Image via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In March, many of the best sets found DJs leaning into specificity. This is often the case, of course, but it felt especially pronounced this time around. Anderson do Paraíso showed off the power of Belo Horizonte’s take on funk carioca; Introspekt zoomed in on the intersection of early dubstep and new-school UK garage; and Sugar Free, Kasra V. and Rey Colino offered up takes on retro-leaning rave nostalgia. M August & J Castillo grabbed their CDJs and flew to Ibiza; elsewhere, TAKAKO outlined a gut-twisting take on techno and noise music. Omagoqa, a gqom trio from Durban, explored a few different takes on the genre’s minimalistic grooves, and Mike Midnight, miscmeg, and Takeo.K took over Melbourne’s Mezzanine for a night of zoned-out trip-hop.
Of course, there’s joy in tangling the wires, too. Baptist Goth, a critical figure in Berlin’s contemporary left field, dove deep into liturgical ambience and sky-scraping classical music, and Significant Other dug into scuffed-up field recordings, bleary electronics, and stomach-churning synth workouts. Carlos Souffront and SPRKLBB both went long, taking the supposedly simple joys of house and techno and scrambling them up with a million other sounds along the way; Chee Shimizu did something similar, but with riotous percussion tracks. TSVI showed off the billion-caliber club weaponry he’s been reaching for lately, and Piezo stuffed the amps with million-limbed drum programming. Jan Woo drew a map from New York to another nebula, while Identified Patient rocketed between a staggering range of club-music futures. Time Is Away looked towards the past, using modern classical music to soundtrack a tragedy, and Vladimir Ivković and Yibing dug into deep-groove rock music, deep-space dance records, dollar-bin head-scratchers, and alternative canons in a pair of live recordings.
Here are some of the best DJ sets March had to offer.
Anderson do Paraíso – Funk Mineiro
A lot of the noise made about funk carioca centers around, well, how noisy it is. The style is chaotic and everything-goes, with just a few elements cranked deep into the red: Screaming synthesizers, amp-busting kick drums, and MCs swimming upstream the whole time. But what happens when you suck all the air out of the room? DJ Anderson do Paraíso, a critical figure in Belo Horizonte’s contemporary funk scene, knows the answer. His city’s take on funk carioca is hyper-minimal, often brooding, and relentlessly dark; at its best, it sounds like new-school rave music retooled for a neo-noir. In its dimly lit atmospheres, gothic architecture, and compositional restraint, the genre recalls, of all things, Durban’s gqom circuit, which did to house music what this does to funk carioca. On Funk Mineiro, the DJ digs deep into this hyper-specific offshoot, showing off the raw power of dancefloor minimalism. Again and again, Anderson do Paraíso opts for barely-there beats, with MCs looped atop a single droning synthesizer, a pile of busted tom drums, or a snare played three rooms away. The set takes funk carioca’s trademark whirlwind-stomp and reimagines it as a blood-curdling and whisper-quiet thing; the result is driving, icy, and deeply psychedelic.
Baptist Goth – subglow/Live
One of the joys of mixes is that the format offers endless space for play. This column has, over the years, showcased many different styles of sets: Radio plays, quick-and-messy historiography, direct rips from listening bars, globe-trotting genre histories, wild-eyed radio sessions, music meant to be played in your sleep. But there’s always another stone to turn over; at the end of the day, this is an art built around connecting pieces together, and there are infinite ways to manage that. On subglow/Live, Baptist Goth—a.k.a. Berlin’s Dylan Kerr, a.k.a. the architect behind one of this year’s most stunning electronic-music compositions—goes deep on the DJ set as a form, refusing obvious blends in favor of a slow and purgatorial smear. Or, put another way, obvious historical documentation and delineated beats are out; drone metal and electroacoustic trickery are in. Throughout the session, Kerr builds a universe out of pitch-black drones, creating a framework where J.S. Bach, Iannis Xenakis, Steve Reich, and Sinéad O’Connor all make sense next to one another. Acting as a connective tissue is Kerr’s interest in slow-and-low sludge and gristly textures; the resultant two hours are disorienting, discordant—and, frequently, beautiful. subglow/Live is a two-hour dive into liturgical noise music, with Kerr finding ascendance in the muck.
