FACT Mixes

Choi’s sets straddle genres without sounding like a forced education, showing both his wide array of knowledge and his deep understanding of the dancefloor. A Berlin resident for many years, Choi recently upped sticks and moved out to Amsterdam, so it seemed almost inevitable that he’d end up working with the city’s stories Rush Hour imprint. The label released Hunee’s debut album Hunch Music earlier this year, and it highlighted just how versatile Choi is as a producer. Giving requisite nods to Detroit and Chicago, Choi tracks through house and techno’s cinematic side with a unique lightness, bringing his expertise and pacing as a DJ to his productions with ease. That same expertise can be heard throughout Hunee’s FACT mix. There’s nothing show-offy here, rather Choi has hand-picked a selection of summery deep cuts from his extensive catalogue of rarities, blending fuzzy soul, melancholy disco, hypnotic Kosmische music and plenty more to emerge with a mix that practically demands the clouds to part. Hunee will be performing at Farr Festival this summer – 16-18 July to be precise – so if you’re in the Hertfordshire area, make sure you head over to the Farr site to investigate the expansive lineup and snag tickets. As usual with a Hunee mix there’s no tracklist, so get spotting.

Scottish label LuckyMe might officially be a big deal these days, with Cashmere Cat and Baauer infiltrating pop music, Hudson Mohawke going from bedroom Just Blaze disciple to one of Kanye’s right hand men, and Lunice and Eclair Fifi becoming two of electronic music’s favourite live acts and DJs, respectively, but S-Type is as good as anyone on the roster. After a couple of under-the-radar records (the first released on his older brother Tommy’s label in 2005), S-Type made his first real impact with Billboard, a six-track EP of widescreen rap beats, oversexed funk and, in ‘You Da Best’, a closer that’s about as sweet as instrumental hip-hop gets when it’s 150bpm with a hundred snares a minute. Two more records on LuckyMe followed: Rosario continued Billboard‘s way with undeniable melodies and added guest spots from Roc Marciano, YC the Cynic and Rustie, while SV8 saw him team up with Lunice, Inkke and Yung Gud for no frills club music. S-Type’s biggest collaboration, however, came with Hud Mo on The Rap Monument, a 36-minute rap song featuring Young Thug, Pusha T, Raekwon and a whole lot more. It took the idea of a posse cut to whole new levels, proved that branded content doesn’t need to suck and was generally pretty damn impressive. We’ve been badgering S-Type for a mix for a good couple of years now, and it’s pure coincidence that it’s ended up number 500 – but it also feels kinda fitting. There’s few people working at his level, but S-Type doesn’t always get the props he deserves – the sort of artist we’ve tried to champion since the start. P.S. Unreleased TNGHT.

Chris Finke has been an important part of the UK techno scene since the early 2000s, releasing music from Mark Broom, DJ Urban, Victor Simonelli and more on his Flux Recordings label and co-running London’s Split raves with Ben Simons (as well as the Split Radio Show). As a producer, he’s steadily released singles and EPs of his own music, mostly on Flux but with diversions to labels like Mote-Evolver and Hidden Recordings. In short, he knows how to make people sweat. In 2013, he dropped the Finke name to focus on a pair of aliases: Bodyjack and He/at. As He/at, he’s self-released ripping techno records while also holding down a residency at crucial UK techno night Atomic Jam, but it’s been his Bodyjack work that has been most rewarding. As well as setting up a small ring of Bodyjack-related labels, he’s released music on Hypercolour, Unknown to the Unknown, Leftroom and Ultramajic – all labels that share Bodyjack’s love of house and techno music that’s educated and authoritative but totally unpretentious. That’s also the case with his FACT mix. It draws from the gods (Johnson, Deeon, Tyrell, Falcon and, at one point, Jeremy Sylvester and Mike Millrain’s G.O.D. alias – see what we did there) and the best of the current crop (Peverelist, Kowton, DJ Haus), and is very clearly the work of someone who’s bought dance records for years, but it’s never less than a shitload of fun, with martial snares, organ riffs and instructions to work it all over the place. Bodyjack’s latest release, the self-released Throwdown EP, is out now.

