Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In September—as ever—plenty of DJs the world over turned in critical sessions, offering up headspinners and barnburners in equal measure. Eamon Harkin and Rey Colino, in a pair of riotous live recordings, rocketed between house and techno belters for six can’t-miss hours. Club-music pranksters Two Shell dug into dancefloor futurism, deep-fried electronics, and vintage-ish hardcore-or-so, and Wonja turned a peak-time floor on its side. Elsewhere, two critical Berlin DJs conjured very different kinds of delirium: Assyouti looked towards pitch-black drum-music hysteria, and Darwin grabbed an hour of vertiginous and abyssal dubstep.
Elsewhere, column favorite boxofbox dug into an expansive and hi-energy vision of what dance music can sound like, and Kiernan Laveaux explored deep-space dub and outré electronics in her latest set. Myles Mac and DJ Possum conjured a sepia-tinged kind of nostalgia with a bag of early-aughts rollers, and mi-el looked towards ‘90s New York with a set that split the difference between hip-hop and field recordings. DJ Oltermann cooked up four hours of sun-kissed love songs, and Nosedrip & OKO DJ looked towards far nervier spaces, pushing each other towards icy rock-and-roll and glacial electronics. Lastly, a trio of DJs pushed into ever stranger territories: ojoo offered a cragged vision of folk musics, techno, and dancehall; Pom Pom dug, yet again, into black-hole ambience and industrial techno; and Samson A.K turned in a staggering session of corrugated-metal synth work and windswept landscapes.
Here are some of the best DJ sets September had to offer.
“Both apocalypse and utopia are already here. They are lived every day already; this is the only life, and life has always been only itself.” So goes the beginning of Berlin Atonal 2024: the first hurled gauntlet in a flurry of them, an intermingling of stardust and smog-drenched gloom. It’s a neat encapsulation of the set, which sees the Berlin-via-Cairo DJ darting between the moods with such acuity that any distinctions melt away. By and large, this is a celebration of pitch-black club-music idioms, with everything tilted just a bit towards the unknown: gqom that’s been sped up until it’s practically hardcore, pop-rap belters shot through a woodchipper, blown-out gabber-breaks—if it’s tough, left-field, and dimly lit, it’s fair game. Assyouti chases that dragon throughout Berlin Atonal 2024 to chaotic and winning results, finding a hard-won sort of euphoria in the center of the maelstrom.
A bit over two hours into Live at Hot Mass, boxofbox pulls off a miracle. One moment, the DJ is ripping through some shoulder-rolling house, all whip-cracking drum programming and what sounds like a purring bassline. It turns out that it’s actually the sound of a tiger snoring, but, if you play it loud enough, it might as well be a gut-twisting low-end—a foreboding kind of intimacy, a sound that draws the floor in even as it suggests a bit of danger. Then, Tlim Shug’s remix of Floetry’s “Say Yes”: an early-aughts R&B melter tossed on top of synthesizers pulled out of a Dalí composition. Then, somehow, after three moon-shots in thirty seconds, they lock it back in, turning the whole thing into a lighters-up club-music moment with a rollicking two-step rhythm.
On Live at Hot Mass, boxofbox—an inventive and playful DJ whose work splits the difference between club-music futurism and sepia-tinged euphoria—spends three hours landing backflip after backflip live from Pittsburgh. It’s bleary-eyed 2-a.m. ambiance and sweat-soaked Jeremih flips; it’s piano-house stompers where the kick drums are enough to crack the amps in two; it’s acidic electro rollers that could be from 1982 or 2082 next to timeless tom-drum workouts; it’s brain-bending garage tunes and million-limbed hip-house. (At its best, its ecstatic energy recalls Wonja & livuwang’s everything-at-once Campout Series marathon session—no small feat, given it’s one of the strongest DJ mixes released this decade.) Here, boxofbox gets on top of the CDJs and hurls a gauntlet, rocketing the dancefloor into parts unknown along the way.
Sometimes, all you need is a bit of bass that promises to turn your stomach inside out. On her entry in wav.world’s flagship mix series, London selector and veritable dubstep historian Darwin goes deep on that feeling, crafting an hour of delirious and out-there bass burners. Compositionally speaking, it’s pretty minimal stuff—a wall of bass, a few drums skittering underfoot, a vocal sample or two ricocheting in the dark—but it never feels bare-bones thanks to the sheer scale of it all, with a low-end that feels like it could level a stack of apartments if you calibrated the EQ just right. Darwin makes the canny choice of cutting things back to zero-gravity ambience now and again; when the clubbier stuff drops back in, as it always does, it underlines just how vertiginous it is, with its blasts of bass sounding like depth charges. Darwin spends the bulk of the set working in this space—minimalistic, heavy, and dimly lit—so even the slightest shifts, like a mid-session drop into chase-scene tracker techno, land with a disproportionate heft. On wav.world, Darwin imagines dubstep as an earth-cracking, frigid, and alien thing.
