The first radio personality to earn the tag "disk jockey" didn't just play records-- he wove an elaborate illusion. Whether newsman Walter Winchell was talking about horse racers or machine operators when he invented the phrase in 1935, it's clear that the coinage emphasized a brand new skill set, specific to a particular moment in the evolution of recorded media. Winchell's subject was Martin Block, a New York radio DJ who revolutionized the medium when he began broadcasting records during downtime in the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. To keep his listeners tuned in, Block played records between dispatches, upping the drama further by insinuating that the bands were playing live in the studio.
Block's gift to recorded music was to create a figure that was part storyteller, part snake-oil salesman. (It's also worth noting that Block would go on to steal the name of his show, "Make Believe Ballroom," from Los Angeles radio DJ Al Jarvis; consider this the Original Sin for which every DJ ever wrongly accused of "simply playing other peoples' records" must atone.) A talent for mystery, trickery and control has been the crux of the DJ's job ever since, both on the airwaves and in nightclubs. But if this role has remained largely the same-- the practice of the art of catching ears and moving butts-- recent technological developments are altering the task in significant ways. The DJ's burgeoning toolbox has grown from a few basic instruments-- two turntables, a mixer and (maybe) a microphone-- to include CD players, effects rigs, and computers, tools which have led to an increasing atomization of musical raw materials. (The pre-history of these techniques is found in disco and early house, which incorporated reel-to-reel recorders, cassette players, and drum machines as means for expanding the hypnotic groove towards its infinite horizons.) Once upon a time, you needed advanced motor skills to break down a song's constituent parts and build them back up again; today, a copy of Ableton and a little preparation are enough allow amateur DJs to extract blips, beats, breakdowns, and bass lines, and reassemble them.
Two new mixes from the Glasgow's DJ team Optimo-- one from the partnership of JG Wilkes and JD Twitch and one from Twitch alone-- buck current trends, avoiding traditional (and non-traditional) mix trickery to emphasize the DJ's curatorial role. What's most striking about these mixes is that both almost entirely forsake beatmatching and blending in favor of simple sequencing-- at times, to the point of letting a track play out in its entirety, complete with a slim cushion of silence before the next selection begins. This is even more notable given that the pair's previous mixes, like How to Kill the DJ (Part Two) (2004), Psyche Out (2005) and Walkabout (2007), favored lickety-split cuts and teasingly seamless blends. Both mixes are less like dance parties than late-night radio broadcasts discovered in the last quarter-hour of a long drive home-- left-of-the-dial Sirens that seduce you into an extra hour of circling the suburbs, the hidden FM messages suddenly far more important than the hour or the price of gas.
Mx6: Twitch's 60 Minutes of Fear, published by New York's RVNG, is an unorthodox survey of American and UK punk and hardcore, mostly from the early and mid 80s. It succeeds by taking the only route it possibly could: to ignore any blinkered definitions of hardcore or punk. No single style, region, or era dominates, but the mix also doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive survey. A one-two punch from UK anarchists Zounds and Crass quickly gives way to the droning "Viva le Rock 'n' Roll", from L.A.'s Savage Republic, a group more often canonized as post-punk; later, Mark Stewart's dub-indebted Pop Group leave an augmented guitar chord hanging in the air as SoCal's Minutemen careen into the funk-inflected "This Ain't No Picnic". Like some mammoth un-parting of the seas, the moment is a sublime meeting of the Black Atlantic and the Black Pacific.
Just after that, there's a delicious moment of friction as Hüsker Dü's "Don't Wanna Know if You Are Lonely" leads into Big Black's "Jordan, Minnesota". It's a cheeky move, slotting a song from the Hüskers' major-label debut-- the record that would lead hardcore's doctrinaire die-hards to brand them sold-out pariahs-- alongside a song from punk's cantankerous kingpin of anti-corporatism. And musically, it makes perfect (if counterintuitive) sense, Hüsker Dü's slow-fast cyclone of drums and guitars touching down exactly at the point where Big Black begin clear-cutting a swath of drum machines and guitars through through "Jordan, Minnesota", mapping a direct line between emo and automatic rage. There's a whole thesis on America's 80s underground in that juxtaposition alone.
A goodly portion of the mix is given to what might loosely be termed post-punk, as might be expected from a DJ with a documented fondness for Throbbing Gristle and Suicide. One of my favorite chunks pairs Swans' throbbing "A Screw (Holy Money)" with Sonic Youth's oily, droning "Brother James". A few years separate the songs-- the former dates back to a 1985 session, while the latter was recorded two years prior-- but what's most surprising is how two bands with such intertwined histories could take droning, detuned guitars to such different ends. "A Screw (Holy Money)" is proper death disco, while "Brother James" is punk at its melting point, extroverted anger disassembling itself into a mercurial, interior bleed. (It's all the more striking to realize that "Brother James" rides a steady 4/4 thump that sounds almost techno, in retrospect.)
