L’Rain crafts a healing sound bath, Tristan Arp embraces overgrowth, and Dopplereffekt get melancholy
Every month, Philip Sherburne listens to a whole lot of mixes so you only have to listen to the best ones.
L’Rain – Sunday Mix
L’Rain’s latest album, Fatigue, swirls with healing energy: a tender tumult of layered voices, electronic rhythms, field recordings, and scraps of jazz and folk and soul, all of it grounded in the fluid yet inscrutable rhythms of personal transformation. The New York musician’s contribution to Crack’s Sunday Mix series is cut from similar cloth. She leans toward measured tempos and billowing textures, and though most of her selections include vocals, they rarely dominate; instead, they stay woven deeply into the mix, much like they do in L’Rain’s own music. She begins with wispy, ambient-adjacent songs from Lionmilk and Daniel Aged, shares a dreamy lullaby in the form of Jitwam’s instrumental “Confessions,” and then eases into a passage of leftfield electro pop with Smerz, Hildegard, and Yu Su; tunes from Flying Lotus and Clever Austin (collaborating with Georgia Anne Muldrow) mark the set’s soulful center point. And the final stretch through Low, Space Afrika, Nala Sinephro, and L’Rain’s own “Take Two” amounts to a purifying sound bath of pulsing synths and weightless voices.
Shanti Celeste – Daisychain 196
Chilean-born, London-based electronic musician Shanti Celeste’s debut album is called Tangerine, and with good reason. No matter the style or tempo, her music is suffused in vivid color. The same holds true for her mixing. Her set for Chicago’s Daisychain series sails through deep house, electro, IDM, UK garage, and more, but it’s uniformly radiant. In just the first 30 minutes, she weaves through tropical ambient techno, jungle-driven tunes from Sputnik One and Special Request, breakbeat club, electro, and even a hard-charging edit of Solange’s “Jerrod.” But despite the variety, the flow never falters. Celeste’s predilection for luminous detail runs through her selections like fine gold filigree.
Tristan Arp – Dekmantel Podcast 356
For his excellent new album Sculpturegardening, released on the UK’s Wisdom Teeth label this month, Tristan Arp attempted to wire up his synthesizers so that the music might effectively write itself, then pared back the chaos to highlight the fruits of his labor. (Or his machines’ labor, anyway.) The Mexico City-based musician’s Dekmantel podcast also feels almost like the result of an organic process, something that has grown of its own accord. But where Sculpturegardening emphasizes elegant lines and efficient movements, this DJ set suggests a yard that’s gone to seed: an overgrown tangle of stray weeds and stubborn undergrowth. That’s particularly true early on, where multiple scraps of music seem to be competing for space: methodical drum beats, minimalist choral pulses, small bursts of noise. Every once in a while, a snippet of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Feel” peeks through, like a small white flower seeking sunlight. Unlike his album, which is mostly ambient, a clubby pulse runs through broad swathes of the set, but even then the mixing is densely layered and thrillingly unpredictable, twisting from DJ Firmeza to Steve Reich and from Sputnik One to Jon Hassell. Shifting tempos and beat structures play a crucial role: Ultimately, Arp’s set feels less like a traditional DJ mix than an ecosystem of interdependent species.
Massimiliano Pagliara – HNYPOT 396
Massimiliano Pagliara’s Honeypot Soundsystem podcast oozes panache. It’s exactly the kind of session you might expect to encounter on a Sunday afternoon at Panorama Bar, where Pagliara is a resident: driving, playful, seductive. He favors grinding, analog-inspired house jams with a hint of disco flair; though many of his selections are relatively recent, they tend to reference the sounds and spirit of that period in the ’80s as disco was morphing into house music. Cormac’s 2021 single “Heartcore” sounds for all the world like a vintage Italo hit; Pagliara follows that with Divine’s 1982 song “Native Love (Step by Step Remix),” a shuddering example of hi-NRG, and the back half of the set delves further into the uncanny valley between period pieces and latter-day homage. He closes out with 10 full minutes of Patrick Cowley’s epic “I Feel Love” bootleg remix, as psychedelic as it is sexy. You can practically feel the sweat dripping from the walls.
Dopplereffekt – DUSK150
Dopplereffekt emerged in 1995 with an EP of slinky electro infused with ominous overtones—it was called Fascist State, for one thing—and a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. (“I want to make love/To a mannequin,” chirped a robotic voice on “Plastiphilia”: “I want to fuck it/I want to suck it.”) Released on Detroit’s Dataphysix label, the record was accompanied by a one-sheet in German and billed as the work of two unknown figures named Kim Karli and Rudolf Klorzeiger; only later did Klorzeiger turn out to be Drexciya’s Gerald Donald, although in retrospect, the Detroit electro musician’s fingerprints were all over Dopplereffekt’s squelchy analog sequences and mysterious self-presentation. But where Drexciya focused their myth-making on Afro-Futurist science fiction, the Dopplereffekt mood board amounts to a sinister tangle of totalitarianism, eugenics, and astrophysics. Helmed by Donald and collaborators unknown, the Dopplereffekt project is still going and still as cryptic as ever. Their set for Amsterdam’s DUSK. | 夕闇 series begins with 30-plus minutes of seasick drones overlaid with queasily processed speech about space-time; things pick up after that, though, plunging into a snapping machine grooves and fizzing analog synths. The setlist is heavy on classics from Donald’s catalog: “Scientist” lays out Dopplereffekt’s deadpan program; “Axis of Rotation,” from his Arpanet alias, revels in dazzlingly detuned chords; and toward the end, the Arpanet track “Probability Densities” drops the stone-faced facade to indulge in unmistakably melancholy tones and moods.
Exael – Pleasure Gallery
Exael, aka Naemi, is one of the key people in a loose configuration of artists—among them Special Guest DJ, Ulla, Perila, Pontiac Streator, and Huerco S.—using powdery textures and dusty pastels to smudge the boundaries between ambient and dance music. Exael can get pretty heavy: One strain of their work is steeped in drum’n’bass rhythms, jagged synths, and even the occasional Godsmack reference. But their new set for the wonderfully named Pleasure Gallery series is a showcase of their music at its most blissful. They open with shimmering waves halfway between Durutti Column and Arvo Pärt, move into breezy, Arovane-like IDM, and then cozily settle into the drones and rainfall of Perila’s “Untitled,” off their recent album How Much Time It Is Between You and Me? Though swirling synth pads and abstract rustling predominate the set, it’s not all strictly ambient: Twenty minutes in, the gauzy curtains part halfway, revealing a muted edit of Ariana Grande’s “Ghostin,” as though it were playing at the far end of a concrete tunnel. Then, after burrowing back down into dusty chords, beatless trance arpeggios, and the breathtakingly elastic tones of Diony Lake’s “iTrinity,” they conclude with an ambient passage from Ariana Grande’s “Goodnight N Go.” It’s both gorgeous and, once again, totally unexpected; collapsing slowed + reverb aesthetics into underground electronic music, it feels like some glorious subcultural singularity.
