Lauren Martin’s picks of 2018
Eris Drew’s Thundering Goddess Mix
Influenced by psychedelic-soaked parties in the American midwest, Eris Drew transformed her identity through a shamanic relationship to raving. She coined the ecstatic, femme energy contained within “The Motherbeat”, and she is its high priestess. Neither a turntablist nor a house evangelist, Drew combines their respective approaches with rave and breakbeat bombs volleyed in with dramatic flair. Her sets at Chicago’s Smartbar ignited the scene, and the Thundering Goddess mix confirms what people have been finding out on dancefloors all year long: her studied sets show a thoughtful kind of pleasure-seeking, and her anti-cynical attitude is a breath of fresh air.
Batu at Dekmantel Selectors 2018
The producers and DJs of Bristol label Timedance perform techno with a soundsystem mentality, injecting dark funky house, jungle breaks and dubstep bass into the 4/4. Some of the producers have also been working the UK techno party circuit hard this year, their musical vision developing with a technical focus on propulsive forward motion allied to dubby reprieves. At Dekmantel’s Croatian outing Selectors this summer, label boss Batu was drafted in at the very last minute and delivered one of the best sets of the festival – three hours of powerful twists and turns, rooted in Timedance’s signature: those frenzy-starting, polyrhythmic drum tracks.
Midland: As the City Sleeps, a Mixtape
British producer and DJ Midland is known for his pumping house sets, playing at clubs such as Berlin’s Panorama Bar and London’s finest gay techno rave, Chapter 10. But his musical knowledge is vast, and he’s skilled in weaving genres together – in his 2016 BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix, he found ample space for Nick Drake and Silver Apples among the club beats. In this beautiful hour-long mixtape, Midland explores music that blooms and wilts in cycles – a soundtrack to early sunrise, when bodies curl into one another and dream of how to shape themselves anew.
Kyle Hall b2b Jay Daniel at Marble Bar, Detroit
The birthplace of Motown and techno, Detroit is mythologised for its musical history, but deserved as that is, a focus on elder statesmen such as Jeff Mills or J Dilla often crowds out contemporary talent. Two young artists carrying the city’s torch while creating new, thrilling music are Jay Daniel and Kyle Hall. Their loop-based hip-hop and soulful house and techno grooves feel like warm sunshine rolling across your skin – Daniel’s 2018 album Tala is a delight – and when they get behind the decks for a back-to-back session in their home city, they have a chemistry that just fizzes with joy.
Blowing Up the Workshop 85: Leif
Matthew Kent’s Blowing Up the Workshop is a go-to mix series for experimental, downbeat electronics, with guest selectors bringing rare and unusual music from around the globe for each instalment. While the quality of curation is consistently excellent, making it difficult to pick a favourite for 2018, one mix that stood out was by Welsh DJ Leif. A resident at the tiny Welsh summer techno gathering Freerotation, Leif understands how to move quietly between sonic spaces. In his mix, he creates a gentle symphony, weaving together Gaelic choral singing, ambient synths and Cuban jazz piano.
Tayyab Amin’s picks of 2018
Mumdance: Shared Meanings
After a 40-episode radio series that saw him go back to back with unsung junglists, tinkering noisemakers and techno superstars, London’s Mumdance has continued to excel at whatever he’s tried his hand at in 2018. The producer’s mutative sound is skeletal and soundsystem-driven, caught in the liminal space between grime and techno. This year, his knack for collaborations led him to sculpting a ballad with Dawn Richard, crafting electronic blastbeats for black metal project Bliss Signal with James Kelly, and creating Teachers, with Logos – a track that revamps its Daft Punk namesake and lists the underground heroes at the core of his Shared Meanings mix. Boasting an exclusive tracklist, this mix unites the intensity of disparate styles found on music’s furthest frontiers, eschewing typical trajectories to deliver 96 minutes of beguiling unpredictability.
Appian Mix 009: Forest Drive West
Forest Drive West’s mix for Appian Sounds immortalises the kind of summer that Britain waits all year for and never holds on to for long enough. It has an air of purity and serenity coursing through the ambience, emanating from the meditative beats and smooth transitions. The east London-based producer honed his craft for 15 years before his music began to see the light of day: techno vistas released by Peverelist’s Livity Sound label and jungle through breaks specialists Rupture. It’s here, out in the sun alongside feathery percussion, beatless atmospherics and Reich-influenced minimalism, that his productions belong.
Discwoman 53 x Ikonika
Few show love for R&B on the ones and twos like Ikonika. The Hyperdub alumnus has applied her garage-inspired sound to styles such as dubstep, techno and dancehall over the years, but it’s her love of grooves and crooners that shines through in her sets. It’s been a big year for her club edits, with Kelela and Ella Mai remixes featuring in her entry to the Discwoman series. Yet even as she moves towards different genres without the expected vocal motifs, Ikonika still finds a way to channel the bubbling ebullience and charm of R&B through the seductive sway of extended family cuts and soulful tunes from the likes of house legend Kerri Chandler. Also loaded with unreleased teasers of her own making, it’s exciting to think what 2019 might bring.
Fact mix 649: Ziúr
Berlin-based club maverick Ziúr brings her astonishing vision to Fact’s mix series. Her fringe approach to music brings a diversity in sound to match the diversity of selectors championed by the parties she’s thrown. She’s been known to shell down the riotous punk of her pre-electronic days in the rave, alongside aggressive industrial and spiky club music. True to form, there’s no telling what could come next as the mix plays, with Klein’s noise’n’B and Still’s organ chants thrown in to tumble with hardcore ragers and the words of esteemed activist Angela Davis. The result is a fierce and feverish hour of music where typical beat-matching techniques are relinquished to intuition and inhibition.
Truancy Volume 204: Olof Dreijer
Now-defunct Swedish experimental synth-pop group the Knife hold a special place in the hearts of music fans, thanks to their political intent and stylistic idiosyncrasies. One half of the duo, Olof Dreijer, has a particular resonance with dance music communities, traceable to two artefacts: his vivacious remix of Emmanuel Jal’s Sudanese call to vote, Kuar, and the zip present in his productions under the alias Oni Ayhun. Dreijer’s submission to the Truants mix series beams with irresistible joie de vivre, matching his own cuts with Portuguese batida, ghetto house and a baile funk take on Dua Lipa: a carefree romp that leaves nothing on the pitch.