DJ Express ~ Live @ Bass Coast 2024
A deeper dive...
Hi again. Lately, I’ve been thinking about new ways to talk about the music I love playing. I really want to share more mixes and live sets— but the old formula of posting a mix & hoping to earn even a sliver of someone’s attention these days in a world of DJ over saturation is pretty daunting. So I figured, why not just post the what, but also the why. Why these songs? What do they mean to me? Since I know a lot of you won’t even press play without a tracklist, I figured I’d use this as an opportunity to go deeper: highlighting key selections, explaining their significance, and sharing why they continue to resonate with me as a DJ & selector. One thing I’ve learned over time is that even if a track doesn’t immediately fit into my sets—or if I doubt how receptive an audience will be to it in the present—if it speaks to me, it will find its moment eventually.
UPDATE 02/12/25 ~ OOPS I totally uploaded the WRONG file here and it was clippy as hell. This one should be better now!
So this is the set I put together for Bass Coast Festival last year. With the slight caveat it was recorded on the Teenage Engineering TP-7 field recorder that I had just purchased and didn’t really quite know how to dial yet. So there’s a bit of clipping throughout that my pal Destrata did his best to mitigate. But I suppose it adds some character. Or maybe you can just mentally picture it being played out of these speakers:
Photo borrowed from Resident Advisor’s awesome feature on mobile Indian sound systems.
Anyways, here it is in all its long winded glory (I can’t seem to help myself, can I):
1. Unity 3 - “The Age Of Love Suite (Neverending Voice Remix)”
2. Duke Dumont - “Hoy (Original Mix)”
A track that could be best described as “Orientalist” in its shameless appropriation of a vaguely South Asian soundscape, “Hoy” came out of the Fidget House era (Dubsided was Switch’s label) like a bat out of hell, and was weirdly the 1st track that really put Duke Dumont on the map. A far cry from his eventual evolution into a peddler of poppy deep house, I remember reading somewhere around the time it came out (2008…woo!) that he heard the original sample in a taxi cab and bought the CD off the taxi driver right then and there. Whatever compelled him to make a ripping banger out of it is as much puzzling as it is genius, and its been a secret weapon for that perfect peak time moment over the years.
3. Nic Jalusi, Tech Ryder - “Kickstart”
4. DJ SWISHA - “Paradise Loop”
5. BETH - “Diamonds & Pearls”
6. Katakana - “The Lights (Original Mix)”
7. Edu K & Deize Tigrona - “Sex-O-Matic (Solid Groove Remix)”
Solid Groove was another alias of Dave Taylor aka Switch (I’m thinking of doing a Switch / Fidget House retrospective as a future post.. good idea?), and this is another example of Fidget House getting it right. As an avid collector of everything Switch has ever touched, I’ve done a pretty thorough dive into the spectrum of Fidget House and arrived at the conclusion that most of it is just a bit too maximal. It was too maximal then and definitely too maximal now, and more than anything, moreso set the stage for what eventually became sound design heavy EDM. However, this track strikes the perfect balance of Fidgety madness with hypnotic groove, all with a slamming Brazilian Carioca Funk vocal making it as appealing on the dance floor as ever.
Bonus track (not in the set):
Another Switch special that is definitely too maximal for most occasions, but groovy and hypnotic enough to maybe have its chance one day.
8. Proxy - “Raven” Diplo Bubbling Edit
Long before Diplo became the irritating poster boy of “trend du jour” (I guess he’s an Afro House DJ now?) and a DJ lifetime ago when I was putting out music with his label Mad Decent, he had a knack for tapping into the nether regions of the global club diaspora and finding ways to cleverly collide them with whatever was popping in the DJ circuit. Being a few degrees away from him guaranteed I got a fresh folder of exclusive edits & this has persisted as one of my all time faves from his unreleased crates.
Raven by Proxy was an absolute unit of anthem when it dropped and all he really did here was layer Bubbling’s famous Boeke Anthem on top of it. As sonic trends have shifted back & forth over the years, this one’s come in and out of rotation but it always conjures up a pretty visceral crowd reaction when I get a chance to drop it.
Sorry, I needed an excuse to post this 😂
9. Im Kellar - “Kings Valley”
10. Alex Kassian, Running Hot & Surco's Groove - “The Love Theme”
This cheeky little number was one I honestly thought I’d hear in a lot more DJ sets last year, but since it straddles the line of being perhaps a bit too cheese, I imagine a lot of DJs passed on it. Or it might’ve just snuck through unassumingly as part of that awesome 10 Years of Love On The Rocks compilation which was full of too many dance floor bombs to choose from.
I love Alex Kassian and the whole LOTR crew for their referential style of conjuring proto-trance, proggy & tribal sounds from the 90’s/2000’s while completely refurbishing & polishing them up for the modern era. They do such an incredible job of paying homage to these genres of old and they rarely, if ever, miss.
