It does, somehow, evoke a sense of Weekend or Watergate on a Saturday night – a feeling of fearless, delirious freedom – but in such a way as it still works for home listening. Naturally, it is a Dulux colour chart of the house music the city currently loves, but it goes deeper than that. Troxler wanted Boogybytes Vol 5 to, "paint a picture" of his Berlin. It's a mix as sticky and pungent as the finest skunk. Is, therefore, Kruder & Dorfmeister's DJ Kicks (1996) the best DJ mix of all time? Not only is it the definitive document of the beatz era, but this "dubecho-orgy" actually sounds like the front room in a shared student house, in which someone is sat on a battered sofa, building a spliff, under a large poster for DJ Shadow's Endtroducing. Likewise, using brooding folk, indie and electronics, Trentemøller's Harbour Boat Trips 01 (2009) is like a vivid sonic sketch of Copenhagen's low, slate-grey, Sunday morning skyline. With its fractured, stop-start progress and avant-garde sound palette – more electronica than techno – Miss Kittin's Radio Caroline Vol 1 (2002) served notice of a shift in house music's centre of gravity, from the US to Europe, and thrummed with a sense of it being 6am, in some dark, disorientating continental rave bunker. Other great mixes are less epochal, but have their own specific resonance. Likewise, 2 Many DJs' As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt 2 (2002) ushered in an era of indie-electro eclecticism that nowadays underpins everything from Delphic to Lady Gaga. Coldcut's legendary Journeys By DJ: 70 Minutes Of Madness (1996), for instance, was a Damascene moment, a shocking illustration of just how boring mainstream, mid-90s dance music had become. The most obvious examples are those game-changers which either catalyse, or encapsulate, fundamental musical shifts. It will also, in its sympathetic tapestry of tracks, evoke quite specific moods, atmospheres, places and memories. It will evolve and mutate, sonically, but within its own identifiable idiom. But what makes a truly great mix?Ĭhoice tune selection is vital, of course, but, for me, the durable mix goes way beyond that. In a culture where the DJ's collation and manipulation of individual tracks has always been more important than the artist album, the mix CD, it seems, remains dance music's primary form of self-expression. Yet, record labels keep issuing (and, presumably, selling in reasonable volumes) their own.
That paid-for mix CDs still exist is a curious anomaly. Indeed, Boogybytes Vol 5 – which opens with the Royal We's amusing Party Guilt (in which Troxler tells a deeply sceptical girl that he's sick of vacuous nightclub chitchat and, instead, wants to talk about politics and quantum physics) – recasts Troxler less as a party animal and more as a thinker and gifted audio manipulator. His almost psychedelic house/techno productions and remixes (most notably of Fever Ray's Seven) have an alluring otherness, depth and complexity. In one Slices interview, he outlined his personal philosophy – I don't think I'm paraphrasing too much, here – as: have a few drinks, have a few laughs, get to the afterparty, stay there.Ĭlearly, though, there is a more serious side to the Michigan-born, Berlin-based musician. In the media, the 23-year-old DJ/producer cultivates the air of a feckless charmer, forever joking around.
At the time of writing, however, he was off the radar somewhere in Ecuador. I had hoped that Seth Troxler might contribute a quote to this blog, about his new Boogybytes mix, and the art of the mix CD generally.
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