Carlos Souffront – Nowadays Live and Direct 016 / SPRKLBB – All Night Long at Mansions
Give a DJ long enough, the mythos says, and they’ll build an entire universe. That’s certainly part of the joy of all-night (or all-afternoon) sessions: A solid enough selector can make that idea feel true, using their crates as stepping stones to parts unknown. Carlos Souffront, who is, full stop, one of the States’ finest DJs, took over Nowadays for a mid-day session last October, dropping a session of chunky techno, acidic electro, and storming four-four kicks. It’s a real masterclass of a session—Again and again, Souffront opts for sly and understated blends, keeping the floor moving without peacocking in the slightest. By and large, it’s “techno,” but that’s more a way of underlining the sheer propulsion of his selections: Look between the kick drums and you’ll find sludged-up new beat, riotous acid, old-school ghetto house, and about a hundred other forms. This is one of the States’ finest DJs mixing in peak form, blasting a crucial dancefloor with seemingly endless left turns as the dancefloor fills with sunlight.
Elsewhere in New York, a few months later, on the opposite end of the clock, SPRKLBB took over Mansions, a wine bar and critical dance floor. If Souffront’s session reveals its hand early, jolting between styles with a bit of a skip in its step, SPRKLBB moves a bit slow by comparison, leaning harder into four-four techno idioms. The result is a session that takes a bit longer to snowball, but all those drum tracks give it a phenomenal momentum once it gets going: This is techno imagined as a funky and playful thing, with drum lines vaulting over each other and turning their own rhythms inside out. As the session runs on, SPRKLBB goes ever stranger, pulling off all sorts of why-not blends—New Orleans drum-line snares and sci-fi synth blasts, whip-cracking garage house and funked-up R&B, and two separate jaw-dropping slips into turn-of-the-century dance-pop. No matter how many directions the set cuts in, though, SPRKLBB holds it all together thanks to their rock-solid handle on grooves—bump-and-weave house and shoulder-rolling techno, mixed to perfection, and sounding like it could go on forever.
Chee Shimizu – rural2023
Chee Shimizu has earned a reputation as a digger’s digger. The Organic Music head has a seemingly boundless number of crates, running from far-flung jazz fusion to off-kilter synthpop and back again. Part of the thrill of rural2023, then, is perhaps a bit counterintuitive. Here, the anything-goes DJ goes deep rather than wide, opting for hypnosis above all else. After a brief shot of disorientation at the top—spoken word, pipe-organ blurs, vertiginous drones—He pulls off an impressive trick, upping the confusion even as he folds in grooving percussion tracks. By and large, rural2023 is defined by its steady kicks and heady grooves, with ramshackle percussion and lo-bit synths dancing atop a solid foundation. Here, it’s rickety electro and machine-funk drum-lines; there, it’s ever-ascending synth lines pinging into the dark; elsewhere still, it’s a long-form blast of synths that sound a bit like staring into the sun. No matter the form, it’s masterfully mixed, with few obvious transitions to speak of; here, Shimizu blurs the lines between form and style with a steady hand, traversing the astral plane with the help of a few well-laid kicks.
Identified Patient – wav.world
The risk with million-genre DJing is simple: It’s all too easy to shred any connective tissue along the way, turning what could be a brain-bending trip to something a bit muddier. Scanning the tracklist for Identified Patient’s latest mix ought to set off alarm bells: Chest-rattling grime rubs shoulders with piledriving techno; acid crashes into vintage dub records; vertiginous halftime runs into white-hot junglisms. But you don’t listen to sets on paper, and a careful enough alchemist can make just about anything into gold. On wav.world, the Amsterdam DJ-producer proves this again and again, vaulting between styles and making the trick seem entirely natural. He spends a good chunk of the set playing uptempo and left-field club music, folding vertiginous ambience into shoulder-rolling dubstep and breaks; it helps that he mixes slowly, giving each of his selections plenty of space to breathe. (Sure, he plays over fifty tracks, but he takes nearly three hours to do it.) wav.world is kaleidoscopic, playful, and unpredictable in equal measure; it is a carefully plotted sprint through a million outré dance-music idioms.
