{"id":672,"date":"2018-06-13T09:51:14","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T07:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dantz.eu\/?p=672"},"modified":"2018-07-13T10:18:54","modified_gmt":"2018-07-13T08:18:54","slug":"the-7-best-dj-sets-of-april-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/the-7-best-dj-sets-of-april-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"The 7 Best DJ Sets of April 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Trying to stay on top of all the DJ sets floating around online could be a full-time job (but it probably wouldn\u2019t pay very well).\u00a0Every month, Philip Sherburne sifts through the never-ending avalanche of beats and bass to bring you the best of the bunch.<\/p>\n

This month offers a bumper crop of cracking house and techno, thanks to energetic sets from Kazakhstan\u2019s Nazira, one of the leading lights of the \u201cNew East\u201d scene, and Chicago\u2019s Eris Drew. There\u2019s also bucolic ambient from Leif, bumping batida from N\u00eddia, and more.<\/p>\n

Grouper – RA.621<\/h2>\n

Grouper\u2019s gloomy brand of ambient folk is a world away from the sounds typically showcased in Resident Advisor\u2019s weekly mix series. But Liz Harris finds an unexpected point of overlap with her opener here: \u201cIt\u2019s a Fine Day,\u201d a song that served as the basis for an ecstatic 1992 remix by A Guy Called Gerald. Unsurprisingly, she opts for the original Jane and Barton a cappella, released on Cherry Red in 1983, whose wistful mood is of a piece with Grouper\u2019s own music. Harris describes the mix as a \u201cdouble-sided postcard\u201d: the front side takes in melancholy, raw-nerved vocal songs from Roy Montgomery and Joanne Robertson, while the back side leans toward instrumentals and ambient: Maxwell Croy, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Tashi Wada with Julia Holter. Bristol space-rock fans will be pleased to hear late-1990s songs from Flying Saucer Attack and Crescent. And right in the middle is an eerie choral piece from Le Mystere des Voix Bulgaires, the state-supported Bulgarian folk choir whose 1975 album became an unexpected hit for 4AD in the 1980s. Just like \u201cIt\u2019s a Fine Day\u201d and Grouper herself, it knows a thing or two about crossing boundaries.<\/p>\n

Eris Drew \u2013 Her Damit Podcast #28<\/h2>\n

From the very first blend, you can tell that this is going to be a special one. The opener\u2014a tough, vintage-sounding breakbeat cut overlaid with ethereal vocals\u2014leads so seamlessly into a remix of Blaze\u2019s \u201cLovelee Dae\u201d that they might as well be extensions of each other. Drew, a cofounder of Chicago\u2019s Hugo Ball parties, tends to speak of dance music in terms like \u201coneness\u201d and \u201cmajesty,\u201d and both qualities shine through in her podcast for Berlin\u2019s Her Damit festival. It\u2019s not hard to see why she\u2019s tagged the set as \u201cmystery house\u201d: Incorporating deep house, dub techno, tons of breaks, and even the occasional dubstep-adjacent track, it moves with a flow that\u2019s unpredictable yet irresistible, and it\u2019s peppered with moments of wide-eyed rapture. I must have listened to it six times over a three-day period; few sets do a better job of tapping into dance music\u2019s ecstatic dimension.<\/p>\n

N\u00eddia \u2013 Sounds of S\u00f3nar<\/h2>\n

N\u00eddia\u2019s guest-producer slot on Fever Ray\u2019s Plunge<\/em> instantly confirmed the 21-year-old as one of the leading lights of Portuguese batida, a rollicking electronic style that fuses elements from around the Afro-Lusophone diaspora. This short, sweet set shows why her take on it is so special: drums so distorted they smear like blackberries dropped on the floor; slippery polyrhythms and whipcrack accents; copious amounts of acoustic guitar and accordion that give the music a supersaturated hue. It\u2019s a masterfully hypnotic tour of one of the most exciting new genres around.<\/p>\n

