This week’s mix takes me back to going record shopping for gigs, looking for new tracks to weave into an upcoming event. Now, most record stores have closed, and buying music is done right from your laptop. I used to drive into Manhattan on Friday nights, Sunday afternoons, and any other time there was quality house music being spun at clubs that had the right vibe (most we frequented didn’t even serve alcohol, because NOBODY there was drinking). We’d make calls, get flyers, wait on lines, get pulled over and searched by undercover cops, make it through metal detectors and bouncers, all to finally be in the presence of the forbidden sounds of house music (“alternative life-style clubs”, as I remember one cop called them).
Entering clubs and raves back then to me was like discovering some underground love ritual. My favorite DJs would drop tracks that blew my mind months and months before you’d ever see the record show up in a shop. The sounds were meticulously selected and spun with long overlapping times between both records. The suspense of feeling the beat push up, back, high, to way down… the DJ yielding his own rhythm and dynamics from behind the decks. At first, I never even knew they were using records! I’d see DJs bouncing, moving, pushing buttons, twisting knobs, bending down and shooting back up, like a control-station above the crowd equipped with the sounds we heard. I remember being amazed by the concept that there were two songs playing and it wasn’t the DJ adding or subtracting sounds, it was the improvisational magic factor of beat-matching two records live and EQing and filtering to make it all dance seamlessly.
Here are some tracks I just bought this week in preparing for Beat Nite in Bushwick this Saturday, March 10th- I’ll be spinning from 6-10pm at Factory Fresh!
Artist/Title:
Alexis Raphael- Spaceship
Hot Natured- Nino Brown
Russ Yallop- Rock Me
Chez Damier- Can You Feel It (New York Dub)
Honey Dijon & Sebastian Manuel- Dream Drums
Avicii & Sebastien Drums- My Feelings For You
Honey Dijon & Sebastian Manuel- Percomaniac
Avicii- Levels
Martin Dawson & Glimpse- No One Belongs Here More Than You
Stephane K & DJ Koutarou.a- In The Dark
Stephane K & DJ Koutarou.a- Speaker (DJ Sawa Shangri-La 4am Remix)
Mike Kings- The Rave
Flashmob- Brick House
Knife Party- Internet Friends