FACT Mixes show

FACT Mixes

Summary: Every week, FACT brings you mixes from the hottest DJs and artists in the world.

Podcasts:

 FACT mix 486: Dave Clarke | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:14:14

Dave Clarke may be best known for uncompromising techno – that style is at the heart of classic records like Archive One and the ‘Red’ series of singles, and was one of the attributes that John Peel, who featured him regularly on his BBC radio show, lauded him for – but electro and hip-hop are massive parts of his DNA too. He started as a hip-hop DJ in the late ’80s, and has tirelessly championed electro on his White Noise radio show. His classic World Service mix CDs were also split into two halves, one for techno and the other for electro. Released ahead of an appearance at Fabric’s Room 2 this coming Saturday March 14, Clarke’s FACT mix leans heavy on the electro, with several appearances from UK gloom-monger Dez Williams and oft-overlooked veteran Will Web, plus more established names like Radioactive Man and Keith Tucker. As the mix winds down, though, it really turns off-piste: there’s whirling weirdness from Martin Rev, odd-ball funk from Toob and even a spin for UK breakbeat classic ‘Mad Monks on Zinc’.

 FACT mix 485: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:42:58

For the second time this year, we’re being spoilt with a FACT mix of nothing but original and unreleased music. Woven from the same guitars, tape, modular synths and vintage drum machines that produced his stunning new album on Mexican Summer, A Year With 13 Moons, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s session is a neat companion to Torn Hawk’s sprawling, soft-focus mix from January and one we reckon we’ll be coming back to all year long. The former Tarantel member has dipped into his vast archives to pick out an album’s worth of improvised tracks made between 2012 and 2014, mixing them down to two-track tape while “adding a few FX here and there”. Throbbing synths are smothered in static, guitars are buried in mossy noise and crushed LinnDrum loops heave against each other like tectonic plates, occasionally crumbling away completely – but throughout you can hear traces of the mournful shoegaze and ‘80s pop that bubble under the surface of the new record (an unexpected direction for which we can thank the encouragement of noise guru Pete Swanson, as FACT’s Maya Kalev learned in her recent interview). “It’s pretty fucked,” he says – and with that as your warning and encouragement, dive in.

 FACT mix 484: Helm | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:18:31

It’s in techno, with the crunched euphoria of artists like Container, it’s in grime and dubstep with the harsh experiments of Mumdance and Rabit, and you’ll even find shreds of it in bonafide breakthrough artists like Baauer (and on a smaller scale, Oneohtrix Point Never, or even a case like Powell appearing on XL). It feels like for many artists at the moment, noise is less a genre and more of a paste to bring together different sounds and genres – and although Helm’s been making a racket longer than most, this wide-reaching approach is a constant quality of his FACT mix. Helm has been releasing music for around a decade now, both solo and with projects like Birds of Delay, his group with Heatsick. In recent years he’s had two main outlets: the PAN label, who released 2012’s excellent Impossible Symmetry album, and his own Alter label, where he’s released records from artists as diverse as Hieroglyphic Being, Richard Youngs and Cremation Lily. Well, we say diverse, they’re all pretty noisy at times. See what we mean? Ahead of a short UK tour supporting Iceage in May (dates on his Facebook page), Helm’s FACT mix features dead-eyed coldwave, painfully panned noise experiments, interstellar grime, punk, and techno crushed and distorted to within an inch of their life. At its peaks, it’s sheer nirvana, at others it’s just creaks and noises, but really, who doesn’t enjoy records that sound like the Metroid ship on a Monday morning?