In a manifesto-of-sorts on his Soundcloud page, he sets out his intentions as “an attempt to get to a time in electronic music where everything sounds warmer”, citing “more techno-ey tunes by Throbbing Gristle” and Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi “but with the more danceable edge of New Order” as inspirations. “This needed to be done”, his statement reads, “And needs to be done more. Let’s call it Tape Throb for now.” Of course, in 2015 this doesn’t exactly make The Cyclist unique: more than enough virtual ink has been spilt on noise-techno crossover records, and “tape throb” might as well be the M.O. of a label like 1080p Collection. He does, however, do it better than most. 2013’s Bones in Motion was a beautiful record (as Angus Finlayson wrote in FACT, an album “that renders even simple arrangements partially indecipherable – as if they hover teasingly out of focus – and lends these tracks a certain cryptic quality”), and the more recent Flourish and Hot House have developed The Cyclist’s knack for saturating memorable melodies in fuzz until they sound like just that: memories. As previously mentioned, The Cyclist isn’t alone in his journey, and his FACT mix feels like a minor manifesto in itself. Although it only includes three tunes by him, the whole set fits his vision, with music from Fort Romeau, Anthony Naples and Suicide captured through that same gauzy lens. Hot House is out now on Music is for Losers.

After moving from Kentucky to Chicago in her early 20s, Stamper made music under various aliases while working for Radek’s Dust Traxx label. After some time struggling to get attention for her music, Garrett David – an intern at Dust Traxx while Stamper worked there – asked to release ‘We Don’t Need No Music (Thank You Rahaan)’ on his new label. The whole story is told in an excellent RA feature, where Stamper admits that the success of that track, as well as a subsequent EP on Argot, Lady of Sorrows, “changed my whole life in a period of – not kidding – three months.” As well as a renowned – and fantastic – DJ, Stamper is creative director at Smart Bar, a decades-old Chicago venue where as well as organising residencies for Honey Dijon, DVS1 and more, she’s diversified the club’s make-up with programs like this year’s DAPHNE, a series of workshops, parties and more in celebration of Women’s History Month, described as “a month full of reminders that women always have been and always will be central to dance and electronic music culture”. On June 13, The Black Madonna will touch down in London for Found Festival, where she’ll be spinning alongside Andres, Tevo Howard and more on the Feelings stage (for tickets and more information, head here). Ahead of that, we’ve got her in the mix. Metro Area, Errorsmith, Session Victim and more feature, and it really is a thing of beauty.

Although Guillermo Scott Herren has released music under a plethora of different names in his time – including early work as Delarosa & Asora, the drone-informed group Risill, his folk-influenced Savath & Savalas project and the exceptionally titled Diamond Watch Wrists and Piano Overlord – he’s best known for his groundbreaking records as Prefuse 73. Herren isn’t known for speaking publicly about his work, but he recently opened up to Laurent Fintoni in his most revealing interview to date, talking candidly about how early Prefuse records like One Word Extinguisher “changed the face of what kids are doing now” and the knock his confidence took when Warp dropped him after eight albums. Still, his vigour’s back now: he’ll be releasing new music throughout 2015, and his FACT mix – titled Themes for a 2005 SAAB (9/3 Wagon): A Commuter’s Lament – features three unheard new Prefuse tracks (two of which will feature on a new EP due in July, Every Color of Darkness), as well as music by Obey City, Nils Frahm, De La Soul, Flying Lotus and more.

Marquis Hawkes debuted in 2012, releasing a trio of EPs on Glasgow’s Dixon Avenue Basement Jams label. Drawing from classic Chicago house, with a no frills approach to production that made him the perfect fit for the label (whose motto is “real rockin’ raw shit from the street for the clubs”), the EPs made him an instant one-to-watch in house and techno. 2014 was Hawkes’ most productive year yet: as well as another record on Dixon Avenue, he delivered records for European labels that fit his approach (Clone Jack for Daze, Creme Organisation) and inked a deal with Houndstooth, who released his Fifty Fathoms Deep EP. Hawkes is no kid, however (if you didn’t gather that from the illustration above): a British ex pat in Berlin, he was making music for 15 years before finding success as Marqius, and his FACT mix draws from two decades of buying dance records. DBX, Kerri Chandler, Armando and Roy Davis Jr are all included, while there’s also airings for newer, but still classic-sounding house from Leon Vynehall and Delroy Edwards.