Introspekt – RA.929
Great dance music is often timeless. This isn’t a statement on the qualities of tunes, per se, but instead on their constituent parts: You can trace Amen breaks from 2024 to 1969, or follow the squelch of a 303 across the decades, or chase UK garage’s shuffling drums across oceans. Introspekt—a UKG producer based in New York—understands this. With RA.929, she turns in a hot-and-playful session that blurs the lines between past, present, and future, sitting somewhere between new-school breaks, proto-dubstep, and vintage two-step; the result would be a bit disorienting if it weren’t for her rock-solid grasp on groove and sheer vim. She mixes fast here, rocketing between forty tunes in ninety minutes, but it never feels rushed; instead, it’s just a bit rollicking, taking the forward momentum of classic garage and dubstep and riding it all the way through. The throughline, here, is the back-and-forth between tooth-rattling bass and shoulder-rolling hi-hats; it’s equal parts propulsive and seismic. RA.929 is a history lesson, a glimpse towards the future, and a celebration of UKG and dubstep at their most rough-and-ready.
Jan Woo – Juanita’s Mix 099
Techno can be a heavy, inelegant thing, and there’s a lot of joy to be found in that—Sometimes, you need to ride a steamroller to the nightclub. But it’s worth turning that coin over, too. On Juanita’s Mix 099, NYC DJ Jan Woo digs deep into fourth-world techno, locking in on tripped-out grooves. It’s not all “techno,” per se, in the Axis Records sense of the term—There’s plenty of ambience, a fair number of field recordings, a bit of folk music, a pile of heartrending spoken-word recordings. But the throughline, a steadfast focus upon slow-rolling rhythms and a gradual tilt towards the cosmos, is surely familiar to anyone who’s spent enough time listening to, say, Donato Dozzy or Ricardo Villalobos. Juanita’s Mix 099 demonstrates an intimate understanding of the possibilities of techno as a tool for world-building. Here, slowly and steadily, Woo builds a tower of synthesizers, drum machines, and dusty ambience until their synthesizers scrape against the stars.
Kasra V – 1400 ˚ C
The appeal of 1400 ˚ C is pretty simple. Throughout the set, Kasra V digs into vintage and chunky club tracks, each new keyboard landing like a piñata stuffed with glitter. The opening track is a blur of lo-bit synthesizers, hefty kicks, and satisfyingly retro vocal runs: Equal parts playful and delirious, casting the dancefloor as a place for out-and-out escapism. From there, Kasra leans hard into this style, discarding any obvious peacocking in favor of keeping the party going. As the set runs on, Kasra slowly teases out the extreme ends of his selections: The drums swing harder, the keyboards get a bit rowdier, the vocal samples a bit more rambunctious. Nu Agenda’s “Pure Energy,” with its ricocheting tom drums, acid-soaked synths, and relentless drive, would be a shot in the arm in most any context, but here, twenty minutes in, it’s pretext to a much longer ascent. Throughout 1400 ˚ C, Kasra V pilots a course towards old-school rave jubilee, digging deep into a crate of dollar-bin dancefloor gems along the way.
M August & J Castillo – Coast 2 Coast
“Love Attack,” by Just Jaymes, is a quietly disorienting track: It’s downtempo dancehall; it’s chill-out room fodder that gets under the skin; it feels like it splits the difference between new-school neo-soul and early-aughts new-age compilations. It’s also, not coincidentally, a telling way to open a mix. On Coast 2 Coast, New York’s M August and San Francisco’s Jeremy Castillo conjure three hours of smog, crossing state lines and oceans in the process. This is slow-and-low music primed for the smoking section and sun-drenched beaches: low-slung drumming, keyboards curling around hi-hats like wafting smoke, vocals floating somewhere atop. (A few highlights out of a million: a piano-dancehall stomper an hour in; a shot of ebullient new jack swing halfway through; a few blends that thread the needle between fuzzed-up deep house and Golden-age New York hip-hop.) It’s dancehall, dub, and old-school hip-hop; it’s head-nodding grooves from across the decades; it’s playful, carefully mixed, and full of surprises. On Coast 2 Coast, M August & J Castillo write a love letter to kicking back, opening up their crates and pulling out three hours of sunlight.
