of some of my more jam-ward colleagues, people who like in-person, in-the-moment jamming, especially if it’s a little crunchy, and are wide open on what kind of jamming it might be. And I assume that it being a performance rather than a set might entice folks who already really like Nyenge Nyenge’s output—because in essence, that’s what it is, a live album under another guise.
“Azzi on the Beat presents the unmistakable sound of Mara an emerging genre of music rooted in the streets of Lagos, Nigeria,” goes the write-up, in part: “Mara reimagines local sonic traditions for a global audience.” Heavily percussive and highly disjunctive, the tunes weaved as densely into the musical fabric as the rhythms, very highly pitched at the top and in love with vocal processing, and harnessing the 303 like a lariat, this is hypnotic at the start and berserk by the end. Well done yet again, Nyenge Nyenge Tapes. Also, as I said here not all that long ago, “Mixes are releases now.”
Further listening and reading
deep creep: BC091, BC110, BC164, BC189
DJextreme: BC139
Hardscore: BC057, BC117, BC127, BC168, BC174
1993: BC007, BC014, BC017, BC039, BC068, BC082, BC086, BC099, BC105, BC118, BC136, BC161, BC166