 FACT mix 483: Tom Demac | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:00:35

Demac has been releasing music for over 10 years, since launching the now-defunct Electronique Audio label for his own productions in 2004, but has really risen up the house and techno ranks over the last few years, releasing on club strongholds like Hypercolour, Aus Music, Drumcode and Pets Recordings. His FACT mix centres around unreleased material, opening with an edit of Gazelle Twin (Demac recently released an EP on HypeLTD, editing material from the Brighton musician’s recent album Unflesh) and including three tracks from a new EP, Smoke Stained Ivories, due on Aus on March, as well as a handful of other edits Demac has made for his sets, tracks that he’s “run through pedals and added octaves here and there”. It seems weird to think of Demac being 10 years into his career now, but his FACT mix shows him at his most authoritative. Oh, and he’s definitely not forgotten that sometimes you just need to beat the listener round the head with a massive bassline.

 FACT mix 482: Shapednoise | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:05:16

The Italian producer has a way of doing things to your speakers that you don’t expect. His music’s physical in the way that fevers and heartbreak and fear are physical, affecting every sense at once and casting a shadow over every inch of your periphery. He’s got a background in audio engineering, and he uses it in the most effective possible sense. For the last four years he’s been co-running the Repitch label with Ascion and D. Carbone, mostly releasing music by the label’s in-house producers but also offering opportunities to like-minded sadists like Sleeparchive and Violet Poison – with whom Shapednoise has collaborated as Violetshaped. Speaking of sadists, it was no surprise when Dominick Fernow (a.k.a. noise demigod Prurient) picked up Shapednoise’s debut album in 2013, The Day of Revenge. The years since The Day of Revenge have seen Shapednoise continue to build up a collaborative portfolio – he’s worked with visual artist sYn, and recently unveiled a live collaboration at Berlin’s CTM Festival with Mumdance and Logos (the group, we’re told, will continue to collaborate together under the name The Sprawl). He’s also co-launched a new label Cosmo Rhythmatic, and released Until Human Voices Wake Us, an excellent mini-album on Opal Tapes. Shapednoise’s FACT mix, recorded late last year, is as twisted as you’d expect. It ranges from techno to jungle to gothic quasi-pop to a distorted recording of Squarepusher and Keith Fullerton Whitman talking about kittens, but everything sits together through clipping, distortion and shitloads of noise.

 FACT mix 481: Nightwave | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:57:08

Born Maya Medvešek, Nightwave first started cropping up on our radar back at the end of the ’00s, first with a series of dubs (and FACT comments!) under her past name 8Bitch, then a series of EPs on the Seed (Equinox, Astarte) and Slit Jockey (G41) labels. After changing her name to Nightwave, she returned with a succession of releases on Fortified Audio, Unknown to the Unknown and more, as well as a memorable vocal appearance on Rustie’s Glass Swords. Nightwave’s always been open about her love of hard, fast dance music – Underground Resistance, Funk, Deeon, Mills and the rest of the gods – but it’s over the latter half of her discography where she’s really let that come to the forefront. Her recent releases, mostly self-released through her Heka Trax label, have been her best to date, regularly hitting the 140-160bpm zone and featuring collabs with DJ Deeon and TT the Artist. Listen to ‘Rave Hard’ or ‘Fire Hoes’ and tell us that’s not someone firmly in the midst of a hot streak. It’s no surprise, then, that Nightwave’s FACT mix – described as “the kind of stuff we play at my club night Nightrave and what my typical set sounds like I guess”, is a ridiculous amount of fun, hurtling through old and new music at some rate of knots. Bangalter’s mixed into MMM into Deeon. Rustie into Godfather into Jammin Gerald. Maribor into DJ Milktray into Finn. It features Mad Mike, UR and Plastikman’s ‘Spastik’ within the first four tracks, but just at the moment where you think you might need to calm down, it throws you ‘Pony’. Oh, and there’s an absolute ton of Nightwave’s own material too. Strap in. And if you don’t like snare rolls, look away now.

