Different spaces breed different vibes. One of the wonderful things about electronic music is how adaptable it is, and this month’s selection of mixes samples all kinds of contexts, from a modular-synth set in a Seattle living room—the electronic equivalent of punk's DIY house shows—to a dark ambient takeover of a 360-degree festival tent. Two different sides of Los Angeles turn up: one a Coachella downtime session, as off-the-cuff as the occasion calls for, and the other a drifting dérive through the city’s experimental music history. Lisbon and Buenos Aires both put their stamps on club culture—and a jumping club set, complete with crowd noise, serves as a reminder of why coming together in a crowded room is sometimes the best way to experience the power of the beat.
Four Tet + Daphni + Ben UFO – Dublab Set
With nothing but time on their hands between Coachella weekends, Four Tet, Daphni (aka Caribou's Dan Snaith in his dance-music guise), and Ben UFO rolled their record bags over to Dublab’s Los Angeles studios and mixed up a bracingly freeform two-hour set. It’s anyone’s guess who is leading the mix at any given time, though it’s a fair bet that Four Tet’s behind the Indian classical music that kicks it all off, and it sounds a lot like Ben UFO’s guiding hand through a segment of bruising-but-oddball house that occupies the middle span. The first 45 minutes keep things restrained—highlights include Merdah’s remarkably rare “School Boy Crush,” a 1994 hip-hop cut that sounds like Philly’s answer to the Native Tongues—but the second half of the set, heavy on skippy speed garage, house classics, and even some glowering dub techno, doesn’t let up until right before the end. That’s when they sink deep into pneumatic soul and disco, as though reserving strength for their second stint in the Indio desert.
Avalon Emerson – Live at Printworks London March ’17
Podcasts are all well and fine, but nothing beats the energy of a DJ set recorded in an actual club setting, and this one has energy to spare. The occasional burst of crowd noise is a nice bonus, but even without those wish-you-were-here snapshots, Avalon Emerson’s set would still leave no doubt as to the vibe in the room where it all went down. She keeps things moving, switching between breakbeat house, electro syncopations, and straight-ahead chuggers, and she’s not afraid to make even more radical shifts: About 40 minutes in, the beat drops out to make room for a hypnotic edit of Björk’s “Unravel,” which she slows considerably over the course of a minute or so. And the set’s peppered with surprises, like a brief snippet of the “Little Fluffy Clouds” a cappella or, even more remarkably, a heavy-ass remix of Shamir’s “On the Regular.” Trance keys, jungle breaks, Ashley Judd’s “Nasty Woman” poem from the Women’s March—this set really does have everything.
Kelly Lee Owens – Solid Steel Radio Show 31/3/2017
Kelly Lee Owens’ Solid Steel set feels a little like a roadmap to her recently released debut album: You can hear hints of her vocal style in John Talabot’s swirly “So Will Be Now,” while her way of layering chords, foggy but forceful, partly traces back to her friend Daniel Avery, represented here with his mix of Audion’s “Sky.” What might be most surprising is her fondness for Tiga, who turns up three (!) times; his louche vocal style feels a million miles away from the Arthur Russell-isms of Owens’ debut. However, it turns out that her productions so far have only told half the story: Where her album leans toward spongy textures and subtle details, her selections here are surprisingly full-on. It’s enough to make you hear her comparatively tough tunes, like “C.B.M.,” in a new light, as midway points between the extremes of her tastes.
Veronica Vasicka – Mixmag in Session
Dark drama is the order of the day in Minimal Wave chief Veronica Vasicka’s set for Mixmag’s podcast series. Her drums ooze barely concealed menace; her intensity is unflagging. There’s a timelessness to her selections: Both Eats Everything’s recent remix of Green Velvet’s “Flash” and Bjarki’s Dance Mania-sampling “I Wanna Go Bang” collapse into a thudding, four-to-the-floor kick, and EBM’s clammy atmospheres are always threatening to pull the music back into a primordial murk. The final stretch, which goes from bludgeoning techno to sparkling coldwave in three easy steps, is particularly exhilarating.