The French composer has been releasing records for over 10 years, including the classic The Golden Morning Breaks and Les Ondes Silencieuses. Her recent work, however, has arguably been her best. 2013’s The Weighing of the Heart, the first Colleen record to put her vocals centre-stage, was described by FACT’s John Twells as “40 minutes of economic, uncluttered and most importantly unique music”, while this year’s Captain of None is perhaps her most ambitious record to date: an ode to dub-reggae that’s more bass and vocal-driven than her previous work. Colleen’s FACT mix is a companion piece of sorts to Captain of None, and focuses on music that “has specifically influenced” the album, “mostly from the point of view of song-writing, production, or just a general “feel” in the music, for lack of a better word.” “No other song”, Colleen tells us, “encapsulates how these various aspects of music-making are intertwined in Jamaican music better than Burning Spear’s ‘Door Peeper’. Released in 1969, the combination of Burning Spear’s voice, percussion, compressed horn line, minimal instrumentation and lyrics, and dry but deep production make this song one of the most earth-shaking I’ve ever heard. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Scientist’s ‘Dangerous Match 1′ from 1982 sounds like underwater swimming in weird waters and shows how abstract and stylized Jamaican music can be.” Elsewhere on the mix, examples of “crazy tape manipulation”, “radical production” and “killer basslines” remind us just how much even the more outsider side of today’s music owes to dub. Colleen’s FACT mix closes with Lee Perry’s ‘Return of the Super Ape, a track that she “heard in my childhood. [It was] one of the many Lee Perry/Upsetters songs contained on a tape that my parents bought in the late 70s and which we played in the car on long trips. To this day I just love this track and still find it totally unique and one of a kind: you can never be sure of what it is that you’re hearing on this song: monkeys, spanners falling on the floor in a metal house, a jazz band lost in Jamaica, soap bubbles transformed into notes… before one of the best breaks and song finales of all time.”

Growing up, Tom ‘Squarepusher’ Jenkinson had an experimental approach to bass guitar – both at school, and then later in teenage metal bands – which he applied to electronic music, releasing his debut record, Stereotype (under the name Stereotype) in 1994. After a series of records on Spymania, Jenkinson landed on Warp’s roster in 1995, and became part of the label’s stable of 1990s titans with Aphex, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Plaid et al. The 20 years since have seen Squarepusher tear up the templates of jazz, drum’n’bass, psychedelia, techno and more across over 15 albums, while also developing one of the most talked-about live shows on the electronic circuit. Last year, the Squarepusher project reached a logical climax of sorts when Jenkinson released an EP, Music for Robots, that was written by him but performed by a trio of Z-Machine robots (including a 77-fingered guitarist and a 22-armed drummer). That hasn’t, of course, stopped him: this month he released his latest album, Damogen Furies, and his forthcoming London show in October is billed as his biggest yet. For Squarepusher’s FACT mix, he looks way back, at the rave music from the turn of the 1990s that inspired not only him, but many of his contemporaries. This is Squarepusher presents Shut Up And Dance, 1990-1992, and it’s rude as fuck.

Since 2012, the New York-based pair have been honing their vision of deep house across a singles on the Scissor and Thread label and their residency at Brooklyn’s The Panther Room, gaining the support of DJ Sprinkles in the process. Last year, they released their debut album You Go Girl, which stayed true to the duo’s deep house foundations while also exploring dubbier sounds indebted to Basic Channel et al. Frank & Tony’s FACT mix is entirely made up of their own edits, of Mogwai, Herbert, Roedelius and more. “Over the past few years as our sets became more and more focused on a vinyl format”, the pair explain, “when faced with non-working turntables, the turn to digital became more and more of a challenge for us. The vinyl we digitized never sounded quite as good and we both had little patience for searching for music with online shops, so most of the time we were playing our own cuts, which, after a while also became tedious.” “As a result, we started making dancefloor edits of music that really inspired us both artistically and personally. These have now become a central part of our DJ performances from the digital side of the spectrum. The list of edits is growing rather exponentially, so we felt that with this mix we would give a little glimpse into this recent approach in our sets. In a way, this mix is a bit of a list of “greatest hits” in our minds, culminating in the ultimate homage to one of the masters, Roedelius.” Grouper’s never grooved quite like this, in other words.

Rising to notoriety thanks to his popular (and now defunct) Gutterbreakz blog, Nick Edwards adopted the Ekoplekz moniker in the late-2000s, and since 2010 has released an inhuman amount of material for a variety of prestigious imprints. Last year, he settled into the Planet Mu stable, dropping two full-lengths – Unfidelity and Four Track Mind – and this year he’s continued the winning streak with a phenomenal EP (Entropik) and a new album – entitled Reflekzionz – ready to drop on May 18. Edwards’s FACT mix is an expectedly labyrinthine journey, dragging the listener through an expertly-selected set of dusty off-world electronics, mischievous low-end rumblings and hoarse electro from the likes of regular collaborators Mordant Music, Nochexxx and of course Edwards himself.