As far as I can tell, this is basically a souped up deep house remix of Haddaway’s “What Is Love” mashed up with the acapella from an obscure track from 2022 also called “What Is Love” by a South American producer named Surco’s Groove. Pretty damn clever & HIGHLY effective floor filling material of the highest order.
11. DJ Erick Rincon - “Magdalena Trival”
As I’ve expressed here in past posts, I love 3ball (or Tribal, Trival, etc) and it’s fun to find excuses to turn the dance floor upside down with the wild swing of its drums and over the top vocal hooks & sound fx. Everyone knows the Brasilian anthem Magdalena and this is one of my favourite versions to sneak into sets.
Like most 3ball, getting it was as simple (or difficult) as finding one Mexican guy on 4shared who had a folder of every tune the DJs were rinsing in Mexico at the time, so in the spirit of keeping this music alive, here’s the OG file for download:
DOWNLOAD: Erick Rincon - Magdalena Trival
12. Robert Hood - “And Then We Planned Our Escape”
Mainly highlighting this track because my dear friend and Vancouver DJ 🐐 Scott W. also played it in his set w/ Downtown Solutions (better known as Zap!) on the very same stage I was playing just a few hours earlier— except, of course, he played the actual record and when that crispy hi-hat sneaks in at 3:48 it likely sounded 10x better. Most memorably, he heard me playing it all the way from the comfort of his campsite which prompted him to get up and run towards the stage to inform me that we played the exact same song, on the same stage, on the same day! DJ Kismet if there ever was such a thing :)
13. Morgan Bitters - “WAYO TOOL”
14. Alexey Kotlyar & Jmix - “Ground Bass (Original Mix)”
15. Koreless - “Seven”
IMO one of the best tracks of 2024, bar none. Insane tension and release and the untouchable sonic signature of Koreless. He’s consistently been one of my favourite electronic music producers of the last 10 years, period.
16. Seph - “Azure”
17. DJ Accident At Work - “Know Better”
18. DJ Kurvy - Track 06 (Unnamed)
My dear friend Paul Devro hipped me to this very niche subgenre “Vietnamese Breaks”. At least that’s what he lovingly called it, but I’m not sure if it actually has a real name. Picture the soundtrack to a mirror universe where we live in a Fast & The Furious-esque reality based on street racing music. This track comes from DJ Kurvy and it seems most of his tracks are nameless and burnt to bootleg CDs that you can sometimes find on eBay. It seems to be a pretty specific genre of breaks (which, when I grew up there, were the predominant genre of dance music popular across any Southern state region touching the Gulf of Mexico). I guess what makes this variant unique is its seemingly exclusive reworks of 90’s and 2000’s trance music with slamming electro breaks and drums laid beneath. The sound quality of these tunes is also questionable at best, adding to their charm.
19. Gaston Fiore - “Error De Perdedor (Skyblaster Sunrise Mix)”
20. TSVI - “Movimento”
21. Tigerstyle & Miss Rimpi - “Bol Bol Bol (feat. Miss Rimpi) [Gidha Mix]”
22. IVY HOLLIVANA - “Skype Softness (EMILY GLASS Banished Euphoria Rework)”
Another one my friend Paul sent my way a couple years back. This isn’t normally the type of track I’d play but its really got this otherworldly quality to it. It’s fully an over the top, euphoric Trancey Eurodance type remix, and when digging into the layers here it’s a bit of an odd one as it completely reworks the source material to be almost unrecognizable. As if the original was just a vehicle for Emily Glass to put out a track they already had in mind. I seem to remember it being free to download on Soundcloud at some point, but here it is on Bandcamp for purchase:
Full track listing without a bunch of annoying words in between:
1. Unity 3 - “The Age Of Love Suite (Neverending Voice Remix)”
2. Duke Dumont - “Hoy (Original Mix)”
3. Nic Jalusi, Tech Ryder - “Kickstart”
4. DJ SWISHA - “Paradise Loop”
5. BETH - “Diamonds & Pearls”
6. Katakana - “The Lights (Original Mix)”
7. Edu K & Deize Tigrona - “Sex-O-Matic (Solid Groove Remix)”
8. Proxy - “Raven” Diplo Bubbling Edit
9. Im Kellar - “Kings Valley”
10. Alex Kassian, Running Hot & Surco's Groove - “The Love Theme”
11. DJ Erick Rincon - “Magdalena Trival”
12. Robert Hood - “And Then We Planned Our Escape”
13. Morgan Bitters - “WAYO TOOL”
14. Alexey Kotlyar & Jmix - “Ground Bass (Original Mix)”
15. Koreless - “Seven”
16. Seph - “Azure”
17. DJ Accident At Work - “Know Better”
18. DJ Kurvy - Track 06 (Unnamed)
19. Gaston Fiore - “Error De Perdedor (Skyblaster Sunrise Mix)”
20. TSVI - “Movimento”
21. Tigerstyle & Miss Rimpi - “Bol Bol Bol (feat. Miss Rimpi) [Gidha Mix]”
22. IVY HOLLIVANA - “Skype Softness (EMILY GLASS Banished Euphoria Rework)”