The Best DJ Mixes of 2022 So Far

13.04.2022

All the techno, electro, house, drum’n’bass, ambient, and downbeat you can handle.

Graphic by Callum Abbott

Our electronic music expert Philip Sherburne sifts through the internet’s bounty of DJ mixes to find only the best sets—because life’s too short to waste on stale beats. The following list is presented by release date, from newest to oldest, and will be updated throughout the year.

Heinali: Live From a Bomb Shelter

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On April 1, the Ukrainian experimental electronic musician Heinali live-streamed a 30-minute performance from a basement in Lviv that doubled as a fundraiser for his country’s self-defense and humanitarian funds. Conditions were not optimal: To make the stream possible, he had to cobble together two 50-meter ethernet cables, run them out from the basement, and shield them from the rain with a plastic bag. More pressingly, just two hours before his set, an air-raid siren had driven city dwellers scurrying for cover; since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the end of February, the basement has doubled as a bomb shelter.

The violence being visited upon the country only makes the contemplative stillness of Heinali’s music that much more striking. For 30 minutes, seated before a compact modular rig, he coaxed airy figures based upon Baroque counterpoint into tangled thickets of arpeggios and rich, thrumming drones. In any other context, it would be profoundly beautiful; given the war raging outside, this quiet act of perseverance takes on even greater significance—part protest, part song of mourning.

The Irresistible Force vs. Ramjac Corporation: Live at the Brain 1990

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Between 1989 and 1992, the psychedelic epicenter of the UK’s acid house scene was located at 11 Wardour Street, London, smack between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. It was there, at a tiny club, bar, and gallery called the Brain, that artists like Orbital and Andrew Weatherall mapped dance music’s outer limits in DJ sets and—a rarity for the time—live performances on keyboards, samplers, and sundry bits of hardware.

Live at the Brain 1990 captures a characteristically heady session from the era, a collaboration between Paul Chivers’ Ramjac Corporation, who was responsible for a handful of brain-bending techno records around that time, and the Irresistible Force, better known as the psychedelic lifer Mixmaster Morris. These days, we tend to think of ambient and house music as opposites, but, much like the KLF’s 1990 classic Chill Out, Live at the Brain 1990 proves the genres’ fundamental compatibility, wrapping propulsive drum programming and basslines in looped chants, spiraling synth arpeggios, and even the occasional snippet of birdsong. It’s a guileless, wide-eyed look back at UK rave’s golden age.

Maelstrom: Ensemble Mix

The shift from commercial mix CDs to free online mixes has been a boon for listeners and DJs alike, but for the producers whose music actually fills all those sets, it’s been yet another instance where the value of their work has plummeted. Producers historically have received a licensing fee, however negligible, when their work gets placed on a mix CD, but placement in a streaming mix typically nets only exposure. Enter French producer Maelstrom, whose “Ensemble Mix” harnesses the blockchain as a potential solution to the problem.

In March, he uploaded the mix to sound.xyz, a web3 music platform, as an NFT in an edition of 150. The price tag was .1 ETH, or around $300, on the day of release. A smart contract written into the blockchain guarantees nearly 6 percent of each sale to each of the 14 producers with a track in the mix, while Maelstrom takes home 15 percent. (FWB, the crypto organization that helped him execute the concept, got 5 percent.) The only catch is that all the producers needed to have blockchain wallets to get paid, so Maelstrom ended up sourcing the mix from tracks he found on Nina, another blockchain music platform, along with others that he solicited on Twitter.

Listening to the set—which is also free to stream—you’d never guess that he was pulling from such a limited pool. Blending heavy hitters like Space Dimension Controller and Boys Noize with relative unknowns like Bagvs and Random Brothers (both, coincidentally enough, from Indonesia), his mixing flows naturally across an evolving selection of dark techno and electro.

Sales of the set raised 15.0 ETH—on the day it was released, the equivalent of a little more than $45,000, which meant a payout of about $2,266 for each artist involved. Whether this strategy is sustainable, of course, is another question—the number of buyers willing and able to plunk down hundreds of dollars on a single mix is likely to be limited. As a musical proof of concept, though, “Ensemble Mix” revealed the growing breadth of the blockchain music community, while underscoring a simple but provocative idea: Musicians deserve to be paid for their music.

Shannen SP: Dekmantel 377

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On her new Dekmantel mix, the London NTS Radio resident (and co-curator of Hyperdub’s monthly Ø club nights) Shannen SP is intent upon tracing connections across dance-music history, pulling together rap, techno, electro, drum’n’bass, footwork, ghetto house, breakbeat hardcore, and more, both classic and recent. The set is so tightly wound that it seems ready to snap at any moment. That’s particularly true of the closing stretch, where rapid-fire breaks explode into Tanzanian singeli, a dizzyingly fast style that sounds a little like a merengue cassette played back with the fast-forward button held down. You can tell that she had a blast mixing it, too: The faster the rhythm gets, the giddier the mood.

James Bangura: Origins Tapes 051

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Washington, D.C.’s James Bangura comes out kicking in this set for UK promoters Origins Sound, doling out booming drums, punchy basslines, and the staccato chords of classic Detroit techno. Bangura’s Interpretation of Sound EP for New York’s Mister Saturday Night label in 2020 balanced muscle with depth, and his mixing here does the same: The drums hit hard, but his textures are diaphanous and billowing. The opening of the mix blends Robert Hood-like squelch with a percussive workout from veteran producer Mark Broom and cavernous techno. The mood softens in the back half as Leon Vynehall’s “Brother” gives way to a 1996 deep-house track from a surprising source. He wraps up with Detroit producer Shigeto’s “There’s a Vibe Tonight,” which is, truly, a whole vibe.