Based in Texas, Craig Clouse makes a lot of music, and he has fun doing it. How else do you explain record titles like Cunts with Roses, Toilet Door Tits, You’re Lucky to Have Friends Like Us and, perhaps best of all, Find Out What Happens When People Start Being Polite For A Fucking Change? For over 10 years, Clouse and the various other musicians who’ve been in and out of Shine and Shine – the group’s press material regularly refers to performing live with 10 drummers at a time – have been gutting post-punk, krautrock, electro and more for parts, combining the grubbiest aspects of all those sounds into something that’s somewhere between Big Black and Big Beat. It’s no surprise that Powell and Jaime Williams’ Diagonal label has taken a particular – ahem – shine to Clouse in recent years: there’s clear parallels between Powell’s music and Clouse’s, and when Powell takes about finding “getting [a track’s] idea down” boring (“it’s when you get into the detail that the track turns from ‘it could be anyone’ to sounding like me”, he told Resident Advisor), it’s hard not to imagine Clouse sharing that approach. Even on this mix, which only features one Shit and Shine track, everything feels like it could be by Clouse. Shit and Shine’s most recent album, 54-Synth-Brass 38 Metal Guitar 65 Cathedral, is out now on Rocket Recordings.

For the last FACT mix of March, two artists who’ve made more moves than most in jungle of late – Londoner Fracture and Manchester staple Chimpo – slow things down. Way, way down. In Fracture’s words, “this is a slow motion mix. The idea came from wanting to fit a load of music we had got together into a mix but having to slow some down to make it work”. So there’s music from all across the musical spectrum – from Björk, FKA twigs and Boards of Canada to Mumdance, Novelist and Wiley; hell, there’s even an airing for ‘Midas Touch’ – but very little of it sounds as you know it. A comment on our medicated generation? An online mix that finally taps into that “dull, empty feeling” we’re all left with when we stare at a screen all day? Nah, it’s probably just because a ton of shit sounds cooler when its slowed down. Make sure to check Chimpo and Fracture’s recent Metalheadz single, Chimpo’s Monkey Teef mixtape and Fracture’s label Astrophonica. No tracklist, because that would completely spoil the fun.

A collaboration between Samo Sound Boy and Jerome LOL, Los Angeles’ Body High has quietly become one of the US’s most rewarding outposts for new house music. Refreshingly unpretentious, they’ve housed records from up-and-comers (Myrryrs, Jim-E Stack) and innovators (garage legend Todd Edwards, Jersey club king DJ Sliink) alike, as well as providing an outpost for their own productions: Samo and LOL released an album as DJ Dodger Stadium on the label last year, and Samo’s own debut album, Begging Please, will be released on April 28. Described as a “story about the last couple years of my life, told the best way I know how,” Begging Please doesn’t spare on the drama or emotion, and it’s an attitude that also defines his breathless FACT mix. “I recorded this mix to serve as a preface to my album and give people a little more insight as to my major influences with it,” Samo tells us. “As both a DJ and producer, I’ve really come to prefer emotive and unusual tracks over functional club tools. I like everything to sound like the last scene in a movie, that moment right before the credits start. I’m just trying to stretch that out forever, I guess.” In Samo Sound Boy’s world, it’s forever sunset.

A UK house veteran digs deep. Mr. G‘s name has become synonymous with quality in UK house. The artist born Colin McBean was raised in London (though he now resides just outside the capital) and first earned his stripes as part of The Advent, a techno collaboration with sound engineer-turned-producer Cisco Ferreira, before focusing on a sound that’s slower and closer to house, though still often intense, under the Mr. G name. McBean has been gradually honing his music as Mr. G for 15 years now, mostly releasing on his own Phoenix G label, but also through Defected and Rekids, who released his first two albums, Still Here and State of Flux. His most recent album, last year’s Personal Momentz (a reference to the death of his father, a reoccurring theme throughout the album) is his best full-length to date, and his status as a DJ continues to rise (a recent, well received Boiler Room session didn’t hurt, of course). Before he was a producer, Mr. G was a digger, and on his FACT mix he focuses on the soul, funk and more which has always inspired him. It’s sweet, funky, and on Kendrick day, oddly appropriate.