Here, DJ Oltermann offers up a straightforward proposition: how would you like four hours of love songs? The Helsinki DJ recorded Seaside 42 around Valentine’s Day this year, but you could have guessed that based on the tracklist alone. This is a session devoted almost entirely to rose-tinted tracks, whether they’re about romance, friends, or communal joys. The most refreshing thing about it all is Oltermann’s whole-hearted commitment to the approach. Throughout the set, Oltermann leans into deep grooves and deeper feelings: diva-house vocal runs and starlit synth lines, lushly orchestrated soul cuts that promise intimacy before the verse even starts, disco classics that promise to stretch into infinity. He mixes long here, leaning on the strength of his selections rather than any peacocking behind the decks; this stretched-out approach, alongside the general vintage of his selections, makes the whole thing feel a bit like a sepia-tinged photo album of bygone loves, million-dollar grins shining through the dust all these years later.
Dance music makes all sorts of promises—joy, escapism, sweat, jubilee—but one of the most basic is this: a well-placed kick drum, if calibrated just right, could act as a gateway to nothing less than outright elation. With his live performance from Waking Life 2024, Eamon Harkin, one of the main names behind Nowadays, a New York club that has become a veritable dance-music institution, goes deep on that promise, spinning three hours of kaleidoscopic and ebullient dance music with a veteran’s grace. The set is, fundamentally, rooted in tracky house tunes and sci-fi techno, but if you skip around and you’ll find all sorts of idioms on display: full-throttle electro, sort-of-2-step, breakbeat-grime scorchers, bubbly hardgroove, chunky MIDI house, and plenty more. Harkin manages all these flips with ease here thanks to his unerring focus on straight-ahead rollers and hands- up ecstasy; each cut, it feels, is done in service of taking ravers a bit higher.
Over the course of the past few years, Kiernan Laveaux has established herself as a one-of-one DJ, a selector less interested in “dance” or “listening” music than she is in something far slipperier. It’s more or less impossible to guess the sonic particulars of a Laveaux set coming into it, but you can, at least somewhat reliably, count on a mood: something between drugged-out delirium and fourth-world disorientation, each knob and fader and brain stem twisted past the breaking point. That trademark slipperiness permeates 623 in Dub, a real mind-expander of a set that sees the DJ sliding between all sorts of barely recognizable forms. There’s dub here, of course, but it’s less as a genre, per se, than it is as an approach. Nearly everything here drips with the sound of studio trickery, whether real or imagined: synthesizers soaked in vats of syrup, drums filled with fog, echoes doubling back on themselves until it’s more or less impossible to discern where it all started. It’s one hell of an atmosphere to curate—tripped-out and sluggish and barely lucid— but Laveaux pulls it off with flying colors here. Tune in, check out, and take off.
It’s not as though the Internet—let alone this corner of it—needs more writing about Illmatic, so let’s keep it particular. Part of that record’s magic lies in its specificity: in the way that field recordings and subway cars and grainy microphones keep the whole thing sounding like it could only have emerged from a single neighborhood. This is hardly unique to Illmatic, or New York, or hip-hop, but it’s nevertheless a skeleton key here, too.
So: what if you took “N.Y. State of Mind” but cranked the ambience to an eleven? That’s the proposal behind mi-el’s Love From NYC, a remarkable hour that sees the New York DJ building a time capsule out of field recordings, snatches of conversations overheard years ago, decades of hip-hop records, and a metric ton of dust. (At points, it recalls Geng’s 2019 found-footage jaw-dropper, Time Weapon Radio, a mix which pulled off a similar trick with an angle towards old-school New York rap and new-school experimentalism; at other points, it’s got the kind of grit you’d associate with an archival folk record on Death Is Not the End.) it feels like mi-el is making a point of seeming incongruity here, flicking between bleary-eyed kind-of-grime, rollicking boom-bap, vintage turntablism, and answering-machine rips, jumping across airwaves, parking lots, and decades in the process. Its bleary, disorienting, and, not infrequently, surprisingly emotive.
