The five sets below all more or less leapt out of the fray; their inevitability is what drew them together. In that spirit, here’s another super-obvious pick: Fab 5 Freddy on The Questlove Show (June 15). It’s nearly two and a half hours and it is wall-to-wall. The host has lots of questions, and the guest never takes things exactly where you think he will. These are two people who can talk about anything, doing it.
You can hear four of these sets (with a link to the fifth) at this SoundCloud playlist.
Mor Elian, Reclaim Your City 699 (June 8)
Dasha Rush, Reclaim Your City 700 (June 15)
Esposito, Reclaim Your City 701 (June 22)
When I heard, in roughly real time, these three consecutive weeks of the French techno podcast Reclaim Your City as it crossed the 700 mark, teaming them up together seemed obvious. It still does, and it’s not unprecedented: I’m a fan of the series (see below). But techno can still be tricky to get one’s claws around. As Simon Reynolds recently noted, this stuff can be awfully samey: “DJ tools-y techno seems to me to be the most static of artforms, really unchanged in its fundamentals since the late 90s.” That’s its charm and its limitation.
Still, all three mixes are remarkably different, and none of them very tools-y. A day after playing all three, I wrote this out: Mor Elian’s is bustling and warehouse-like, Dasha Rush is streamlined like neon signage, and Esposito’s sub-heavy and aggressive. Playing them again afterward—aided by the RYC write-ups for each episode, to help guide my ear—confirmed these general impressions but also exploded them. Usually the episodes are two hours, a lot of time to play within, though it’s notable and rather invigorating that Dasha Rush’s 700th edition is only one hour.
In the case of the Mor Elian set, “bustling” is apt and “warehouse-like” is both not bad and not enough. There’s more pure dynamic range than the echoing the latter phrase evokes; when it gets quiet you are hearing quiet even if, hearing this at a rave, it wouldn’t be. It grows more engrossing in the second hour—no two tracks are alike, but you notice the bass lines smearing, the percussion patterns simple but ineluctable, and near the end the focus goes triumphantly soft, though the rhythms don’t.
“Seething machine funk” is the phrase that jumps out of the Dasha Rush descriptor—that’s the aftereffect it leaves even if you aren’t listening that moment. Lots of glowering bass: low-end psychedelic-adjacent if not quite the thing itself. But also a lot of snowy grain on the top end: sawtooths perceived through clouds.
Episode 701 promises, in its details, “stripped-down techno voodooism” that “bridg[es] dubstep and techno.” Spoiler: techno wins, though I’m not a voodooism expert, so I’m not sure how that, in particular, fares. Maybe they mean the one-bar looped “tunes” that decorate many of the selections? This is probably the most “tools-y” of the three, but it may also have the most sheer torque.
Theo Parrish, The Detroit Underground Sound (Vol. II) (74min_Mixtapes, July 7)
The found footage montages they fill out the video with are very good, but I’m here for the music, which is so on-target that the set could function as a primer. A re-look at the mix’s title and, right, that’s the idea. From C2 rejuvenating “Falling Up” to the climactic (and appositely Chicagoan) “Lake Shore Drive,” this is the laid-back post-2000s showcase of your fondest wishes. It’s so mellow that it can be pure background if you let it, or maybe that’s just familiarity.
Arthur, Wackie’s Special (The Lot Radio, July 17)
If there’s ever been a total gimme of a set, it is this: two hours of tracks from Wackie’s, the Bronx-based reggae label that issued some of the toughest and most atmospheric Jamaican music of the early eighties, still in the roots style well into Kingston embracing dance hall. (See David Katz’s interview for RBMA with its founder, Lloyd “Bullwackie” Barnes.) It came to my attention in the early 2000s when Rhythm & Sound began reissuing its albums (Discogs), and I know I’m not the only one. This version of the catalog sounded so instantaneously right I was afraid including it would therefore, somehow be cheating. Well, it isn’t. If anything, it’s the summation I’ve been waiting all these years for someone to offer. Horace Andy dominates, as you’d expect—the revelation was his Diana cover, very different but even more humid than hers.
Reclaim Your City: BC067, BC147, BC156, BC160, BC165
Theo Parrish: BC001, BC119, BC140, BC154
The Lot Radio: BC036, BC060, BC089, BC091, BC095, BC110, BC113, BC168, BC171, BC174, BC185, BC190, BC192
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