If any ideology dominates Twitch's mix, it's a fealty to punk's experimental, iconoclastic spirit. You don't often hear about the sound of punk-- more about its fury, its breakneck tempos and its short, sharp shocks-- but leave it to a record nerd like Twitch to lend as much attention to the mutant sonics of the recording process as he does to more traditional concerns of songwriting, arrangement and style. 60 Minutes of Fear is a gelatinous mass of warped tape and weird, glassy high end; a sound fetishist's treasure trove of the accidental glories of no-fi technology. It's a particular, highly personal, gladly revisionist take on punk-- this is no Hardcore 101-- but it could also serve as a wonderful primer for anyone that didn't grow up listening to the stuff.
Above all, what makes 60 Minutes a DJ mix, rather than a particularly well curated compilation, is its flow. The experience of the thing obliterates anything you could say about it, and yet, at the same time, the stories it suggests beg to be told and re-told; it's history as a living thing that demands your participation, whether it's a trip to Wikipedia or the shelf where you keep your tattered copies of Flipside. Minutemen's suggestion, "Our Band Could Be Your Life", takes on a whole new meaning when re-interpreted by a selector like JD Twitch, the distant discographies having become the raw material for disk jockey DIY.
A companion 10-inch includes Twitch's rhythm-centric edits of songs by Zounds, Honey Bane and Flux of Pink Indians, which further blur the line between punk and "dance music" at its most primal. I haven't laid my hands on the actual object, but from the looks of things, the vinyl/CD package, complete with liner notes and a fold-out poster, is a thing to behold, a reminder of what it felt like to send a slim wad of grubby dollar bills to an address found in the back of Maximum Rock & Roll, and receive something like a revelation in return. The wait was always the worst of it, in those snail-trailed, pre-Internet days; you may be shocked to realize, when you finally hear this, that this is exactly what you've been waiting for, all these years. Its arrival is right on time.
Optimo's Sleepwalk is different altogether. Where, until now, Optimo's mixes have retained at least tenuous footing on the dance floor over which the two DJs have presided, every Sunday night, since 1997, Sleepwalk-- the followup to 2007's Walkabout-- is a fever dream of ambient muckracking and fucked-up balladeering.
"Beats," in the debased vernacular of dance music, are few and far between; that the most uptempo cut here comes courtesy Mulatu Astatke, best known from the Ethiopiques series (and prime placement in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers) should say something about the mix's profoundly narcotic vibe. This is head music, "listening" music, something like an alternate history of easy listening played out in uneasy selections from the likes of Nurse With Wound, Cluster, Coil, and, of course, those avant-garde stalwarts, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. There are moments that sound like background oceanscapes for run-down spas (SPOILER ALERT: they're Chris Watson, the Touch/BBC field recording artist, and former member of Cabaret Voltaire) and there are moments that sound like Rod McKuen over Wendy Carlos. Throughout, across tempos that range from the soporific to an easygoing Codeine andante, the melodic line sticks to a wormy sort of furrow, with dated synthesizers morphing into flutes, into voice, into trombones, into guitars flying 80s telltale delay, into fiddle, into still more dated synthesizers. In love with the midrange, the mix follows a line as unstably sure as the median strip on a particularly lysergic midnight drive.
And having said all this, I'm actually loathe to explain any more about Sleepwalk. In fact, I'd like to propose an experiment. Buy the CD, if possible, and do what you can to avert your gaze from the tracklisting. If your habit is to immediately rip CDs into your computer, don't copy the artists or track titles. And then just live with the thing for a while. I had the good fortune to receive my review copy as a single, 73-minute MP3 with no identifying information attached, and the sheer experience of the thing, as hypnagogic as its title promised, was visceral and overwhelming, even in partial doses. Later come the reflective, intellectual surprises: this 80s throwback revealing themselves as secretive experimentalists, that Krautrock staple surely referencing magic mushrooms in their track title, and a particular (there could only be one) avant-disco figurehead dropping down in a shining beam of cello and trombone (ok, so I've given that one away-- it's Arthur Russell) at his most otherworldly and eternal and perfect.
There will be plenty of time to go back and pore over the tracklisting, Google the things you don't know, find connections cleverer than any I've made here. But all of that pales in comparison with listening to the thing and losing yourself in its invented universe. This is the Make Believe Ballroom at its most credible and all-encompassing. It's an illusion you don't ever want to end.