Dance music has long gestured towards fantasy: speaker stacks stretching towards the cosmos, CDJs doubling as time machines, dancefloors as temporary Edens. However temporary—or elusive—those promises prove to be, there’s a reason the dancefloor-as-escapism narrative persists: it’s powerful. Myles Mac & DJ Possum clearly understand this; in their music, they alternate between sun-baked nostalgia and sepia-tinged four-fours. Fundraiser Broadcast, the latest session from the critical Melbourne DJ duo, is no different: here, for a blissed-out three hours, they stuff the amps with sand and stardust, sliding between ‘90s progressive house, tough-to-place trance records, and shuffle-and-swing Ibizan grooves—basically, anything with plenty of skip in its step and a nice amount of bass. While many of their sets lean towards mid-afternoon sun-tanning, this would sound better a bit closer to dusk, with warm washes of synthesizers promising to stretch the sunset into infinity and endlessly rolling kicks keeping the whole thing moving forward. Fundraiser Broadcast isn’t rave-up nostalgia, exactly, but it does feel a bit timeless. Here, Myles Mac & DJ Possum stretch the joy of a warm evening out for as long as they can manage.
Nosedrip & OKO DJ are, flat-out, two of the most eccentric selectors working today; on that merit alone, it makes sense that they paired up for a festival slot earlier this year. But there’s much more than that, of course—both DJs tend towards hard lefts and share wide views of what “dance music” can sound like, whether that’s coldwave, elliptical trance records, or live-drumming freakouts. Solstice 2024 shows the pair inhabiting the kind of back-to-back dynamic that promoters dream of: each pushing the other towards increasingly oddball selections, deepening grooves and trances at once. Given how singular Nosedrip and OKO DJ are, you’d think it’d be relatively straightforward to pick out who’s who, but they pull off a nigh-impenetrable mind-meld here, slinking between menacing synthpop, wild-eyed drum workouts, busted-MPC techno, white-hot jungle, and about a hundred other idioms. Plenty of DJs promise to take the dancefloor somewhere new, but many fewer actually do it. On Solstice 2024, two critical club-music experimentalists do so and then some.
In her work, Morocco-born and Belgium-based ojoo splits the difference between cacophony and stillness; her work is at once groggy and rhythmic, each slammed drums balanced out with a few vertiginous synthesizers. Positive Education sees the DJ putting her thumb on that scale just a bit and leaning into dancefloor energies. That doesn’t mean you should expect four-four kicks and lighters-up toplines, though; as ever in ojoo’s mixing, this is a cragged and spine-tingling take on electronic music, one where every new track functions as a yanked rug or a sledgehammer to the temple. After a brief introduction of brain-scrambling ambience and maybe-field recordings, she gets right to business, filtering a variety of folk musics through bass-blasted speakers before, somehow, pulling off a clean segue to some speaker-busting hardcore—corroded and nigh-arrhythmic kick drums, blaring alarms, and spinbacks on spinbacks on spinbacks. (That’s just a few moments from the first twenty minutes; at that point, ojoo’s got another seventy to work with.) Positive Education is stuffed with sharp lefts like this. It’s consistently disorienting, but never wearying, thanks to ojoo’s iron grip on aesthetics; again and again, she reaches for electronic music with dirt crammed in between each drum line and momentary pause, lending the whole thing a satisfying crunch that holds it all together.
Given enough time, even the inkiest blacks become visible, however dimly. As color and light drain from a space, the contrasts that remain—contours, textures, memories—are rendered more meaningful by nature of omission. This experience is mirrored nicely by working through Pom Pom’s discography: bewilderment to unease to a queasy kind of comfort. The project’s music most often sits somewhere between hyper-minimal techno and stomach-churning ambience, moving between the two so frequently that any distinctions seem beside the point. The same is true on Pom Pom 24—a sequel of sorts, perhaps, to the truly remarkable Pom Pom 20 19, Pom Pom 20 18, and Pom Pom 20 20: this is electronic music imagined as a soundtrack for floating through deep space long after the engines have been cut; it is surreal, disorienting, and thoroughly uninviting. That said, if you’re willing to make the trip, 20 24 is a masterclass in craggy sort-of-techno. Here, kick drums land like distant explosions, reverberating in the chest rather than the skull, and some kind of ambient noise—dial-up rattlings, or alien breezes, or clattering machinery—threaten to drown out the pulse entirely. This is “industrial techno” for a universe long past any use for machinery.
