The 7 Best DJ Mixes of November 2020

Every month, Philip Sherburne listens to a whole lot of mixes so you only have to listen to the best ones.

A good DJ mix can be like sonic interior design, subtly making your surroundings feel cozier or more stylish. A great mix can upend your bearings altogether, and three of this month’s standout sets do just that. Russian electronic musician Kate NV uses supersaturated color and a skewed sense of humor to wring surrealist overtones out of vintage synth pop. Barcelona’s Tutu uses field recordings to explore the physicality of creative practice. And Poland’s FOQL layers the sounds of protest with left-field psychedelia, yielding a kind of political music that goes beyond simple didacticism. For those in search of something slightly less disorienting, there are also plenty of alternatives, including Imaginary Softwoods’ enveloping ambient and Tim Reaper’s retro-futurist jungle.

Kate NV – Bleep Mix 143

I first heard Kate NV’s Bleep mix on a gloomy Saturday morning, feverishly cleaning house under the influence of one too many cups of coffee—ideal conditions for experiencing the Russian electronic musician’s strange and captivating set. With a particular emphasis on Japanese music from the 1980s—city pop from Taeko Ohnuki, tropical futurism from Today’s Latin Project, Burt Bacharach–esque synth pop from Marica—it is full of perky melodies and shiny, synthetic textures, with an undercurrent of kitsch snaking beneath disco flash and new-wave sheen. Familiar sounds are made strange: A shimmering piece of pulse minimalism sounds like Steve Reich being performed on music boxes and grandfather clocks; Gontiti’s 夢の比重 tackles a cappella bossa nova via sampling keyboard; Frank Zappa’s “The Beltway Bandits” (from the intriguingly named album Jazz From Hell) is disorientingly beautiful, like staring too long at the sun. One song made me think, improbably, of some Casio-toting entertainer playing reggae covers of Tom Waits in a long-ago German Kneipe. The only Kate NV song to make the cut is an excerpt from a year-ago performance in which the producer lays down pointillist percussion alongside clarinetist Andrey Bessonov, distilling the mix’s prevailing air of bright-eyed mischief.

AceMoMa – BBC Radio 1 Mix

Even with clubs closed, regular collaborators AceMo and MoMa Ready have had a banner year. Pretty much every month has brought new material from one or the other. Whether they’re turning out techno, house, jungle, or something else entirely, it’s all distinguished by their signature sense of contrast, balancing raw, analog frequencies and rushing grooves with a lush harmonic sensibility. The New York DJs’ collaborative set as AceMoMa for BBC Radio 1 has pretty much everything you could want in a set of peak-time house and techno: big, burly grooves drenched in melody; hypnotic vocal hooks; intensity to spare; and crucially, a healthy sense of fun. When they want to, they can go as deep as anyone—by the very second song here (MoMa Ready’s “Saving Grace”) they’re exploring the kinds of full-fathom chords that will carry through the duration of the set—but they’re also not afraid to take the occasional detour into boisterousness. When the nervous refrain of MoMa Ready’s “Untitled” (“There’s something wrong with my mind”) gives way to the driving piano house of Escaflowne’s “Stronger,” it feels like the roof tearing off. It’s an exhilarating hour from start to finish, and virtually all of it comes from the two producers or their circle of friends—yet more evidence that these two are just unstoppable right now.

Waajeed – AIAIAI Mix 019

Detroit’s Waajeed is carrying on two of the city’s hallowed traditions: electronic music and community uplift. This year, he launched a fundraiser to help the Underground Music Academy get off the ground. Inspired by local Black-owned outfits like Underground Resistance, the UMA will provide local residents with training and mentoring in music production, DJing, and the industry. Detroit is also the unspoken theme of Waajeed’s contribution to the Swedish headphone maker AIAIAI’s new mix series: Virtually every track in the set is a product of the 313. Electro and ghetto-tech form the backbone of the mix, as Waajeed cycles through cuts from producers like Mr. De, DJ Godfather, DJ Deeon, Erik Travis, and the late Erotek—often returning to a given artist (or even a single track, in the case of Mr. De’s “Din Daa Daa” remix) multiple times in the set. Favoring syncopated 808s and call-and-response vocals, the energy is rambunctious, but Waajeed’s mixing style is infallible as quartz timekeeping. He fleshes out these sweat-soaked party jams with smoother, deeper strains of techno, bringing the hour to an emotional climax with Los Hermanos’ gorgeous 2004 cut “Resurrection,” as affecting an example of Detroit’s resilient spirit as you could ask for.