Mike Midnight / miscmeg / Takeo.K – Mezzanine : II
If electronic music—and folk music traditions, for that matter, which aren’t that far removed from the club—are about reanimating old ghosts and reimagining histories, whether that’s old-school hardcore or Black American dance musics, then it’s a surprise that DJs don’t play trip-hop more often. The style, which dunks hip-hop, dub, and turntablism into a vat of smog, feels ancient even when it is freshly pressed; it takes contemporary electronic-music styles and casts them in amber. On Mezzanine : II, three critical Australian downtempo DJs—Mike Midnight, who has featured on this column several times; and miscmeg and Takeo.K, both of whom ought to have been—go deep on the style, prizing atmosphere over genre specifics to consistently winning results. Mike Midnight’s session splits the difference between zonked-out trip-hop and slow-mo downtempo; miscmeg folds in 4-a.m. breakbeat and sunkissed shoegaze; and Takeo.K’s turn behind the decks is perhaps the brightest of the three, with liturgical drum-and-bass rubbed up against aqueous noise rock and deep-space dub records. The sets have all been posted individually, but they’re best consumed à la February’s Mezzanine : I: a single unending terrace made of smoke and crushed velvet, any obvious stylistic distinctions dissolving underneath the weight of sheer atmosphere.
Omagoqa – Hyper Real Radio 004
If you’ve got your ear to the ground in Durban, you’ve likely already heard of uThayela. But, just in case: The style, whose name translates to “corrugated iron,” takes the already icy sounds of gqom and makes them even heftier. It’s a mean feat, given gqom—a South African offshoot of house that has spawned entire universes of its own—is already defined by its bracing minimalism and sheer weight; here, a kick, a snare, and a whistle are often enough to crack the earth in two. If you’ve heard of uThayela, though, what about Is’qinsi? The genre, which seems to have emerged in the past few years, takes gqom and combines it with more international club styles, weaving tones pulled from techno and dubstep into the mix. Even as plenty of gqom’s leading lights have moved on to amapiano, the genre’s still innovating and moving in wildly exciting directions. You just may need to dig a bit, but that’s always been the case.
On Hyper Real Radio 004, Omagoqa—a critical trio in contemporary gqom—turn in a survey of the sound’s particulars at the moment, building a bridge between circa-2020 gqom, uThayela, and Is’qinsi. The set is full of the expected bone-crunching kicks and vertiginous minimalism, but it’s got a fleet of brain-bending grooves dancing atop the bare-bones foundations. Omagoqa gesture towards the genre’s forefathers with a few drops from DJ Lag and Rudeboyz, but they make plenty of room for a decidedly left-of-center new school, too: Twenty minutes in, it practically turns to a DEEP MEDi halftime night, all wobbling basslines and seismic drumlines; near the end, they bring in an honest-to-God synth bass, which is the kind of thing that doesn’t sound like a big deal until you’ve gotten acclimated to just how Spartan this stuff typically is. Gqom is a genre of microscopic variations, and new sounds often aren’t fully obvious until they’re a few years in the rearview. With Hyper Real Radio 004, Omagoqa pull off the rare trick of documenting the gqom scene as it currently stands.
Piezo – Recognise
In a recent interview with Piezo, Christian Eede went deep on the Italian producer’s musical palette: His productions, which span from dub to downtempo to dubstep; his introductions to dance music, which include Aphex Twin, freetekno, and Mala & Coki; and his label, which has a decidedly global focus. It’s that last bit that might be the most instructive. Piezo’s productions pull from all sorts of dance-music traditions, and with Ansia, the label he launched several years back, he’s been leaning into that global side of things. (Case in point: The label’s latest release features names from Cairo, Chicago, Tokyo, and Austria.)
This is all to say: It’s hard to tell where, exactly, Piezo is looking for inspiration. His latest mix might offer a clue, though; to hear him play it out, it’s not any particular sound or geography that unites his interests. It’s an approach. How else would you explain someone linking the rough-and-tumble tom drums of gorge, the quick-and-precise sounds of footwork, and who-knows post-post-dubstep? This is all, at its root, fleet-footed percussion music; it’s about running circles around drum lines and making whirlwinds of hi-hats and shattered drumsticks. Again and again, he doubles back on himself, flipping tracks inside out, halving and doubling BPMs, folding continents in on each other, and generally angling towards a kaleidoscopic kind of mania. On a macro level, it’s truly anything-goes stuff, but he handles each blend with ease, making even the most daring leaps seem intuitive at the moment. Doing that once is impressive; doing it for an hour is something else entirely. On Recognise, Piezo collapses a universe of drum tracks in on itself, revealing something new every step of the way.