Skee Mask B2B Simo Cell

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In April 2019, French bass producer Simo Cell strapped in with German breakbeat polymath Skee Mask for a seven-hour B2B set at Nantes, France’s Trempo club, and in November 2020, Simo Cell’s TemeT label released a pair of particularly dynamic 45-minute excerpts from the night as TemeTape1, the first edition in a new series of mixtapes. The cassette sold out quickly, but in late January, Simo Cell’s TemeT label posted the whole thing to SoundCloud, making it available for all to hear without ponying up silly money on Discogs. On the A-side, the two explore grinding EBM, electro, and gothic trap, finding unexpected connections between Drexciya, Autechre, and Ikonika. The B-side is a whirlwind tour of 160 BPM that’s heavy on footwork, breakbeat hardcore, and jungle; near the end, the mix of LSDXOXO’s Depeche Mode-sampling “False Idols” into a DJ Chap track that samples New Order collapses new wave into fast techno in a way you might not believe possible.

Slowfoam: Our Tomorrow w/ Ran Park

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For the January installment of her monthly show on Guadalajara’s Internet Public Radio, Berlin-based musician Slowfoam mixed together a batch of material from Seattle experimentalist Ran Park—songs, snippets, stems—together with some of her own unreleased material. The results are foggy and formless in the best way. The opening passage plays glowing synthesizers off spritzes of static and radar chirps; intimations of electric jazz add depth, and the diffuse atmosphere clears to reveal a simple, poignant piece for piano and flute—one of the “unabashedly aspirational” nods to Ennio Morricone and Ryuichi Sakamoto that Park references in a note accompanying the mix. There’s much more, too: gentle chamber-jazz sketches; glowering reeds; ambient piano; and even, toward the end, a dreamy trip-hop breakbeat. There’s no tracklisting and no clue as to which parts are Park’s and which are Slowfoam’s. It’s best to just close your eyes and let it wash over you.

Laurel Halo: Awe 10.01.22

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In January, experimental artist Laurel Halo celebrated the one-year anniversary of her monthly residency on NTS Radio. Her show tends to range widely—a typical episode might include classical minimalism, American primitive guitar, dub reggae, and Detroit techno, all mixed seamlessly together. This program is no exception: It begins with a psychedelic Orb bootleg, drifts across half an hour of ambient soundscaping, and eventually emerges into a sunlit clearing of spiritual jazz.

Even at its most diffuse, an understated lyrical sensibility connects its disparate parts. This shapeshifting through line takes various forms—the flowing chords of claire rousay and more eaze’s “An Afternoon Whine,” the plaintive vocal melody of Reiko Kudo’s “Son of Man,” or the foghorn-like tones of Joe Zawinul’s “Arrival in New York.” The mood throughout is deeply meditative. Following such a sustained interior journey, the closing song—Ohio Penitentiary 511 Ensemble’s jubilant “Psych City,” from a private-press 1971 recording by a group of incarcerated musicians—feels like emerging into brilliant sunlight, spiritually cleansed.

Finn Johannsen: Hausmusik 10 (1994-1995)

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As one of the organizers of underground Berlin night spots Paloma and Monarch, a former employee of the city’s Hard Wax record store, and a music journalist with decades of bylines to his name, Finn Johannsen is a veritable fountain of dance-music history. And he’s got the mixes to prove it.

In his ongoing Hausmusik series, now 14 installments strong, he’s been documenting the ’90s house and techno scenes in German, Austria, and Switzerland. Volume 10 is particularly engrossing, tracing the delicate balance of deepness and minimalism that held sway in the middle of the ’90s. It kicks off with an uncharacteristically downy selection from Kompakt’s Wolfgang Voigt in his Mint guise before veteran duo Alter Ego, under their seldom-used Primitive Painter alias, offer a deep-diving Detroit homage; ensuing selections offer interpretations of the stabbing organs that were ubiquitous in that era. The period Johannsen surveys here tends to get overlooked in histories of ’90s dance music, and listeners who weren’t there for it may be unfamiliar with a lot these tunes—all of which makes tracks like the shimmering “Psycho Kinesis” all the more revelatory.

John Talabot: DJ Set @ Nitsa (17Dec21)

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At the very end of last year, Barcelona’s John Talabot—the city’s most celebrated DJ for over a decade now—settled in at Nitsa Club, his long-time stomping ground, to deliver a peak-time set of uncommon depth. Nitsa was a crucial cauldron of local dance-music culture in the ’90s, and Talabot flashes back to those years frequently here.

It’s not an expressly retro set; toward the end of the first hour, there’s a stretch of recent tunes that feels like a wide-angled snapshot of modern techno in all its nuance. And right around the two-hour mark, he drops Burial’s 2007 track “Raver,” pitched up slightly, in a spellbinding moment of dancefloor melancholy. But the majority of the set is steeped in the bright, brittle sound of the early-to-mid ’90s, in which sullen FM bass, rigid hats and claps, and flickering pads sketched out a hypnotic fusion of techno and trance. Those early European trance sounds have been coming back into vogue lately, particularly in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, but Talabot never tips into the headbanging tempos of Copenhagen’s “fast techno” scene. Instead, he takes something of a Goldilocks approach to blending styles. At once driving and immersive, it’s a picture of classic European dance music at its most ecstatic.