 FACT mix 480: Torn Hawk | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:06:48

The artist has released a ton of music and video art in the past several years, under both his own name and a variety of aliases, for the likes of L.I.E.S., Not Not Fun, 1080p and Mexican Summer. None of his projects are more aesthetically and thematically consistent than Torn Hawk though, an alias he has utilized to share sprawling, richly-texture music that tackles machismo, vulnerability and emotional exposure. Last year’s wonderfully-titled Let’s Cry And Do Pushups At The Same Time - which he built from live guitar, drum machines, synths and samples, with nods to Manuel Göttsching, Tom Verlaine and Don Henley – demonstrates the same blurring of time, place and source of his “video mulch” pieces, as does his FACT mix. “These are all original sounds I created,” he writes. “A small portion of the tracks compiled have been half-heard elsewhere. All material is now put to work supporting the larger story presented here.” That’s your tracklist, illustrated by Wyatt, below.

 FACT mix 479: Ejeca | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:01:06

The Belfast-bred producer draws from garage, house, gnarly techno and more, and the labels that he’s released on reflect that. His collabs with fellow Belfasters Bicep on Aus Music represented some of his springiest music to date, while his productions on the shady Tusk Wax label, for instance, were rawer and glistening under moonlight – deep house for dark nights. Elsewhere, he’s continued to return to Waze & Odyssey’s W&O Street Trax, sharing the label owners’ knack for rapturous bass grooves, launched his own label Exploris, and has recently turned heads with the thumping Space & Time EP on Bpitch Ctrl and a well-received remix for Poker Flat. Ejeca’s FACT mix finds him indulging his grubbier side with warehouse basslines, militant stabs and strings aimed straight at the 3am tingle – at points, the mix’s paranoid melodies border on micro-house, but to call this less than major does it a serious disservice. Appropriately, he’s playing London Warehouse Events on January 30, heading up a bill that also includes Citizen (who collaborates with Ejeca as Mountainking) and Sisterhood. For tickets and more information on that head here, and stream his FACT mix below.

 FACT mix 478: Panda Bear | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:41:23

Panda Bear‘s relationship with dance music is an interesting one. He’s been releasing dance records as early as 2002, when he collaborated with Other Music’s Scott Mou for minimal techno experiments under the name Jane, but for his latest album Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, he was a little more cautious with the drums, telling FACT’s Aimee Cliff that ”I feel like the usage of the drum breaks was kind of a gamble for me.” “I don’t think I ever felt like I had figured out a way of entering into that room where I wasn’t just making some kind of lame copy of something else, something that felt like a costume or felt artificial”, he continued. “So after I started making a couple of these tracks and utilising these breaks, I feel like I found a way of dealing with them that still felt genuine.” Drum breaks aren’t restricted to dance music of course, and Meets the Grim Reaper feels just as inspired by hip-hop and r’n'b (9th Wonder was cited as a particular influence prior to the album’s announcement). Panda Bear clearly enjoys a refreshingly naive relationship with dance though, and it shines through on his FACT mix. The mixing is unflashy, letting anthems like Pepe Bradock’s ‘Deep Burnt’ and Jack J’s ‘Something (On My Mind)’ play in close-to-full, while the inclusion of Eric Copeland – a peer of Panda’s from the New York experimental scene whose last release came on dance label L.I.E.S. – should come as no surprise. King Tubby, Aphex Twin and 13th Floor Elevators also feature.

 FACT mix 477: Afrikan Sciences | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:00:57

As Afrikan Sciences, Eric Douglas Porter has spent the last half-decade drawing from afro-futurism, science fiction, hip-hop, jazz and house to create his own sonic world. He wears his influences on his sleeve – there’s very clear elements of Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Theo Parrish and Rick Wade to his records, and his approach bears similarities to Madteo and Bill Kouligas’s PAN label, who released Circuitous - but this is an act mostly out on his own, thumbing his nose at established conventions of tempo, finish and structure. Until Circuitous, Porter mostly released on Deepblak, with the odd diversion to like-minded imprints like Brownswood, but PAN seems the perfect home for his music: both artist and label have one foot in the house and techno circuit (and it’s probably the biggest foot they have in any scene or sound), but also would be completely undersold if referred to as just a house act. Porter’s FACT mix is the perfect accompaniment to Circuitous, slipping as easily into grooves as it does out of them. There’s no real climax to it; instead, it feels like an glimpse into Porter’s world that fades out of view just as you think you’ve got a handle on it.

