Mark Farina in 2015, via Wiki Commons
Even more than most of these assemblages, I have no trouble admitting that this one’s pretty willful. But I had goodies to get to old and new, so why not? First I thought it was all Lot, then I mistook it for being all NTS, and then I realized that the one oldie I hadn’t yet placed was also the hottest by my ears. Et voila. A good late-summer grouping, dates be damned.
You can hear all five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
Peach, NTS Radio (May 20)
A radio set, interspersed with back-announcements, but also the kind of pure month’s cull that in itself replays attention. Tech-house and UK garage-house and also some house-house, bright and cosmic-leaning, jazzy in places, sunny and clear even when the tones darken. But the time-capsule moment comes during the talkover. To wit, @ 52:20, she gets real about the price of being a DJ in 2026: “It’s getting harder to tour, and I don’t think enough people are talking about that.”
Marge présente Bass Bloom avec DJ Koyla (Rinse France, May 21)
The accompanying blurb, via Google Translator: “So happy to welcome DJ Koyla, a French-Burkinabe artist who navigates across various musical styles. Ranging from Trance and Bounce to Afrotech—get ready!” There’s even are a few things missing, as you might have figured and/or hoped—the one that jumps out to me is UK hard house, which you can immediately take or leave, as one must. But trance is the guiding light, for silly or sickly, and to me it’s the former. Here, I find the heavily Euro high-BPM strictures oddly resonant when they bump up against equally speedy and bouncy Afro [American]-patterned stuff. Velocity: you take it where you find it.
Elena Colombi, NTS Radio (July 21)
Incidentally, by “late-summer grouping,” I mean congenial with warm weather, not “happy” or “easygoing.” Exhibit A: this industrial/post-punk/noise-leaning hour from Colombi, whose audacious and unerring taste means that even when things veer toward the harsh, they also catch and keep the ear. She even veers dance floor-ward in the back half, albeit without changing the tone much. This is true also for the couple of instantly recognizable songs that, cannily, aren’t on the official tracklist.
Mark Farina, The Lot Radio (August 1)
If you told both an old head and a new one, separately, that Mark Farina plays “deep house,” each one would know what you meant, and both would be right. There is a sense when he plays that he is constantly moving through the stacks, locating something different than the last selection but equally hypnotic. Over the years he’s changed slightly if at all—what I hadn’t realized, since I hadn’t paid real attention in a while, is how cunning his playing is, how singularly focused. He’s been mining it forever.
If I were feeling ungenerous I could simply call it the remnants of a perpetual 1993. But that’s a compliment where I’m from, and not only are the tracks far newer than that—a random sample of a half-dozen revealed four from 2026, one from 2021, and an oldie all the way back from 2007—they approximate the layered sampling, congenial mien, and joie de vivre of 1993, as well.
Almost exactly one minute from the end, Farina mixes in one final track, “A Tribute to Music,” whose organ wash spreads slowly and determinedly over the speakers until the DJ’s time officially goes up. It’s a statement—the last thing you hear echoing through the speakers is “Music . . . Music . . . Music,” before he cuts and fades it for good.
Julia Govor, The Lot Radio (August 1)
One of the good parts of adding the list matter below is that it reminds me to pay more attention to certain DJs, and Govor is one of them. In her hands, techno matters as a stylistic endeavor, not merely a tradition passed on. There is a lot in this hour I’d term “psychedelic” but not “psy,” if you catch my drift. There’s just as much that isn’t, per se. Telling which from which is the game of it. Meanwhile, I read inside jokes and/or hunger pangs with the close proximity, toward the end, of tracks titled “Heineken,” “Orange,” and “Put a Banana in Your Ear (Aetha Remix).”
Further listening and reading
Rinse France: BC071, BC104, BC176, BC177
Elena Colombi: BC003
Julia Govor: BC077
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