Nazira \u2013 HNYPOT 265<\/h2>\n

Nazira turned up in this column just a few months ago, and the Kazakhstani DJ\u2019s new mix for Honey Soundsystem\u2019s HNYPOT series is too good not to make room for her again. It\u2019s got everything you could want out of a techno set: Impeccable selection from the very first track (Stanley\u2019s \u201cTravolta\u201d); tight, thoughtful mixing; an understated sense of drama. Her crisply percussive tracks are forceful but never overbearing, in large part because she switches up straight-ahead stompers with electro\u2019s slinkier syncopations. Around 23 minutes in, keep an ear out for the unexpected sound of seagulls\u2014just one of the many trap doors built into her labyrinth of clang and shadow.<\/p>\n

Elena Colombi \u2013 BIS Radio Show #934<\/h2>\n

NTS Radio resident Elena Colombi takes to her guest slot on WNYU\u2019s Beats in Space like a spelunker heading deep underground. Her set is full of sluggish tempos, muddy frequencies, and downright clammy atmospheres; a sensibility inspired by post-punk and coldwave yields minor-key synths, murky basslines, andominous muttering. Still, availing herself of the slow tempo, she also makes room for dancehall\u2019s dembow pulse. Colombi plays a 27-year-old CJ Bolland track at 33 instead of 45, using it as the woozy setup to Clint Mansell\u2019s mind-scrambling \u201cMeltdown\u201d from the Requiem for a Dream<\/em> soundtrack; by the time she follows up with Plastikman\u2019s seismic \u201cSlinky,\u201d you can practically feel the stalactites raining down around you.<\/p>\n

Leif \u2013 Blowing Up the Workshop 85<\/h2>\n

Attendees of Wales\u2019 Freerotation festival describe it as a kind of rural paradise, the sort of place where certain trees on the property are as celebrated as the headlining DJs. Perhaps it\u2019s no surprise that Freerotation resident Leif channels such a mystical sensibility in this gorgeous ambient set for Blowing Up the Workshop. This is a vision of Balearic music at its most open-ended, encompassing the chimes and bells of Max Roach\u2019s \u201cJanuary V,\u201d reeds-and-organs drones from Waclaw Zimpel, jazz piano and Senegalese kora from Omar Sosa and Sekou Keita, and even hair-raising Gaelic liturgical music; there are Theremins, Hawaiian slack-key guitars, and, of course, plenty of shimmering downbeat grooves. My highlight falls almost exactly at the halfway mark: a track from Canada\u2019s Ex-Terrestrial that sounds for all the world like 4AD\u2019s ambient-prog-jazzbos Dif Juz. The perfect lazy-afternoon outdoor mix, just brimming with lakeside vibes.<\/p>\n

Auscultation \u2013 Radio Valencia Broadcast 54<\/h2>\n

This broadcast from San Francisco\u2019s Radio Valencia begins with a pair of techno tracks and a brief introduction from Infinite Beat host Topazu, but the main attraction begins just before the 11-minute mark: a nearly two-hour ambient set from Auscultation, aka Madison\u2019s Joel Shanahan, best known as Golden Donna. His Memory<\/em> double-pack of two Golden Donna live sets was a late-2017 treat, but this set is an entirely different proposition: Focused on beatless ambient in the vein of Stars of the Lid and GAS, classical soundtracks (Ryuichi Sakamoto\u2019s \u201cMerry Christmas Mr. Lawrence\u201d), and the odd new wave brooder, it\u2019s elegiac, immersive, and unpredictable\u2014an ideal late-night soundtrack. (Stream or download here.)<\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/pitchfork.com\/thepitch\/the-7-best-dj-sets-of-april-2018\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trying to stay on top of all the DJ sets floating around online could be a full-time job (but it probably wouldn\u2019t pay very well).\u00a0Every month, Philip Sherburne sifts through the never-ending avalanche of beats and bass to bring you the best of the bunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":938,"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2018.dantz.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}