Tag: dance music

Beats and Grooves and Random Left Turns

Episode 158: I Can’t Stop

This episode begins with a spate of SttM’s fabled “random left turns,” from indie rock to house to club to grime to Latinx trap and back around again. The second half settles into a more predictable groove, full of d****** and instrumental grime, with just one quick (very melodic) Hard Drum detour around the thirty…
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Episode 157: Blow Yo Head Off

This episode starts things off with a protean track from Morwell, which spins through various permutations of jungle breaks. From there, we’re once again in drum’n’werk territory, sliding around between footwork and 160 BPM drum’n’bass, finding all the gradients of cross-influence in between. Heavily represented are Fracture, who appears with a track off his recent…
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Episode 155: Hypersigil

Here’s an episode that returns us to the well-trod path of drum’n’bass music, most of it Autonomic in variety. Things start out oldschool with Roni Size and his Reprazent project. Next up is Astrophonica label-head Fracture, except from an EP out on Autonomic powerhouse Exit Records. After that, a track from Lightless Records head Fanu,…
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Episode 154: Funky Diabetic

Another exercise in offensively eclectic, this episode begins with Chicago shoegaze and ends with Trukish psych-rock. In between it visits some hip hop (in ironic celebration of my newfound Insulin resistance), some French disco, some Latinx club, some Hard Drum, some techno-produced hip hop, some deconstructed club, some club remixes of various provenance (R&B, Russian…
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Episode 153: Don’t Stop the Dance

This episode ran a little long. Seven minutes or so. The main idea was to do a Plaid sandwich, with the album version of “Maru” at the beginning and the excellent Orbital remix of the same at the end. So when the (also excellent) penultimate track, “Inside of Me,” went over time, I plowed forward.…
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Episode 152: Irie

And so, this episode, at least to an extent, felt like me relearning how to do a mix. Which is odd, since I only took a week off. Possibly the retro feel is due to the subject matter, which takes us back in time somewhere between four and twelve years. Yes, this is shamefully, shamelessly…
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Episode 151: Back in the Jungle

There was a time not too long ago when almost every episode was footwork and jungle and the area where the two genres have been bleeding into each other of late. Drum’n’Werk, 160 BPM. I had to force myself to do anything else. This episode, after a short break, returns to that territory. No fewer…
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Episode 149: Great Escape

So this here episode slows things down considerably. 100 BPM is home to dancehall and reggaeton and various other slow-burning funky genres. Many of them, certainly in my experience, and certainly in this episode, have a Latin feel to them, even from Japanese or Londoner producers. Slavic producers, on the other hand, certainly in my…
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Episode 150: Babycakes

This episode is to high tempo club what last week’s was to low tempo club. At 137 BPM there’s less Latin feel, more African-inspired Hard Drum syncopations and Jersey Club calypso kicks, plus some excursions into house and techno spaces. Once again (and as always) the middle third dips into more avant-garde space, reaching its…
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Episode 148: Hyperphonix

“if you call that music…” Yeah, so I’m over a month late getting this episode posted up here. I’m kinda running out of things to say, I feel like? This episode is 140 BPM. It has some grime, it has some d******, it has some faster-paced future club, as would be expected for such a…
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