Mixed live by DJ POC, Berlin 10 September 2024, using Pioneer’s rekordbox software and a DDJ-FLX4 controller.
Tracklist
01. Lotic – “Come Unto Me”
02. Ammar 808 feat. Belhassen Mihoub – “Yarima (3Phaz remix)”
03. Deena Abdelwahed – “Wein Al Malayeen”
04. A.Fruit – “Tea Leaf Dancers VIP”
05. Kelela, Flexulant, BAMBII, Rahrah Gabor & Brazy – “Closure (Flexulant x BAMBII Remix feat. Rahrah Gabor & Brazy)”
06. Anunaku & DJ Plead – “Clap Clap”
07. AshTreJinkins – “Before The Save Point”
08. Oni Ayhun – “Oni Ayhun Meets Shangaan Electro”
09. Martyn Bootyspoon – “Dial Me 69”
10. Flore – “A Thousand Years (Deena Abdelwahed Remix)”
11. STILL – “Prophet Riddim”
12. object blue & TSVI – “Turing Machine”
13. FAUZIA – “Percussive Track”
14. Thys, Nikki Nair & DJ ADHD – “Sun”
15. Loraine James – “Never Leave Me”
16. Wanton Witch – “In The Mirror”
17. Zoë Mc Pherson – “Potentials (Jana Rush Remix)”
18. Heavee, Sinjin Hawke & Zora Jones – “Loud”
19. Kush Jones – “BREAK SYSTEM”
20 Perera Elsewhere – “Like This (Eddington Again x Neana Remix)”
21. Wata Igarashi – “Floating Against Time (Original Mix)”
22. Nova Ruth – “Plong”
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Notes
I’ve spent the first half of this year in Southeast Asia and then Finland and was anxious about returning to Berlin in early August as it has changed dramatically over this time. My feed from Berlin consistently turns up documentation of police violence as wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere have polarised the city’s inhabitants, contributing to an atmosphere of tension and anxiety. In making this mix, I was interested in the way such affects arise in music, how they can be mediated through sound and worked into and then out of the dancing body.
I’ve been thinking about an encounter almost twenty years ago, during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was at a gathering in Melbourne for art and activism, which culminated in a party in an unused industrial building in an inner city suburb. It wasn’t a huge crowd, maybe one hundred people, and many of us had just met, shuffling together in one corner of the cavernous concrete space. It was a bare-bones production: a sound system, decks, a couple of lights, a few crates of beer. One of the DJs kept loading up commercial RnB — Eve, Destiny’s Child, Amerie, Aaliyah — that got us all bouncing, then bumping and grinding; their slick hi-fidelity erotics were infectious. Someone turned to me and said “it’s not the kind of music I was expecting to hear, but this is exactly what we need right now! No wonder this kind of music is being made.”
This memory shaped my approach for this mix; to find the sounds that we seem to need for this moment. Taking prompts from this Spotify list made for last year’s program, I began accumulating songs that foregrounded vocalists. Digging into a hard drive I found a folder of music on labelled “Singing Medicine”, which includes Lotic and Nova Ruth who bookend this mix. Unlike many DJs, I don’t plan, rehearse and execute a set. It seems to drain the life and energy out of the mix — and takes the fun out of DJing. But I do practice and curate my crate. However, not everyone in my play list made it into this recording; Lyra Pramuk, Sanni Est, FKA Twigs and Lafawndah will certainly make it out another time, but I was determined that Kelela would remain in. “Closure” from her recent Rave:n remix album is cute, sexy, perhaps nostalgic and a little challenging to mix as it gears through different tempos. Notably, these are mostly femme identifying or non-binary people and their music veers towards pop.
I was also searching for different trajectories for this speculative so-called “RnB”. In Berlin, I’ve become attuned to strains of Afro-Arabic solidarity and coincidently this can be grasped in the club music I’ve been listening to. Producers such as Deena Abdelwahed, DJ Plead, Anunaku/TSVI, 3Phaz and Toumba all deploy Arabic drum patterns and tunings. DJ Haram is another influential figure. Having just spent some time around South and Southeast Asia, I was keen to include artists from there, stimulating those kinds of identities on the dancefloor and by extension bringing them into this axis of solidarity. The Malaysian Borneo-born Wanton Witch has impressed me with her unique outsider take on techno. The Singaporean bani haykal, another absentee in this mix, is nevertheless worth your time.
I am compelled to mix into the experimental spectrum of club music, so there is some rhythmic interference working through productions from Lorraine James, A.Fruit, Zoë Mc Pherson and object blue. Wata Igarashi’s “Floating Against Time” brings to my mind a different (affective) terrain shaped by the sci-fi physics of his arpeggiated synths. I don’t know why I ended with Nova Ruth’s “Plong”, but I had pre-determined that it would be the far horizon of this mix. Perhaps because her song has a kind of cadence and character that I associate with Southeast Asia? It is an altogether a different acoustic space, bringing the mix back to the ambience of a small room and the intimacy of a friend.