003: Great Moments in Compilation History

One of my reasons for starting this blog was to provide an outlet for one my great passions - compilations. Between 1990 and 2010, commercially released compilations were my musical lifeblood. These little nuggets of musical delight were by far the most convenient, reliable and interesting way to explore new (or new to me) music. Usually they would have an established artist or DJ's name attached to them. Some, like the Back To Mine, or the Late Night Tales series, had dozens of instalments, featuring many of the best electronic and indie artists of their era. Others were more like mixtapes: studio mixes released as a work, much like an EP or LP.   Others still were showcases, or history lessons, presenting music from a specific era, or from a different music culture or territory. Then there were the film soundtracks, which in the 1990s enjoyed a golden age: fascinating and evocative mixes of the popular and the avant garde interspersed with original compositions and dialogue. What is particularly interesting to me is that they are now often very difficult to find. Streaming services have little use for esoteric mixes, with vaguely defined themes from half forgotten artists. They have their own perpetual, procedurally generated mixes for your delictation, and clearly don't wish to pay the licenses to reproduce old stuff in full. This is particularly frustrating when it comes to film sound tracks: how can it be that you can't stream the Jackie Brown soundtrack anywhere in 2020? It feels wilfully neglectful, as there are so many beautifully crafted and unique mixes in danger of being lost to history. 

So I think it's time to celebrate this nearly extinct mix format, and think about what the compilation era might mean within the broader sweep of popular music history. Stemming from DJ culture and the dual-deck pirate mixtape phenomenon,  compilations became a ubiquitous feature of popular music and, I would argue,  a guiding light for emergent streaming services: flexible services wherein anyone can compile tracks, share them and be their own Back To Mine DJ. Artistically, I think compilations represent a highly underrated subdiscipline of DJing, one to which I have always been most at home (pun intended): the ability to play an appropriately pitched, interesting and pleasurable hour long set to people in a private or domestic setting. The audience might be hanging out, having a drink, or everyone might just have got back from an all nighter and need some sonic support while they drink tea and smoke spliffs. A good CD mix is a wonderful thing, and this little sub-blog will document some of the best, in a loose descending order.

32: 4Hero Present Brazilika (Far Out Recordings, 2006) 

Brazilian music isn't for everyone. To say it veers towards cheese would be an understatement. The strumming guitars, glockenspiels, jazzy keys and unctuous vocals to my hears carry strong muzak, or even Mario Kart vibes. Where it excels is the variety and depth of its percussion instruments: beautifully delicate, violently powerful, completely weird and everything between, Brazil is the drum's spiritual home. So when a track hits the right balance between schmaltz and symphonic syncopation the result will go down as easy as a fresh caipirinha.

The balancing act on the 2006 compilation Brazilika was delivered by one half of South London breakbeat pioneers 4Hero, Marc Mac. Ever since their star turn at the bleeding edge of 90s jungle, 4Hero had been moving increasingly towards the jazz, neo-soul, broken beat and Afro-fusion realm, later exemplified by Gilles Peterson. 4Hero's best music is marked by an ability to strike through warm, sunny euphoria with deep, syncopated grooves, and Brazilika easily gives up as many good vibes as Black Gold of the Sun and Les Fleur. Running around an hour ten, it's one big gorgeous "Room 3" type mix: easy on the ear, steadily mid tempo but with just enough gas to keep the ravers on their toes.

It is also laden with Brazilian music legends, such as Milton Nascimento (who's opening track is one of the all time great ear worms), Azymuth and Bosa Nova icon Marcos Valle. Remixes abound, with added drum patterns and raised tempos toughening up what can be a lightweight production style. By the time Black Magic Power Ride drops after 15 minutes we're in that perfect ear canal dance zone, where even if you're staring out of a bus window at the February rain you know that there's a party going on somewhere. It's black atlantic soul music of the highest order. Sure, it's a bit one paced, and the mixing is lacklustre in places, but the high points are very high indeed. It's one of those instant roof terrace party records, of which there can never be too many.

This run down would extend to a hundred or so entries if I wrote up every great DJ studio mix in my collection. I have given it less emphasis here because this genre hasn't become endangered in the way that other types of compilation have. Guest mixes on Boiler Room, Soundcloud, FACT, Mixcloud and elsewhere have kept the form alive and thriving in the 21st century, which is great. With that said, this particular gem is worthy of inclusion for a number of reasons. Firstly it is a pure vibe; a DJ perfectly in sync with his material, laying down a coherent, balanced and sometimes surprising 70 minutes of soulful music. Second, it is an respectful and authentic re-framing of a compelling black atlantic music culture for a new audience: always a great basis for a playlist or mix of any kind.  Thirdly, because through this process it shows us a problematic double edge to 90s/00s music culture: how sounds previously out of earshot to white western audiences came to be increasingly and insidiously repackaged as viable form of popular music. 