Tutu – Current Obsession

If the tracks that Barcelona’s Tutu has selected for her latest mix have particularly gem-like qualities—hard and bright, full of translucent synths, polished surfaces, and clean lines—that’s no accident. The set was commissioned by Current Obsession, an experimentally minded Dutch jewelry magazine, on the occasion of NYC Jewelry Week. But it’s not just that Tutu’s sparkling selections of IDM, ambient, and bass music resemble precious stones on a metaphorical level. She also laces the mix with actual sounds of jewelers at work in their studios: the whine of diamond-tipped circular saws, the hammer of hand tools, the buzz of polishing discs. These artisanal found sounds are so effectively folded into the mix that it’s often unclear whether a given sound is a jeweler at work or just part of the track. Conversely, every rolled hi-hat or frozen blast of reverb suddenly sounds like it could be a fragment of the real world: metal meeting metal, sparks flying in midair.

Tim Reaper – On Cue

Tim Reaper has good reason to call his label Future Retro: The UK DJ specializes in a style of music that’s older than he is. Reaper was born in 1993, around the same time that breakbeat hardcore was evolving into jungle; years later, an encounter with DJ Zinc’s 1995 track “Super Sharp Shooter” turned him into the obsessive that is today. Both his productions and his mixing are evidence of extensive study of the classics. “Each time I find a label or an artist that I’m unfamiliar with, I’m digging deep on them,” he told DJ Mag. “You listen to every single tune within a catalogue, mark your favourites, and move onto the next: building, building, building to retain that knowledge in your head and carry it with you.” Reaper’s mix for the magazine is a testament to the way those original hardcore and jungle influences have returned to dance music. Though virtually everything here sounds vintage, most of it dates from the past couple of years; the bulk is still unreleased, with a healthy chunk coming from Reaper’s own hand. The hourlong set expertly balances roughneck energy with deep, atmospheric synths. By reanimating the genre’s tropes—deep-diving basslines, dub sirens, deejay chat, and pretty much every classic breakbeat in the book—Reaper suggests that sometimes you gotta go back to go forward.

Imaginary Softwoods – At No Way Back Streaming From Beyond

Imaginary Softwoods is the solo project of synth whiz John Elliott, best known for his work in Cleveland cosmic travelers Emeralds. Back in May, as portions of the United States were first reeling from lockdown measures, he broadcast from his studio as part of No Way Back: Streaming From Beyond, the online version of a beloved all-nighter that usually coincides with Detroit’s Movement Festival. Where No Way Back has a reputation for mind-bending acid mayhem, Elliott’s performance takes a softer approach to psychedelia, conjuring virtual spaces in rose-tinted tones and gently contoured chords. In places, he revisits the burbling arpeggios that were a staple of Emeralds’ output, but many of the pieces here (a number are live versions of material that later reappeared on Imaginary Softwoods’ So Extra Bronze Lamp) forego complex movements in favor of held tones that feel almost static, save for the shimmering at their edges.

DJ FOQL – Crack Mix 392

Poland’s FOQL frequently works with narrative forms—radio dramas, film scores, video-game soundtracks—and she brings a storyteller’s instincts to her Crack Magazine mix, interweaving experimental music with field recordings of recent abortion-rights protests across Poland. Things get off to an intense start with raging, early-’80s post-punk from Germany’s La Loora; the sounds of police and protestors’ chants of “Solidarność jest kobietą” (“Solidarity is female”) contribute to the overwhelming sense of discord. But then the street noise falls away, and FOQL (Justyna Banaszczyk, a former member of Poland’s activist collective Oramics) turns her hand to an entrancing blend of ambient, noise, and industrial. Occasionally, a song bursts forth, like a brightly costumed character emerging from the shadows: the tropical psychedelia of Cameroonian musician Francis Bebey’s “Forest Nativity”; the twisted vaudeville of “Rats in My Room,” a 1957 song by onetime Charlie Chaplin co-star Leona Anderson, who once declared herself “the world’s most horrible singer.”

The recent protests, a response to Poland’s reactionary government, are the country’s most significant upheaval since the Solidarność movement in the 1980s; one leader of the All-Polish Women’s Strike has described the grassroots movement as a “backlash against a patriarchal culture” and “the fundamentalist religious state.” The protestors’ program is extensive: They are fighting not only for the legalization of abortion but also for the separation of church and state, the independence of the Polish judiciary, and greater protection for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. With one of Europe’s most illiberal administrations currently in power in Poland, the stakes are high. FOQL’s mix captures the spirit of the moment, harnessing defiance, humor, and a touch of surrealism to offer a glimpse of a better world.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork