Josey Rebelle's dark, defiant Discwoman set and Max D's positive-vibes “Yes Mix” bookend this month's column, both asking the same question and coming up with different answers: In a world gone mad, how can dance music keep you sane? Aïsha Devi's thrilling FACT mix takes a more spiritual route, while sets from Deena Abdelwahed and Shy Layers propose globalist solutions.
Josey Rebelle – DISCWOMAN 18
“Listening back, I think I was maybe in a bit of a dark mood when I did this,” writes London's Rinse FM resident Josey Rebelle of her set for Discwoman’s podcast series. “The world feels fucked.” But her mix is defiant, not shying away from overt political messages. Not five minutes in, civil rights activist Angela Davis can be heard lecturing about race and immigration over System Olympia’s woozy, R&B-infused techno. But exhilarating tracks from Indo Tribe and Lone—the former from 1991, the latter sounding like it—carry the implicit promise that we might still rave our way to utopia, while damn-near headbanging cuts from Ikonika and I-F offer more aggressive opportunities for bloodletting. Blitzing through hi-def techno, rapid-fire disco, breakbeat hardcore, and classic electro, it’s an audacious mix—as hopeful a soundtrack you could wish for in a world heading towards hell in a handbasket.
Aïsha Devi – FACT Mix 589
“I am the zero point, the primal vibration,” intones a computer-generated voice at several points in this mind–melting set by the Nepalese-Tibetan-Swiss producer Aïsha Devi. “You will smile when you die… I am the prophet and you are me.” Heady stuff, but fitting for a mix modeled after religious ritual and spiritual ascension. Ambient synthesizers alternate with deconstructed dancehall, apocalyptic trap, and birdcall-riddled bangers like Gila’s “Don’t Chirp.” Sending Young Thug a cappellas soaring over spacy synths, pairing 2Pac verses with Shackleton drum tracks, and closing with a breathtaking Keith Jarrett edit, Devi ventures so far beyond club music’s outer limits that you can practically see Trappist-1’s seven orbs glowing in the distance.
Deena Abdelwahed – Groove Podcast 95
In advance of her appearance at the opening of Berghain’s Säule—the Berlin club’s new ground-floor room dedicated to experimental club sounds—the Tunisian DJ Deena Abdelwahed puts together a captivating set of heavily abstracted electronic beats from Tunisia, Ghana, Crete, London, Boston, Rotterdam, and Portland, Oregon. Her balance of industrial atmospheres and jagged drum grooves is unusual within the global bass scene. Loping drum patterns are wreathed in anxious clang, and tangled snippets of foreign-language vocals lend the impression of spinning Radio Garden’s virtual globe and hopscotching from transmitter to transmitter.
Shy Layers – Métron Musik Mixtape 037
Shy Layers’ wonderful self-titled debut album wears its influences on its sleeve. There are vocoders reminiscent of Kraftwerk, vocals paying homage to Arthur Russell, a production sheen indebted to ’80s pop like Tears for Fears and Phil Collins, and small touches suggesting project principal JD Walsh has logged plenty of hours listening to Steely Dan and Paul Simon. But the most distinctive sound on the Atlanta native’s album might be the snaky guitar lines derived from West African highlife, and that’s the inspiration he unpacks in this gorgeous set for Métron Musik’s mix series. He covers plenty of ground: De Frank Professionals’ “Afe Ato Yen Bio” is a mid-tempo dance number with close-harmonized vocals and an organ/guitar/drums mixdown that oozes into the red, while Seckou Keita’s “N’doké (Little Bro)” is a lilting kora instrumental, expressive but understated. Ata Kak’s “Daa Nyinaa,” on the other hand, slips through a disco-rap trapdoor and winds up in a remarkably strange place. An eerie closing track from the Ethiopian organist Hailu Mergia ties it all up in a bittersweet bow.
Lowtec – RA Label of the Month Mix: Workshop
Workshop’s penchant for “warm-up music, closing music, and something to fill the many in-between situations,” as label cofounder Even Tuell puts it, is well represented in Lowtec’s mix for Resident Advisor’s Label of the Month feature. Willow’s “A1” is an early highlight, the reverb around her wordless vocals spreading out like rings around rocks tossed in a pond. Kassem Mosse’s brand-new “MPCDEEPLIVEEDIT” adds electro-funk squelch to Lowtec’s typically languid style, while D Man’s flickering, half-speed “Cream Test” is among several unreleased treats. In RA’s accompanying feature, it becomes clear that the key to Workshop’s quirky charm is the disinclination on the part of its core artists to treat it as anything other than a hobby. For once, then, thank goodness for day jobs: It’s the square life that keeps Workshop sounding so delightfully bent.
Anna Adams – Mixtape 10
Judging from the sound of this mix for DOCUMNT Magazine, Dresden’s Anna Adams (aka Anna Erdmann) might consider changing her alias to “Anna Addams.” Wending through passages of slow-motion synth-pop and tumbling industrial techno, the set revels in cheerfully gothic vibes. It’s a lot of ground to cover, but she makes it work by virtue of her creative, sometimes counterintuitive juxtapositions. She follows Nthng’s Blade Runner-reminiscent ambient melancholia with pitched-down haunted ballroom from 1952, and her pairing of Cornflakes 808’s bloodcurdling coldwave with Gina X’s slow-motion disco is a masterstroke of evil-sounding sleaze.
System Olympia – NTS Radio: System Olympia 001
A Calabrian musician with ties to Italy’s Slow Motion label, System Olympia devotes her debut NTS show to a megamix of her own productions. She’s partial to brooding synth-pop with a shimmering neon outlook, part Midnight Star and part Oneohtrix Point Never. Toward the end, she ramps up the tempo and sinks into a stretch of pneumatic house, before an echoing acoustic guitar outro that sounds like the Durutti Column spun into cotton candy.
Daniel Avery – At Brilliant Corners (RA Live)
Brilliant Corners is a Japanese restaurant in London’s Dalston neighborhood that boasts what it calls an “audiophile” sound system, where Daniel Avery recently stepped out of his techno wheelhouse to deliver a sit-down set of ambient and shoegaze. The dust on his records might not be quite up to audiophile standards—someone get that man an anti-stat brush, stat—but the selections are impeccable. Autechre’s “Yulquen,” a meditative highlight of their 1994 album Amber, gives way to cosmic wormholes from Italy’s Nuel and Japan’s Iori. Chris and Cosey’s “Trance” and New Order’s “I.C.B.” both lower the room temperature considerably before kosmische traveler Michael Rother (Neu!, Harmonia) and Detroit space-rockers Füxa warm it back up again. Letting tracks play out in full, often leaving a buffer of silence between them, it’s as much playlist as DJ set, but the selections are reason enough to tune in.
Elena Colombi – Dekmantel Podcast 107
London’s Elena Colombi courts no shortage of chaos on this dark, gnarly mix for Dekmantel; it’s no surprise to discover she’s involved in a party called Abattoir. EBM, industrial, and hardcore rave get smashed together in ways that can be difficult to untangle, particularly when knotty polyrhythms from Toulouse Low Trax and Durian Brothers get thrown into the mix. There’s a particularly thrilling passage around the 19:30 mark, where snippets of saxophone and voice are streaked over what sounds like two colliding drum grooves—a tidy encapsulation of the set’s tricky balance of pleasure and unease.
Max D – Yes Mix
Learning when to say no is an essential part of staying sane. But no self-care regimen is complete without the occasional, emphatic yes. So thanks be to Washington, D.C.’s Max D, aka Future Times co-honcho Maxmillion Dunbar, for a set shot through with positive vibes, pulse quickeners, and teasing glimpses of a heightened state of consciousness. (“All over the place—for your mental state,” he notes.) Scene-setting ambient gives way to a spine-tingling voice-and-percussion piece from Music From Memory’s new Outro Tempo compilation; Aleksi Perälä’s curiously tuned breakbeat techno sets up woozy D.C. go-go. Following an eclectic first 30 minutes, the latter half sinks into quick-stepping house and techno drenched in rich color, exuberant almost in spite of itself. The whole thing functions as a jubilant rallying cry to balance out the necessary negativity implied by any act of resistance. It’s going to be a long few years, the set seems to say: pace yourself, and make time for joy.
And check out last month’s Best Mixes column for even more jams.