To an extent this mix is ahead of it's time. Deep syncopations such as those on display here were very much alien to British ears ten years ago. UK Funky was very thriving in the late 00s, but mostly on the outer fringes of British music culture. The rhythms of the time were the standard house/techno 4 to the floor, or the structured patterns of drum n bass and dubstep. I remember borrowing this CD from Hackney Central library and being unsure about what to make of it to begin with. Over time, it started to make more sense, as my ears adjusted to hearing Latin and African rhythms as a direct equivalent of Anglo American dance music. Eventually this turn became a fundamental component of mainstream pop. This tidy little mix encapsulates a moment of transition, and perhaps not an altogether positive one, between the purist, underground legacies of rave culture and the outward looking, hybrid and, yes, commercialised future of electronic music in the pop landscape. 

Studio mixes may - in and of themselves - represent a process of gentrification within electronic and adjacent global music cultures. Taking these sounds out of their original setting - the rave, or dance hall - and packaging them up neatly into a little £10 slab of plastic, for affluent. culturally sophisticated, middle class audiences, is a transaction made by one culture upon another, on unequal terms. There is no choice within capitalism, when the dominant culture takes an interest in a culture in the social margins. A slow, inexorable process of hybridisation, of fragmentation, of Apollonian sophistication, invariably proceeds. We often get good music as a result, as in this case, but when considering cultural appropriation and gentrification, one must always ask, who benefits from the arrangement?    

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Honourable mentions in this vein include Tiga's 2002 DJ Kicks mix, which might make you almost like tech house, and Tensnake's 2010 double In The House mix. These are all just good examples of professional DJs absolutely nailing the remit of a compilation mix - showing people something new that they'll want to play again and again and again.

002 The Tens

So… the 2010s. What an amazingly horrible decade to live through. Not flat out terrifying like the 40s, or tumultuous and revolutionary like the 60s, or even definitively crushing for an entire social class and culture, like the 80s. No, the Tens were a more venal, dismal kind of horrible, where grievance and bad faith became a kind of totalising currency. Against a backdrop of objectively frightening developments around climate change, food and water security, drone warfare, mass surveillance and right wing extremism, so many petty, insecure people seemed to find their voice online. It was, as Barbara McClay put it, 'a decade of sore winners'. 

History will recognise this as the era when the illusory promises of liberal democracy finally started give way. A screen-based culture that began by rewarding shameless self promotion ended up delivering a new political order, and all the old fights we thought we'd won and could leave behind - anti-fascism, anti-racism, civil rights - have now to be fought all over again. It marked the end of ironic detachment as a justifiable attitude towards political and social questions. It was the time when we all picked a side again. After twenty years of neo-liberal insulation it has been a cold, cold wind.

We've all been getting older in the process, which hasn't helped. Trying to become an adult amidst this socio-cultural regression has been a complicated undertaking. Day to day decisions, like how to get to work or what type of toilet paper to buy, require an endless subliminal moral audit, weighing our abundant privileges against our equally abundant sense of inadequacy and alienation. It's no wonder that we are both more aware of and less able to deal with our own mental health Yet somehow, amidst of all of this decay, we produced one of the best 10 year stretches of pop music ever witnessed. Funny that…

I hadn't fully appreciated this state of affairs until I started pulling this playlist together in November. End of the 'teens articles were starting to pop up in my timelines, and it seemed like a good idea to take stock of the sounds that I have been enjoying over the recent and not so recent past.  I did something similar at the end of the last decade, although in quite a different state of mind. Sadly I can't find the exact list anywhere now but remember that I populated it with quite a lot of politicised, confrontational music (it definitely had We Want Your Soul and Single Ladies on it). The 00s were the time that I moved from idiot teenager, to emotionally stunted PhD student, bar tender and part time DJ. Pop music on the whole was pretty irrelevant to me. I remember it as Ibiza chillout, sexy RnB, boy and girl bands, lame indie rock and the continuing capitalist death march of hip hop. I dragged 70 of minutes of rebellion out of the era with some considerable effort. This time, I filled up a playlist of nearly 100 absolute bangers in about 2 hours. Sure there was a lot of crap to sift through - there always is with pop - I was just struck by how much great mainstream music there was that I connected with, and how stylistically coherent the it seemed when heard together. The question has to be how did pop get so good? Here's a few angles on this:

• Electronic/digital production techniques have come of age. Untethered to guitars and other analogue instruments, pop producers are now applying digital tools to create an amazingly wide range of effects, deploying heavy bass, variety of tempo and time signature, auto-tuned vocals, dark, light and a truly international range of rhythmic and melodic influences. Sample /retro culture has effectively died a death in the charts. Its place has been taken by a generation of musicians who know how to nod towards or replicate classic 20th century musical components within a framework that could only have been made in the here and now. The strange prevalence of what can only be described as a "yacht rock" sound palate underpinned by Afro/ratchet drum loops (Bouff Daddy, Blue Lights) is completely inexplicable, yet distinctive and pleasing. We have a signature sound for the first time since the mid 90s.
• The black, latino and queer origins of the electronic music are explicit in this era's pop. Opening tracks Strangers and Sorry are perfect examples. Likeable yet coolly ambivalent singers pay the dance floor its due; the satisfyingly deep drops release the endorphines, drawing deeply from classic house, disco and gay pop. It's gold… Robyn and Little Dragon were doing this years ago: I was convinced the latter should have been massive back then, so I am happy to include them here as precursors of a truly distinctive pop sound for The Tens.
• 2008 was the nadir of the modern music industry. Revenues had completely cratered under the impact of so-called "piracy" - they still haven't recovered to their 1999 levels incidentally. Spotify was essentially the saviour of the capitalist music industry, re-establishing confidence and creating new economies that lowered the profitability ceiling for everyone. In doing so they created opportunities for artists who in previous eras might have ended up pigeon-holed. The upfront subscription model has made music much more of an adventure. Streaming encourages the listener to dabble, with less pressure to own albums or invest financial and cultural capital in a small range of performers. Streaming has had negative effects on music - I will explore some of these in the future - but it's hard to deny pop as a cultural experience has improved immeasurably in the last decade. While I was absolutely determined to keep Edmund Sheeran out of this whole thing, it is clear he has been one of the emblematic artists of the decade. The chap has absorbed global influences like a kitchen sponge soaking up spilled champagne. But happily this appropriation has for once given those influential global pop sounds a boost. Here I have joints from the UK (D Double, Kano, Ghetts, Big Zeeks and others) Nigeria (Burna Boy), Colombia (J Balvin), India/Canada (Sidhu Moose) and Jamaica (DJ Vadim, via Russia). All sound sufficiently similar to sound right next to each other on algorithmic playlists (and this one!), but retain the important local and scene-based signifiers of cool and alternativity. It's been a somewhat virtuous cycle, dislodging the A&R and music journo as the principle gatekeeper of the mainstream. Spotify is, after all, the first medium in recorded music history which gives listeners pretty much exactly what they want, when they want it.
• Auto-tune isn't for everyone. It's rise - stemming largely from influential Caribbean music scenes like dancehall and reggaeton - gives colour to a vocal style which walks a line between song and rap. It sounds lazy at times. The clipped, underexplained lyrics, quantised into the track like any other synthesised component, feel distant or emotionally tranquilised. This is intentional. Cool, unapproachable style, standing apart from RnB/soul tradition, is a perfect sound for serious-faced, performative club glamour. Listen closely (try Loyalty or 47) and there is as much wit and soul in the lyrics as any other era. 
• In a decade of rising bigotry, recrimination and anger, darkness pushes in. I had to include the furious and the ominous (Exeter, Guts) the narcotised (Let U Know, Deadbeat Summer), the misogynistic and money worshiping  (N**as in Paris, For the Paper) to acknowledge the elemental pull of negativity on the modern pop aesthetic. This is still amazing music. Pop is usually at it's worst when it's pretending to be something it's not - a paragon of virtue, say, or an authentic underground sound, or a cultural feelgood service for straight white people. The appetite for this new range of styles and voices perhaps suggests we are experiencing the end of detached postmodernism as a respectable cultural stance. As it is no longer justifiable to stand apart from the fray and announce oneself unimplicated in the strife of the world, perhaps pop has drawn us in, offering us a space in which we can enjoy and acknowledge a range of identities, for better or worse, richer or poorer etc etc. It's not enough to make the world a better place, clearly, but pop has never been about that. Pop is good now, and it's because more people hear themselves and their lives in it.

