so i'm assuming if you follow me here you know who i am and what i do. but if not, my main creative outlet for the last couple years has been making thoroughly detailed, meticulously edited, maximalist DJ mixes packed to the brim with edits, blends, and explosive transitions and releasing them as little mp3 albums to download for free. you can find them here.
as the years have gone on and i've honed my craft of producing a dj mix over many months like i'm editing together a feature film, i've come to solidify what that creative process looks like from beginning to end. i just released my most recent mix, an over 2 hour hardstyle epic, and i'm back at the starting stages for what will become my next one.
i'd like to think i specialize in finding emotional and euphoric bangers. songs that go absolutely stupid hard but have a soul to them that is bursting with earnestness. that's when dance music is most compelling and enjoyable to me. when a track comes together to surge through my veins and make my heart beat loudly outside my chest. this is why happy hardcore will always be my muse, but i digress.
for the next mix, which likely won't come out until a year from now, i'm embarking on something that combs through a few genres instead of staying focused on one with a few deviations here and there to keep things interesting like i usually do. currently my roadmap for this next mix is: slow dreamy house music + moody brooding techno + trance as a central focus + some hardstyle and hardcore + some atmospheric jungle/dnb. i've actually already started carving out a tracklist for it which i'm sure will look entirely different a year from now (always does). but it's been fun doing things a little more freewheeling than usual.
anyway with all that preamble out of the way, i wanted to share a few tracks that have caught my ear and been stuck in my head as i dive head first into starting this project. here's one tune from each of those genres listed above to give you a taste of what this might sound like when i actually get to recording it. no guarantee any of this will make it into the final mix but let's listen together anyway.
Mall Grab - Can't
in the summer of 2016 i was falling for someone who would later become a close friend (funny how that works) and we did acid a handful of times while on dates together. deep and lo-fi house tunes really kept her feeling good when we were tripping and made the mood very peaceful. this song had just come out and a youtube repost of it was getting insanely massive play in dance music circles thanks to an algorithm boost (that specific upload has since been taken down). ever since then i've had a respect for house music i was missing before. for all the discourse that surrounds the genre, there are some wickedly good tunes to be found even without digging too deep. and this one's always had a special place in my heart for cementing that realization within me. i did actually already use this song in a previous mix, which is usually a self-restricted rule i don't break, but that mix is growing older and less relevant to me as the years pass on. so maybe this song deserves another go around. idk we'll see.
ANNA & Miss Kittin - Forever Ravers
this may have the greatest vocal to grace a dance track in the last decade:
WE ARE FUCKING RAVERS
FOREVER RAVERS
TECHNO GENDERFLUID
DANCING TIL WE DIE
doesn't really get more raw than that. helps that the whole thumping bassline and wicked acid lead are sufficiently pounding throughout. techno is an interesting genre to me. i feel a kinship with it because it's another midwestern born style of dance music. and when techno trax are at their best they are embodying that spirit of living through some of the bleakest coldest shit the rust belt will throw at you. but the term "business techno" has taken hold among the most annoying kinds of online dj/producer discourse havers and it has really brought a level of shame to the genre i think is undeserved. while i will agree that, much like house music, techno is a basic enough style of song to make that it results in a lot of mediocre tracks. and as a confluence of that it's a particularly popular genre for clout chasing posers to flock to because the aesthetics of the genre are easy to gentrify thanks to their mass appeal. so like yeah, your local white dude who wears gold chains and 200 dollar plain black tees is annoying as fuck. but like... the music is still good lmao. people rag on a lot of genres of dance music (like tech house, which i will also argue Is Good Actually, musically, at least) because of their associated culture and the people who enjoy the music. i get that to a certain degree, but i just don't understand people who take dance music so seriously that they can't entertain the possibility of enjoying something that has silly components to it. my brother in christ, have you heard dance music? have you gone to a rave before? silliness is part of the appeal in even the most self-serious of genres! like come on. anyway what was i talking about? oh yeah this track is gay (positive) and it makes me feel powerful listening to it. that is all.
Ben Nicky & Stunt - Raindrops (Avao Remix)
this song is like a hyper-compressed version of every element of a trance song that satisfies my brain. it's got the uplifting leads, the dreamy spacey ambiance, the heavy rolling kicks, and a strong vocal to tie it together. trance is God's Music Genre. i firmly hold the belief that it's the purest form dance music can take (yes, even more than house) and that gives it an indelible essence that reverberates through many many other genres and styles of music. think about some of the best dance tracks of all time and ask yourself why many of them are, or are at least tangential to trance songs. i'm just sayin. i'm happy to finally center a mix on the genre, but also glad to be flexible enough to include other genres that its vibes reach out and touch along the way. i may do single-genre-mixes a lot of the time, but i don't ever do one-note-mixes. my philosophy is that the mix as a whole must always be progressing forward. every song needs enough space to say its piece, but no song should kill the pace or drag things past the point of being welcome. i'll be including more traditional, longer form old-school trance in this mix too, but this song just feels like something special only a modern take on the genre could provide. it also gets basically zero dj play by anyone including its creators, so you know i gotta let it shine in my mix.
Empyre One & Quickdrop - Sky (feat. Nathalie Tineo)
i was really trying to put this into the last two mixes i've put out lol but i think a largely trance focused one is probably a more suitable place for it to live. really a banger in every sense of the word. got that modern hardcore/hardstyle structure where it starts with an absolute ripper of a drop and then transitions into a monumentally strong melodic one. a winning formula with a powerful duo fit to deliver on the promises that setup entails. i've managed to steer clear of the "is 160 hardcore really hardcore" debate of recent years and just enjoy the music regardless of the labels people put on it (and you should too). and i'm glad there's producers out there filling a gap between genres that gives us gold nuggets like this that could be comfortably slid into a hardstyle, hardcore, or even trance mix.
Ravegenix - When We Were Young
this one comes from the breakbeat sidelabel of uk hardcore giants fracus & darwin, so it's flown completely under the radar of modern junglist circles. but i'm here to tell you to quit sleeping on it (and future breakz in general) cuz this tune's a primo entry into the late night moody jungle canon. when the horns hit i feel a vibration in my soul so deep i cannot describe it. i will concede to vanity a little bit and say that since changing my dj alias in 2020 i've felt each mix i've made has turned out basically flawless. i've chosen to eschew tighter deadlines in order to let the mixes cook as long they need to, resulting in work i'm extremely proud of. my atmospheric jungle, liquid dnb, etc mix from that same year continues to be a definitive statement on everything i love about the genre 3 years later. don't really think i could top it with a second go, even if i have loads of tracks i'd like to include in such a project. so making it the closing section of this mix feels like an appropriate way to work that material in without devaluing it.
it's gonna be a wild ride when this thing gets finished. don't hold me to it, but it's feeling like a just before/just after summer kind of a vibe so i would love for the mix to come out in like may or september of next year. did i mention i wanna make it 3 hours long? lmao get ready folks.