To accompany your reading this morning, some intentional eclecticism.
Tracklist
Althea & Donna - Love One Another
Elvin – Luggi, Luggi, Ludwig
Biz Markie – Biz Is Goin' Off
Boogie Down Productions – Criminal Minded
Kurtis Blow – If I Ruled The World
Enigma – Sadeness Part 1
New Edition – Can You Stand The Rain (Instrumental)
Aaliyah – Are You That Somebody (A capella)
Big Chocolate – Blue Milk
11Th Hour – Confront
Drone, Snowy – All I Know
Mitekiss – WAIT
Samba – Six to Six
Snowy, Visages – Crystal Clear
Drone – Fiendish
Noisia – Diplodocus
End Productions – Are You Really From The Ends
Groove Chronicles – Black Puppet
Riko Dan, Y U QT – Dancehall Damager
Chimpo – Deep Freeze
P Jam – Real
Cybotron – Clear
Hyper Wizard UFO Cult – High Frequency Altar
DJ ADHD, Nikki Nair – Fidget Spinner
Hermeth – Devil's Reject
Client_03 – Compliance
Drone – Slingshot
Nikki Nair, Nala – Escape
Dexter – Space Booty
Саша Чусовитин & Лёша Куприянцев – Звезды Дискотек 2 (House of Mystic Lights)
Review
This continuous mix is broadly an extended survey of bass and electro lineages, though it resists easy categorisation. It opens with a calculated feint: Elvin’s lightweight novelty, “Luggi, Luggi, Ludwig,” a fragment of 1980s Euro-inflected whimsy that immediately sets a tone of playful dislocation. From there the sequence establishes a pattern of juxtaposition rather than progression, alternating between golden-era hip hop (Biz Markie, Boogie Down Productions, Kurtis Blow) and material from the tail end of the decade’s pop mainstream (Enigma, New Edition, Aaliyah), each excerpt carefully placed as both foil and connective tissue. What could easily collapse into kitsch instead reads as a study in shifting contexts, where rhythmic DNA is repurposed.
The middle passages are dominated by UK bass, 140, and grime selections. Artists such as Mitekiss, Drone, and Snowy are used less as marquee presences than as structural anchors; their work is stitched in with enough space to register, but never allowed to calcify into set-piece drops. The thread connecting early grime and garage (End Productions, Groove Chronicles) to more recent hybrids (Visages, P Jam) is made explicit, though the mix refrains from spelling it out; instead, oblique cuts and some tasteful working of the mix do the work. This section achieves a taut balance: never static, never indulgent, yet quietly insistent on the continuity of a certain British approach to rhythm throughout the midsection of the set.
Later entries reach to Detroit: Cybotron’s “Clear” is treated as an origin point, refracted through contemporary mutations from Client_03 and Nikki Nair. The result is a lineage that feels both archival and immediate, suggesting that the oblique humour of early electro still lingers in present-day hardware experiments. Even the most overtly eccentric inclusions—Hyper Wizard UFO Cult’s “High Frequency Altar,” Hermeth’s “Devil’s Reject”—are folded into the whole without rupture, their unruliness tempered by sequencing.
The closing gesture, “Звезды Дискотек 2 (House of Mystic Lights),” is telling: a Russian disco pastiche that loops back to the opening’s sly play on art-pop tropes. The effect is circular, leaving the listener with a sense of both distance and continuity, as if the past four decades of dance music had been compressed into a single itinerary.
Overall the mix maintains a dry, almost essayistic tone, resisting the obvious climaxes and narrative arcs typical of DJ sets. It operates less as a club document than as a sustained piece of critical listening—an argument, lightly made, for the porousness of dance culture’s borders.
Percival Drift, 2025
