Each week, FACT trawls through the untamed world of free mixes, radio specials and live blends so you don’t have to.
This week, DJ Spinn serves up a lightning-quick blend of footwork, G-funk and R&B titbits ahead of his Simple Things performance, Odile Myrtil unleashes the spirit of Halloween a few weeks early, and Dev/Null goes hell for leather with a vinyl-only jungle and hardcore mix to lose your shit to. Dive in below.
DJ Spinn
Dummy Mix 445 (October 3)
Like the late great Rashad, Spinn has a talent for wringing heavy emotions out of ostensibly dancefloor material, finding the mournful soul samples and luscious ambient pads to turn a Rihanna vocal bittersweet. He’s the master of this game and we’re lucky to have him. No tracklist for his Dummy mix, but as you’d expect it’s heavy on in-house magic from Teklife regulars like DJ Earl and Gant-Man.
Boobs of Doom
BEAST NIGHT (The Wire)
Listen here
The splendidly named Boobs of Doom are a doom-hop duo from Glasgow who released their seventh album (((WHITE NOISE))) this year. That’s not really as important as the tracklist for this conceptual mix for The Wire, titled ‘BEAST NIGHT’, which is a deranged tribute to distortion and all things sick and twisted. Genre is irrelevant: HEALTH, JK Flesh, Equiknoxx, Fugazi, Mr Oizo and William Burroughs all appear. Brilliant.
Odile Myrtil
Choice Mix (RBMA Radio)
Odile Myrtil lent her voice to Fade To Mind member Rizzla’s 2015 single ‘Iron Cages’, and her Choice Mix for the Montreal special of RBMA Radio is underscored by a similar kind of nocturnal energy. It’s what RBMA’s Lauren Martin perfectly describes as a “dark lullaby”. From the noir-pop of Hooverphonic to the Latinx plunderphonics of Elysia Crampton, this mix creeps along the peripheries of gloomy ambient and mellowed-out trip-hop to get you ready for Halloween.
Dev/Null
darkside/idm/reversed hardcore/33bleep special (BTTO Radio, October 2)
Boston’s Dev/Null tried his hand at an “experimental” jungle and hardcore set for a Jan St Werner/Tyondai Braxton show in May this year and it turned out rather nicely. In fact, we’ve been losing our shit to this for the past few days, gnashing our teeth in anticipation for the weekend ahead. The mix combines wide-eyed rave brawlers like Psilocybin with IDM and drum & bass picks like Hospital Records’ Q Project and “acid hardcore records played backwards” (with a little bit of Eek-A-Mouse). The plot twist? It’s vinyl-only.
Cyrk
subsubtropics’ mix de amigo (SSTRMX09)
If you’ve seen Lee Gamble playing live in the past few years, then you’ll also have seen the abstract, high-definition visuals of collaborator Dave Gaskarth. On this two-hour mix for the Subsubtropics Records mix series, Gasgarth shows off his own taste in ambient music, taking a “Lyrolin-stimulated psychogeographical journey” with ties to specific places, including “bedrooms, neighbourhoods and rooftops really around London, Birmingham and Bristol.” Forget the flotation tank, this mix is the sound of being completely immersed at the bottom of the ocean.