 FACT mix 476: Eamon Harkin & Justin Carter | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:06:58

Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin started the party – which soon developed a Sunday afternoon accompaniment, Mister Sunday – back in 2008, and it soon developed a reputation as one of the city’s most fun parties. “Fun” might feel like it downplays Carter and Harkin’s attention to detail – the pair are famous for their meticulous approach to organising parties, an attitude seen in a recent feature for XLR8R on setting up soundsystems, and they certainly don’t half-arse any aspects of the night – but with more smug, dull house nights than ever taking place worldwide, Mister Saturday stands out for its unpretentious, good times attitude. As well as running one hell of a clubnight, Carter and Harkin have shown a smart ear for A&R in recent years, launching their Mister Saturday Night label with Anthony Naples’ breakthrough record Mad Disrespect (its title recently picked as one of FACT’s 100 tracks of the last half-decade), and housing music by Boya, Gunner Haslam, Dark Sky and more on the label. This year, they compiled their label work so far with the Brothers and Sisters compilation, and followed it with their “own musical statement”, a live-recorded mix titled Weekends and Beginnings. Their FACT mix is a companion piece to Weekends and Beginnings, 18 tracks pulled live from the same session.

 FACT mix 475: Josey Rebelle | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:02:46

When we ran down our list of 100 Underrated DJs Who Deserve More Shine, we didn’t just include Josey Rebelle, we made her the face of the feature. A resident at London clubnight Nonsense, there’s no grand backstory to Rebelle – she’s simply a very, very good DJ, who’s able to both set the pace of a night or take it to its peak depending on her role on the line-up. To be able to be as good a warm-up DJ as you are peak-time, you generally need to have one hell of a record collection, and it’s something that Rebelle shows regularly on her three-hour Rinse FM show. Like fellow Rinse resident Alexander Nut – whose show she semi-regularly guests on – on any given day you could find Rebelle spinning quiet storm, funk, disco or crunching bleep techno. She’s capable of show-stopping blends – there’s several on this mix – but ultimately, selection is key with Rebelle, and she’s as good as anyone at playing tracks from the edge without losing the momentum of a crowd. If you like what you hear, you can find Rebelle spinning in Fabric’s Room 2 with EZ, Scratcha DVA, Moxie, Klose One and Mella Dee on December 19, while Room 1 sees Mssingno, Deadboy and Barely Legal supporting a Tropical showcase with Skepta, JME and co. For tickets, head to the Fabric website.

 FACT mix 474: Helix | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:50:04

The US-Euro line is one that’s been wheeled out before about Helix – he’s even talked about his music in terms of Chicago legend Ron Hardy making grime – but it really is at the heart of what he does. He worships Detroit and Chicago – particularly the quick, raw mixing style of Jeff Mills and Derrick May, which is present in his FACT mix – but draws heavily from grime, to the point where he describes having Flirta D vocal his ‘Drum Track’ as “a fucking dream come true.” And although his music could loosely be described as classic loop techno, it feels more in tune with current European sensibilities – particularly the Club Constructions axis – than current Stateside dance music. Away from geography, what makes Helix’s music work is the way he finds the subtleties in simplicity. Whether laying down loops of drum sounds and clipped chords (‘Drum Track’; ‘Stacks Riddim’) or relentless techno (he described his recent Porsche Trax EP as DJ Vague as inspired by driving “fast in the dark – like hella fast”), he’ll find exactly what makes a track work, and focus on it to the point where five channels and a simple 8 or 16-bar arrangement is all it needs. It’s honestly uncanny. The fourth track on Helix’s FACT mix is listed as simply “horns & bass”. Sometimes that’s all you need, and no one proves it quite like him.