Courtesy – Hessle Audio Pocast for Rinse FM
Stepping up for Hessle Audio (Ben UFO, Pearson Sound, and Pangaea’s label) on Rinse FM, Copenhagen’s Courtesy delivers a cool hour of wiry techno, spring-loaded electro, and jagged jungle. You might not expect the latter to follow the former, but she makes it work, using breakbeat syncopations in the first half as the setup for the second half’s shuddering slam dunk. Etch’s “Untitled Hardcore #4,” slowed to mimic a drum ’n’ bass 45 played back at 33, helps ease the transition, while some early-‘90s chipmunk vocals late in the mix take us to the far side of the pitch fader. It all wraps up with a seething cut aimed squarely at Berlin’s gentrifiers: The title of the record (Here Comes a Fucking Startup Campus) tells you all you need to know.
DJ Lycox – Noite Príncipe @ Musicbox
Though he’s based in Paris these days, DJ Lycox hails from Lisbon, Portugal; as a member of the Tia Maria Produções crew, he represents a rising generation of batida producers coming up behind artists like DJ Marfox and DJ Nigga Fox, who put the proudly local Afro-Lusophone style on the international map. This set serves as a kind of homecoming: It was recorded at one of the monthly parties hosted by Príncipe Discos, the label that’s acted as an emissary to get this stuff out into the wider world. If you’ve been following batida, the sound of Lycox’s music will be familiar—he emphasizes the same kinds of loping hand percussion, knotty polyrhythms, and loopy synth riffs as his peers—but it’s a special treat to hear it in the context of a DJ set. Hearing track after track of ricocheting beats begins to take on a kaleidoscopic effect: The elements stay more or less the same, but they’re jumbled anew every few bars. And if your ears happen to perk up toward the end, when he teasingly drops an all-too-short snippet of a “Bad and Boujee” remix, fear not: You can hear the entirety of his Migos rework right here, in all its triplet-riddled glory.
Villa Diamante – Métron Musik Mixtape 041
The Argentine DJ—a cofounder of Zizek Club and ZZK Records—moves away from his customary mix of cumbia, hip-hop, and global bass into a slinkier groove, where traditional “folkloric” tunes are given a subtle electronic sheen. Cumbia’s loping groove is the throughline, but around that, just about anything could happen, from marimbas and North African guitars to Ecuadorian pan flutes; what’s striking is how naturally it all flows, with guitars and other stringed instruments, synthesizers, and voices deftly layered into consonant harmonic blends. With a 4/4 pulse that feels, in places, like house music’s drowsy cousin, it’s a refreshing spin on dance music convention—and a total day-brightener to boot.
Klimek – L.A. Sounds
For a German radio documentary on music and sound art from Los Angeles, Sebastian Meissner—better known as the ambient musician Klimek—takes an unusual approach: He weaves together selections from The Disintegration Loops’ William Basinski, the political activists Ultra-Red, and the pioneering composer Morton Subotnick, along with bits of field recordings collected around the city. The result is a hypnotic blur of shadowy drones and bright streaks of electronic sound, all overlaid with the rumble of traffic and muted playground din—a dreamily contemplative hour that Terre Thaemlitz closes with a melancholy piano reverie.
Raica – Live @ Free Axis
Seattle’s Raica, a co-founder of the Further label, recently broke out her modular rig for an intimate living room performance to benefit the Refugee Women’s Alliance. A recording of the show makes for gratifyingly uneasy listening: a slippery strain of ambient music streaked with grease and graphite, in which soap bubbles pool around piles of metal shavings and freight-train whistles burst through shortwave static. A real head trip, in other words.
Angel Molina – DJ Mix PS14
Angel Molina, a Barcelona legend, has a reputation for the depth of his crates, and at Primavera Sound 2014, Bowers & Wilkins’ cave-like tent gave him the opportunity to explore their darkest recesses. His ambient set from that night—recently released on cassette, but also streaming in full on SoundCloud—begins gently enough, but it gradually morphs into a harrowing foray of hair-raising drones, doomy ambient, and brain-scouring industrial noise. That’s not to say it’s entirely overcast. Halfway through, there’s a minute or two of wriggly acid sequences played back startlingly fast—a glimmer of a brighter world before the darkness closes back in.
And check out last month’s Best Mixes column for even more tunes.