001 A Red Astra

I need to start somewhere, so we'll begin in the back seat of my parents' maroon D-reg Vauxhall Astra. No, it's not where I was conceived (I hope). Rather, it is the site of my earliest memories of music, and many of my earliest memories full stop. The records in this playlist are unexceptional, in that they could have been thrown together by anybody, for any reason. For me, they recall journeys and transitions: episodes in my early life where I found myself lost in those deep patterns of thought peculiar to travel, with endless tapes and CDs colouring my memory. There are songs from childhood holidays here, and from later times when I travelled long distances alone by bus or train. Their assemblage here represents the simplest form of mixing - a sequence of songs with personal significance placed alongside each other for thematic effect/affect.

I want to explore all kinds of mixing, DJing, playlisting, selecting, compiling and curation in this space, but the personal, private mix is foundational. The moment you make a mix and capture it for posterity you become a selector: you are the author of something unique, and have offered the world a statement about you and your relationship with music. There are limits to this form of expression. We are not playing an instrument, composing or sequencing. These are the truly awe inspiring contributions of genius and, frankly, I have never found them that interesting. The personal mix is a crude, amateur, tentative, gauche undertaking, but in a very basic sense it is absolutely music in the making. In our advanced era of recorded music the selector is one of the art form's fundamental protagonists, perhaps even its focal point: the industry's ideal engaged consumer and promoter. This primacy is the result of a long history: music culture, technology and economic factors claiming, rejecting and reformulating the mix and the selector over time. There's a lot to get into.

In this blog then I will be looking for these beats and rhymes. Its central conceit is to use a single mix to illustrate each post. It may be a playlist of my own creation such as this one, or a DJ mix, or a commercially released compilation. I am looking for stories and synthesis. These may come together into a coherent whole over time; they also may not. Let's find out!

Anyway back to the Astra… As a kid we kept maybe a dozen cassettes in the car at any one time, usually a mix of contemporary (mid to late 80s) albums and mix tapes of classic rock n roll, including the Beatles. These would compete with BBC Radio 3 for play time, and the odd brief dip into Radio 1.  My parents were, and remain, infectiously enthusiastic music fans. My dad always honed in on sonically inventive, politically direct song writing, such as Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Joan Armitrading, UB40 and Tracy Chapman. I think he used to pirate most of his stuff from Leicester central library on his dual cassette deck, sometimes splicing the odd mix tape together, but I might be remembering that wrong. Mum was classical, folk, world music and rock n roll (we could all agree on Chuck Berry). Either way, we had an extremely interesting, grown up range of musics on our car journeys, which was a good thing given the endless, beautiful camping trips we would undertake in France and Spain at that time.

I can't say that I necessary liked all of our car music. Take Moorea by the Gypsy Kings. This is a beautiful, yet deeply lame recording, which happens transports me almost whole to my 7 year old self, being driven through the endless pine forest of southern France. I can smell, taste and feel - physically and emotionally - that journey. I can remember what I was reading, what my body felt like, what made me happy and sad. And I expect that I will remember these things every time I hear this record for the rest of my life.  It's just that I don't like it that much (Hotel California on the other hand…)

Every song on this list works magic at this level. I get a strange anticipatory narcotic rush listening to Dark and Long Dark Train - part of an album I used to listen to on my frequent journeys up to London for all nighters way back when. Zero 7 kept my aching bones company on an endless coach journey back from skiing in Tignes in 2001 (they still took Francs I remember). Ms Jackson was playing absolutely everywhere when I toured the USA on my own earlier that same year. Rhapsody in Blue got rinsed on a trip to the Jorvik Viking centre in 1989 (don't laugh - as a 7 year old history nerd this was basically the equivalent of a weekend taking drugs in Amsterdam - see DJ Shadow for the accompaniment to the long, long journey back from that little disaster).

It all stops at some point, around the time I moved to London, when music stops seeming so old. Before 2005, say, my brain appears no longer need synesthetic prompts to place itself in a time and place. This was also around the time I adopted iTunes and began religiously storing and categorising music. Maybe I just grew up a bit. The fact that The First of the Gang To Die, from that unconscionable shitheel Morrissey, draws an unexpectedly similar response from me speaks to my vulnerable, emotional and ecstatic state around the time of my son's birth. For that short drive, on my own, terrified, elated, with my phone on shuffle and that flaming arsehole joyously singing my boy's name, I was as a child again, on the road, moving and changing.

I may be at risk of abusing your time with all this navel gazing. Like a selector, the blogger is here to set a vibe and engage people, not usher you down some hyper-personal memory lane. Nostalgia is after all the evil twin of history  (I'll talk a bit about this kind of bad Djing here as well!). I hope that I have got across a sense of what I am aiming at with this blog - what mixing music means to me on a fundamental level. I have many, many thoughts on this, as well as cool music mixes to share. Onwards…