 FACT mix 473: Mr. Mitch | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:46:12

Not in person, of course: the Gobstopper Records founder and part of the quartet behind crucial grime night Boxed is pretty soft-spoken, with the odd late night tweet about Appletons Rum about as outrageous as he gets. But musically, he’s full of the stuff, and his debut album Parallel Memories, released today on Planet Mu, is spectacular in its sadness. For all the talk of a grime resurgence this last 18 months, to tie Mitch in with a revival sells him short. His Gobstopper label was an outpost for high-quality grime records (Deset, Moony) in the so-called doldrums of 2009-2011, and Bloom’s ‘Quartz’, released on the label in 2012, was a crucial reference point for the dismantled grime of producers like Rabit and Mumdance. As grime has regained its traction, Mitch has continued to look left as others look right, creating quiet anthems with his ‘Peace Dubs’ – a series of melancholic edits made in reaction to last Summer’s war dubs. With Parallel Memories, he develops this style across 12 mournful originals, reflecting – sometimes wordlessly, sometimes with memorable vocal samples – on love and loss. Writing in FACT today, Angus Finlayson calls Parallel Memories‘ tracks “artful, delicate things, rarely saying more or less than they need to.” DJing, Mitch is more than capable of killing a club – see his appearances on Boxed’s Rinse show, or his segment of the Boxed Boiler Room for proof – but his FACT mix runs in parallel (ahem) with his album, tapping contemporary producers (Rabit, Strict Face, Sharp Veins) and classic grime acts (Mizz Beats’ ‘Saw It Coming’ instrumental, Ruff Sqwad’s Rapid, plus a Cashmere Cat and Ariana Grande collaboration that’s effectively a ‘Ghetto Kyote’ tribute piece) acts for some of their saddest moments.

 FACT mix 472: Om Unit | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 01:02:03

“I think once we understand that”, he continued, “then it becomes less about making things with such a fixed perspective and more about adding something reflective to the landscape by using our own techniques to hopefully create something unique and convincing.” Taken in context this may have been a quite about production, but it also extends to the philosophy that makes Om Unit’s music tick. You only need to read one interview to realise that he’s religiously studied the forms of music dearest to him, and thought long and hard about what he can add to them. He doesn’t take his position as a musician lightly, in short. He originally did this as 2Tall, releasing a series of albums and mix CDs from 2004-2008, including the brilliant Beautiful Mindz, a collaboration with Dudley Perkins and Georgia Anne Muldrow. As Om Unit, he found his opening act with a white label edit of Joker’s ‘Digidesign’; the track was heavily supported by Plastician, who signed Om Unit up for a full EP on his Terrorhythm label. Om Unit continued to released warped hip-hop on labels like All City and Civil, but in 2011 something really clicked. Inspired by Chicago’s footwork scene, which had started making waves in Europe due to the support of Planet Mu and others, he released a series of EPs under the name Philip D Kick which explored the then-mostly-untapped ground between jungle and footwork. He wasn’t quite the only one doing this – in fact, when Om Unit and Machinedrum discovered they’d had the same idea, they joined forces for an EP as Dream Continuum – but he was among the first to discover this winning formula, and it led to a whole new phase of Om Unit’s career. After years of studying the form, he was now a fully-fledged jungle producer. As with most of the best jungle producers, Metalheadz eventually came calling. Om Unit’s latest EP Inversion was released last week on ‘Headz and saw Om Unit given access to label boss Goldie’s DAT archive and sample collection, which he “gladly used as salt ‘n’ pepper to spice up the work.” This week, he toasts Inversion with a mix that leans heavily on producers like, like himself, started off making non-jungle music but have been drawn to the style of late: Lee Banon, Etch, Lee Gamble and Teklife’s DJ Earl all feature, alongside 4Hero, Dead Can Dance and more.

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