Features I by I 31.05.13

Looking back: stream our top 10 from the first 50 FACT mixes

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When we first started asking artists for mixes, we didn’t know we were building a series: in fact, it was only after four or five of them that we started numbering them. 

Fast forward five years, and we’ve amassed a collection of FACT mixes that we’re very proud of – but one of the things we like most about our series is that it’s captured some of the world’s best DJs at early stages in their careers, often with an approach to selection that’s entirely different to what people seek from them now, and with the amateur press shots to match. Today, we thought we’d look back at the first 50 mixes in the FACT mix series, ranging from 2008 to mid-2009, and pick out the 10 that have stayed with us the most.

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FACT Mix 3: Pivot (Warp) by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

A really good mix from a still-impressive band – and we’ve always got time for someone who starts a mix with something as abrasive as Rustie’s remix of Pivot’s ‘In the Blood’, but what really sticks out about Pivot’s FACT mix is how early it was drawing the links between contemporary club music (Ikonika, Rustie, Kode9) and ’70s and ’80s synth music (Vangelis, Tangerine Dream et al). Kuedo’s Severant owes it a fist-bump at the very least.

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FACT Mix 08: Ben UFO (Hessle Audio) by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

Back when Ben UFO spent more time on Dissensus than he did on tour, Hessle Audio was more of a promising label than a community touchstone – the original post for this mix has long since vanished into the internet’s ether, but we guess they’d have had five singles out at this point? We asked about Ben, Pangaea and Pearson Sound – then Ramadanman – delivering a three-man mix; instead we got this, which on reflection was a far better result. Headhunter’s ‘Mint 500’ and Greena’s ‘Pattern Recognition’ are still talked about like mythical lost dubs in our office, and it’s entirely this mix’s fault.

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FACT Mix 14: Lukid by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

Hands up: we didn’t know much about Lukid when we asked him about a mix, we just knew that we liked his album Foma, and that we’d recently made contact with Actress whose Werk Discs label had released it, so it seemed to make sense. It’s really not easy to make tracks from Autechre, Actress, Dabrye and Orchestre PolyRythmo De Cotonou Dahomey flow together this smoothly, but Lukid pulls it off; his Ustream sessions from the year that followed were in a similar vein and just as good.

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FACT Mix 15: The Heatwave by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

Just a fine, fine mix from one of London’s best clubnights, perfectly capturing the Summer of 2008 where UK Funky had broke and The Heatwave’s still unbeatable ‘Piano Riddim’ never left our office turntable.

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FACT Mix 21: Jackmaster by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

Back before Numbers was a label and when FACT was a much smaller operation, we caught a Yung Jackmaster spinning at an off-Sonar party, blending bassline house, Baltimore and some of the weirder stuff coming out of London and Glasgow like no one else really was at that time. We hit him up on Myspace, and it turned out he was behind the Dress 2 Sweat label that had been releasing heat from Rod Lee and Kazey & Bulldog (look at this discography – it is still just perfect, right?). He took absolutely ages to deliver this mix, but we still throw it on semi-regularly on Friday afternoons in the office, and that David Banner into Modeselektor blend kills us every time.

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FACT Mix 29: Brackles by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

Our former deputy editor, Kiran, used to throw a clubnight underneath this pub in Camden – God knows what it was called, but he once booked Shackleton on the night of the Camden Market fire, which was about as surreal as you’d expect, and later booked Appleblim, who killed us with a life-changing set of dub, dubstep and the rest of it. Anyway, ‘Blim used to play this one track that used to turn places inside out, which turned out to be ‘Glazed’, by Brackles. As chance had it, some of us caught Brackles warming up at FWD>> a month or so later, and he played ‘R U Really From The Ends’, which sold us on him for life and we asked about a mix. It’s fantastic. Check that photo, too.

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FACT Mix 30: Joakim by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

Back in the original blurb we referred to this as our “landmark 30th podcast”, and sure, 350-odd of the things later it doesn’t seem that big a deal, but we were stupid excited to have Joakim on board this early in the series. The mix is just great, too: there’s Suicide, this ridiculous glitch edit of Britney’s ‘Overprotected’ and a bunch of other stuff that we’re still yet to identify.

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FACT Mix 35: Matt Styles by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

King of the selfie press shot, Matthew Styles’ FACT mix is a masterclass in music that he knows more about than both you and us: rare disco, boogie and proto-house culled entirely from the late ’70s and early ’80s, centred around Arthur Russell’s ‘In the Light of the Miracle’.

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FACT Mix 40: Full Nelson (Greco-Roman) by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

When’s the hip-house revival happening, then? The first 50 FACT mixes features a healthy amount of curios, from short-lived house night High House to a session by classical beard Murcof, but none have aged as well as Alex Waldron of Greco-Roman Records’ hip-house session – mostly because the tunes couldn’t possibly sound any older than they did then.

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FACT Mix 41: Greena by Fact Mix Archive on Mixcloud

What happened to Greena? Well, he’s still making really good music, both for documentaries and under a new name that we can’t tell you about, so it’s not like he’s fallen off, but it still seems like a tragedy that he never released more. His lone single for Applepips is a minor classic, and his FACT mix is hands down one of the best we’ve ever run: a multi-layered tour de force that sidesteps the problems that can face Ableton mixes by, well, just making every track a total corker.

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