Upfront 051 / January 21, 2016

Aspartame

Lumidee to start, Laurie Anderson to close and all manner of blends, bootlegs and 200mph club trax sandwiched in between. A one-of-a-kind mix right here.

About this mix

This mix is inspired by the profane and polysemous experience of the club – joy, anxiety, uncanny memories, broken thresholds.

I see DJing as aestheticised fandom, so I always try to make edits and mixes that are hopefully as fun to hear as they are to make. Bootlegs and blends work well here, injecting propulsion with meaning, connecting functional to popular, knitting together playful and sincere.

I'm really grateful to Total Freedom for his love and his music – we all walk in his shadow.

We all live atop this shitheap they call life; we may as well pick through the trash and find something beautiful together.

Aspartame

Boiler Room says...

The fashionability of blends, mash-ups and bootlegs seems to cycle at double speed; people tend to love them in short bursts then detest them. Notable popularity peaks in recent memory include the chart-bothering heyday 2ManyDJs and electroclasheers at the turn of the century, then the glut of (mostly amateur) Hood Internet and Palms Out Sounds reworks doing the rounds circa '07-08.

The troughs? Pretty much all the time in between.

Recently, though, there's been a refreshing surge of the good stuff once more. You could frame it as a new wave of commentary on the web's sensory overload, or a gigantic spike in poptimism that has won over all but the most jaded forum anoraks, or just an escape from the linearity of so much electronic music out there – but in truth it is, and always has been, extremely fun to crudely collide two songs into one another for fun. This mix, more raw and delightfully unhinged than most, is a testament to that.

Fucking around with form and format poses new questions and opens up new avenues, and that's always a good thing. Take TF's edit of "BBHMM", which hones in on the best part of the track (Ri barking commands), isolates it, places it on a pedestal and sculpts everything around that. Look to Que de-que-ing into a barrage of Missy loops as a prime example of how to extend the glee. Or take Aspartame's own absolute showstopper just a few minutes in, sliding Arca underneath Madonna's "Frozen", somehow rendering it even more emotionally gruelling.

Add a ton of brash new club trax from Air Max '97Neana and the amazing Toxe, likeminded young guns from different spots around the globe all mirroring that wanton sense of (mis)adventure, and you wind up with a seriously intense 200mph ride.

Plus it starts with fucking Lumidee. I mean, what's not to love?

Gabriel Szatan

Gabriel Szatan

Gabriel is one of the show programmer/hosts, and BR's Editor-in-Chief – somehow.

Tracklisting

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