Rey Colino – ani/live Forty Two
In the past few years, Animalia has established itself as a critical hub for new-school dance music, with two mix series that run the gamut from garbled ambient to lighters-up tech-trance and back again. But what’s old is new again: If there’s been any obvious trend in their mix series as of late, it’s been trance, progressive house, and sun-kissed breaks—all of which recall Golden-age club nostalgia. But those styles seem to be on the perpetual upswing, and with good reason. A chunky synth line or well-mixed kick drum never goes out of style, after all. ani/live Forty Two is a solid encapsulation of this ethos: Ninety minutes of confetti-blasted rave tunes that feels half that thanks to careful blending and an unrelentingly sunny attitude. It’s not about any particular blend, though, but about how it all comes together: Here, Colino rockets between livewire breaks, retrofuturistic techno, sassy trance tunes, jazzy deep house, and all manners of vintage rave euphoria. Not unlike a few other selections on this list, ani/live Forty Two feels suspended in time, bottling the best bits of the past few decades into something that’s outright explosive.
Significant Other – Escape From New York
Modern ambient music—the best of it, anyways—is, more often than not, deeply uncanny. Manchester’s Space Afrika, as well as the 3XL crew and extended universe loom large here: Screwed-up synth workouts, Paulstretched pop records, scuffed field recordings, club rhythms heard from miles away. Lots of the most exciting “ambient” music comfortably fits Eno’s definition of the stuff, working equally well in the background and the foreground, but if you tune in, you’re bound to find something far more unsettling than you might hear on Music for Airports.
Significant Other, a.k.a. Berlin’s Roddy Parker, understands this. Escape From New York, the latest tape from critical nu-weirdo electronics label Berceuse Heroique, sits comfortably alongside contemporary sort-of-ambient-music stylings: It opens with creeping minimal-synth records before shifting into abyssal gurgles, cheap-mic field recordings, post-game interviews, and liturgical ambience. It is quiet, disorienting, and deeply bleary; Parker moves slowly here, but he’s building a world out of these scraps. This slow-motion collagery yields marvels. The set’s bleary electronics conjure something that feels entirely alien, wrapping familiar motifs in textures that feel beamed in from another world. It’s gossamer and grungy at once; as soon as it locks into any particular form, it dissolves into thin air. Escape From New York, the title says. To where? Here, Parker looks towards the stars and sewer drains and, somehow, finds his way towards both.
Sugar Free – RA.927
The first thing you’re likely to learn about Sugar Free is that there isn’t much to learn. The Berlin-via-Madrid DJ spins chunky house, techno, and electro records, rarely shares her tracklists, and speaks on the record even less. But the second thing you’re likely to learn—Just how solid those tracklists are—Is likely to make anything else moot. RA.927 is as fine an example of her style as any: A triangulation of floor-focused techno, hands-up house, and wiggly electro that feels like it could have come out at any point in the last three decades. Highlights abound: Here, it’s lo-bit acid squigglers, with a single synth poking out a melody atop bleary ambience; there, it’s livewire house made out of just a few drum machines; elsewhere still, it’s barely-there, yet unerringly propulsive, minimal techno: a kick drum and a keyboard locked in unending arpeggios, rocketing towards the stars. It helps that Sugar Free approaches RA.927 with a veteran’s touch, alternating between invisible blends and head-spinning switch-ups. The set is sure to keep the folks over at MixesDB for quite some time, and deservedly so: This is heads-down dancefloor material executed with precision and aplomb; it’s an endless barrage of shoulder-rolling grooves delivered with a no-nonsense attitude; and, most importantly, it’s just a ton of fun.
TAKAKO – Akalara4
Forty-five minutes into Akalara4, the mix descends into disarray. Steamrolling kick drums and scraped-metal synthesizers are, suddenly, replaced with almost nothing. The mix lingers in a particularly spooked-out zone for a few minutes—scraggly field recordings, Geiger-counter synthesizers, and barely-there kicks that feel like heartbeats—Before dropping, yet again. Then, it’s—Ambient gabber? Freetekno with half the speakers unplugged? In any case, it’s disarming, disorienting, and disquieting. The most impressive thing about Akalara4 is that none of this is wholly unexpected; in fact, it all makes a strange kind of sense. The session, which runs an hour but suggests an entire universe, looks at dancefloor music through Dutch angles; again and again here, TAKAKO infuses familiar forms with an alien energy. This is a set of heart-in-throat electronics that gestures towards the club in form, if not in feel: Locust-infested techno, million-limbed IDM, black-hole drum-and-bass. Even at the set’s most direct, it sounds as though the set’s busted machinery could collapse into itself at any moment—So, in those last fifteen minutes, when it finally does, it’s satisfying and skin-crawling in equal measure.