About halfway into RA.954, a remarkable mix ripped from Taiwan’s Organik Festival, Rey Colino hurls a time capsule directly into the decks. Atop what sounds like four techno tracks playing at once—acidic, alien, pumping, and a bit slinky—he pulls up a chopped-up and vaguely tuneful rendition of what sounds an awful lot like “No Good (Start the Dance),” a critical old-school breakbeat tune from The Prodigy’s second LP. In just a few seconds, he’s taking a foundation of dancefloor pumpers piling entire universes atop; it would be delirious if it weren’t so carefully built. The minor miracle of this whole section—this sixty-second portion of a set that runs for over three hours—is that it’s one of a million; throughout RA.954, Colino does this again and again, stacking countless rave-music ideas in a mind-bending game of Jenga. By and large, he sticks to punchy house and techno, but he throws in countless left hooks, whether in texture or form: lo-bit electro-house here, endless synth arpeggios and acidic basslines there, and squelchy sort-of-electro elsewhere still. Throughout RA.954, Colino is in top form: dynamic, playful, and endlessly imaginative, collapsing histories atop four-four kicks.
Roughly two years ago, Berceuse Heroique—a critical post-everything electronics label from London—kicked off their tape series. The promise was simple: each release would bring a singular approach to an armful of cassettes. In the seasons since, the series has become a real who’s-who of who-knows experimentalism. Column favorites like Time Is Away, Vladimir Ivković, and Ghost Phone have all had their time in the smog, but there’s all sorts of essential names there, too: Nosedrip, Pretty Sneaky, Significant Other, Bruce, Toumba. It’s hard to guess what you’ll get with each new entry, but you can be certain it’ll be one-of-one.
So it is for Samson A.K’s entry: it’s a curveball even by the series’s standards, an entirely self-produced hour of skin-crawling ambient music and hair-raising industrial soundscapes. Obvious rhythms are more or less out of the question here—this is psychological-horror electronic music defined more by a gnawing sense of unease than any rhythmic core, a tidal wave of frayed wires and busted speakers, a bottomless pit of noise suggesting a stomach-churning kind of infinity. Throughout the hour, you can spot all sorts of forms if you squint: blasts of noise briefly cohering into drums before fading from view entirely, something that, for a fraction of a second, sounds like blown-out industrial techno, a few hints of what might—might—be a string section. But the specifics aren’t the point; this is about marinating in a pitch-black atmosphere. As Faces in the Dark runs on, its bleak disorientation only deepens before collapsing into a pile of wind and rust.
Just ask Frank Ghery: if you’ve got enough gusto, and if you design it ornately enough, sometimes, all you need is facade. Two Shell are the reigning jester princes of contemporary club music, for better and worse—their work, which flits between new-school pop records, floor-burning techno and dubstep, and who-knows experimentalism, is equally concerned with dance-music histories and the duo’s own mythos. They’re tongue-in-cheek to a degree that is both fatiguing and admirable: they recently sold a “boring rock” which contained a USB of exclusive tracks; they put out multiple versions of a song featuring maybe-A.I. contributions from artists like FKA twigs and Chris Martin; and, if you get a ticket to see them live, you might catch an entirely different group behind the decks. It’s all a bit much.
All that said: RA.952, recorded live from Horst Arts & Music Festival 2024, is solid enough that it justifies all the scaffolding. Here, the duo take their hyperkinetic and outright goofy energy straight to a peak-time dancefloor, and it makes for a winning combination—playful and riotous and head-spinning, a whirlwind of nu-school breaks, probably-pre-recorded voiceovers, steamrolling techno, lighters-up vocal tracks, and finger-gun hardcore. Like so much of Two Shell’s work, it sounds undeniably of the moment; it feels like their CDJs are hooked up to Discord rather than Rekordbox. That everything-goes energy works here, though, because Two Shell return, again and again, to tried-and-true rave-music touchstones—neither 2024 nor 2420 can escape the past, and the set is stronger for that acknowledgement. On RA.952, dance music’s preëminent postmodernists build a universe of facades, blurring ideas and sounds until the sheer scale of the thing is enough to crack the dancefloor in half.
Wonja has, by this point, earned an enviable reputation behind the decks. When you queue up a session from the Oakland selector, it’s more or less impossible to tell what you’re going to get—at least in terms of proper nouns and genre terminologies—but you can count on a brain-bending kind of psychedelia, a flip-book stuffed with endless histories, a veteran’s careful touch, and a winking sense of joy. Club Moniker, UGSF is no different. Here, she goes long and short at once, stuffing an entire galaxy of synapse-frying drum workouts into the amplifiers: barely-there ambient techno and abyssal drum-and-bass, alien nu-jazz and zero-bit electro, skull-cracking hard drum and hyper-minimalistic two-step. It’s full of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it transitions and sonic jumps that seem outright unintuitive on paper, but Wonja pulls it off again and again here, pushing the decks a bit closer to the cosmos with each selection.
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