Time Is Away – Poor Pierrot
Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney want to tell you a story. This is hardly new: Once a month for the past decade, they have filled the NTS airwaves with oral histories, folk traditions, and hushed psychedelia. In doing so, they have carved out an unusual niche; their show reorganizes histories, chopping and scattering centuries of texts and instrumentation into something that feels entirely new. Their project has looked towards capitalistic displacements, the rough magic of cucina povera, lovelorn balladry, hunger and lust, modern mythology, folk horror, illusory nostalgia, and so much more. Now, with Poor Pierrot, they delve into their stacks of biography yet again, creating what might be one of their most metatextual works yet.
Poor Pierrot is, at its heart, a story about stories: The stories we tell other people, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when those narratives turn out to be more brittle than we imagined. Here, they pull extensive quotes from Richard Holmes’s 1985 text Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer—itself something of a story about stories—and focus, specifically, on Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a French mime who rose to fame playing Pierrot, a character whose silhouette towered over theater in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Rollo and Tierney cycle through liturgical classical-music selections and bleary-eyed drone, the excerpted text moves from whimsical to joyous to concerning to blood-boiling; the piece moves from the street to the theater, and then again to the courthouse. It is a piece about the cost of ego, the value of an audience, and the barriers between performance and reality. As the writing grows more discordant, Rollo and Tierney keep things studiously calm, stretching a tightrope ever further in between their notes and words. That queasiness, it seems, is the point. Poor Pierrot is a story about the limits, and dangers, of stories; it is a meditation on meditations; it is both a paean to performance and a warning against it.
TSVI – The Mix 004
Between his mixes, productions, and label work, TSVI—a.k.a. Guglielmo Barzacchini—has built a universe of trapdoors: Melodies that zig when they ought to zag, synths that sprout legs and scurry deep into the uncanny valley, sort-of-familiar dancefloor rhythms dunked into vats of smog. This anything-goes approach to disorientation is made abundantly clear on The Mix 004, which shows Barzacchini deep in his club-music crates, grabbing inside-out techno, full-throttle raptor house, steamrolling dembow, and who-knows drum workouts. Each blend lands like a light-speed rug-pull, often with everything changing on a moment’s notice save a speedy sub-bass or single rolling snare. The mix reaches its logical apex halfway through, when he reaches for “Rage,” a B-side from Dutch moombahton crew The Partysquad. What starts as a pretty straight-ahead club track fueled by a squealing acid synth turns maddening once the synthesizer starts arpeggiating, pitch-bending, and playing in three tempi at once, turning the track into gut-busting pandemonium: What else can you do but laugh? On The Mix 004, TSVI bottles that exact energy—Bewildering, white-hot, delirious—and drops left-field bomb after left-field bomb in the process.
Vladimir Ivković / Yibing – Weird Science
“Weird science,” indeed. Vladimir Ivković is one of contemporary dance music’s preeminent alchemists; his best sets, often, merely glance towards the dancefloor but keep it moving anyways, splintering motorik grooves and machine-soul funk into wholly unrecognizable forms. (His seven-hour opus from last December is still this year’s mix to beat.) With his recording from Weird Science, a Brooklyn party dedicated to the “Strange, Weird, and Obscure,” Ivković fills his crates with smog, fishing out three hours of low-slung grooves, dusty drum kits, and apocalyptic guitar music: Gothic folk records, psychedelic trance tunes, disheveled post-punk, acid-synth workouts, rickety krautrock.
The brain-bending session finds a cousin in Yibing’s contribution, released a week later. When the Brooklyn DJ was last in this column, it was for a session of delirious sort-of-downtempo that sat somewhere between early-morning IDM, fourth-word rock-and-roll, and dancefloor psychedelia. Here, she pulls off a similar trick, but to wildly different results, opening the floor with new-school classical minimalism, hushed spoken word, and blissed-out dub techno; much like the following two hours, it’s playful, quiet, and deeply wigged-out. The set seems locked in a constant evolution, whether on micro or macro scales: Any given track houses a seemingly endless range of textures and rhythms, and any given twenty-minute stretch spans decades, oceans, and universes. Slowly, Yibing moves from (relatively) straight-ahead dancefloor material to wigged-out guitar records and back again, giving the set a satisfying arc that, intentionally or otherwise, mirrors Ivković’s offering. They say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; here, that line is blurrier than ever.
