The 9 Best DJ Mixes of January 2021

By Philip Sherburne

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

It’s a new year… sort of. Perhaps you’re still figuring out how to feel about the onset of 2021, which, at least so far, doesn’t seem like a huge improvement on 2020. These sets offer two possible coping strategies. Option 1: Rage to your heart’s content and work out your frustrations to the elevated BPMs and aggressive textures of Hyph11E, Kasper Marott, and He Valencia. Option 2: Maybe hibernating will help! Crawl back into bed, dim the lights, and drone away with ambient goodness from Forest Management and O Yuki Conjugate. There are alternatives, of course: Bliss out with Russell E.L. Butler’s domestic funk and soul, or get deeply weird with Leva Zhitskiy’s vintage Russian industrial. Whatever your mood, this month’s selectors have the music to match.

From its home base in Shanghai, the SVBKVLT label has spent the past few years putting its maverick spin on club music. In her productions as well as her DJ sets, Beijing native and Shanghai transplant Hyph11E typifies the label’s mind-melting fusions of noise, bass, and beats. Her Resident Advisor mix dials up the drama right from the start with what sounds like a rusty screen door creaking over rolling toms and scraped cymbals—a proper horror-film opening. From there on, it’s wall-to-wall thrills: pile-driving kicks and snares like automatic weapons; plastified textures and pitch-bent chimes; coiled fusions of techno and footwork suffused in North African tonalities. It’s intense stuff: Listening over my second cup of coffee, I wondered if the dizzying stretch from Gooooose’s manic “Cows” into Sexapil’s rubbery “Pingers 1” might actually be putting me in cardiac peril. Yet no matter how heavy her selections get, her nimble mixing is marked by its laser-like precision. Scan the tracklisting and it becomes clear that Hyph11E and SVBKVLT have tapped into a truly global vanguard: Alongside Chinese artists and resident expats, there are musicians from Manila (Caliph8), Malaysia (Tzusing), Kenya (Slikback), Tokyo (Prettybwoy), Cairo (3Phaz), Portugal (LYM.), Paris (Sexapil), and the UK (Pearson Sound, Laksa, Nazar). In its diversity and iconoclastic spirit, Hyph11E’s mix feels like a glimpse at the future of club music—in more ways than one. With the Shanghai scene essentially back to normal, this set doubles as a tantalizing look at life after the pandemic.

Recorded at Honcho, a long-running monthly queer party at Pittsburgh’s Hot Mass back in January 2020, Kiernan Laveaux’s mix perfectly captures why warm-up sets done right are one of DJ culture’s greatest pleasures. Easing the crowd in with understated grooves, measured tempos, and long, gradual blends, she keeps the heat low for the full two hours, making sure that burbling house rhythms never reach a full boil. She has a thing for elastic rhythms steeped in subtly psychedelic atmospheres, and it often sounds like she’s pitching down her records slightly to accentuate their woozier qualities. Though house music’s steady thump serves at the foundation, she touches on chunky ’90s West Coast sounds, contemporary leftfield bass music, vintage UK bleep techno, and wonky breakbeats. The variety is deceptive, though; Laveaux’s restrained touch and careful pacing amount to a kind of sleight of hand in which the scenery is always shapeshifting.

He Valencia’s guest set for DJ Python’s Rinse FM show opens in medias res, planting its flag smack in the middle of a peak-time dancefloor. The track is an old Heiko Laux production from 1999, with a scowling minor-key bassline and open hi-hats that glint like knives in the dark. For the next 55 minutes, the intensity doesn’t let up: It’s just wave after wave of rushing rhythms and flickering accents. Despite the consistently full-on energy level, the Indianapolis DJ covers plenty of ground, alternating between recent fare and turn-of-the-millennium cuts as he weaves a side-winding path between bare-knuckled techno and loopy, richly hued house. The low-key vocal hook of Chicago’s DJ Rush lends a moment of levity midway through, and the mix makes an unexpected turn just before the end, taking an EBM detour via Nehuen’s “Personal Conflict” and finishing up with a twirling Mood II Swing remix of Crustation’s 1997 classic “Flame”—and for what it’s worth, it’s not the mix you typically hear these days. Even when traversing familiar territory, He Valencia takes his own path.

Danish producer Kasper Marott’s music often feels like a time warp to the golden age of rave: His debut album, Full Circle, jumbles together bits of trance, jungle, trip-hop, acid, and Balearic house—a mix as sweet and colorful as a bowl of Froot Loops. He pays tribute to his inspirations in his Fact Mix, dusting off 90 minutes’ worth of brightly psychedelic barnstormers. Orbital’s epic “The Naked and the Dub” layers carnival-grade congas over buzzing synth bass; Cologne acid icon Dr. Walker’s “Untitled” pairs skulking 303 with skipping drum programming; Code Industry’s “Behind the Mirror” puts a Detroit spin on late-’80s industrial bands like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb. In the set’s second half, trance music’s rigid syncopations and vivid gleam come to the fore, pushing energy levels giddily into the red.

Forest Management’s John Daniel likens his music to painting, calling his method of building up layers of loops akin to “stroking a brush on a canvas.” While the visual metaphor is particularly true of the Chicago ambient musician’s productions, in which minuscule daubs of sound pile up in slowly shifting moiré-like patterns, it could also apply to his DJ mixes. His set for Resident Advisor feels less like a succession of discrete pieces of music than a piece of installation art that’s hazy and amorphous, like an indoor fogbank cycling through various pastel shades. Still, there are more pulses here, and even actual beats, than one is accustomed to finding in his own music: echoing hints of drum machine, silted scraps of slow-motion dub techno. Fifteen minutes in, the piano glissandi of Super Minerals’ “Clusters” emerge from the murk, blossoming like frost on a windshield; later in the mix, the ASMR-like whispers of Luc Ferrari’s “8’16” rustle over the organs and vocoders of Paul DeMarinis’ “Fonetica Francese,” a 30-year-old recording that sounds like contemporary vaporwave. Like the best ambient music, Forest Management’s set makes for a gorgeous lean-back listen, but for the dedicated, his tracklisting offers a rich vein of potential discoveries.

Russell E.L. Butler’s dancefloor productions lean toward skeletal machine grooves and eerie late-night techno, but the Brooklyn-based DJ’s recent mix for Juanita’s NYC, a mutual-aid project rooted in the city’s dance-music underground, swaps club energies for jazz, funk, and soul. Divine Interface’s “Designer Desire”—a woozy, slow-motion blend of electro-funk and ambient overlaid with purring spoken-word vocals—sets the mood, and songs from Sade, Santana, and Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson take the vibe progressively deeper. Mixed in with spiritual jazz and dub reggae are curveballs galore: Early on, Gang Gang Dance’s blast of synths and live drumming suggests cotton-candied shoegaze, and the set wraps up with a full-band jazz-funk rendition of the Balearic house classic “Sueño Latino.” Sunday mornings were made for sets like these.

Chicago’s Hi-Vis curates Beyond / Below, an excellent mix series showcasing eclectic moods and outer-limits sounds. In this mix for L.A. label Motion Ward’s Motion Cast series, they focus their attention on the intersection of pulse-based ambient music and buoyant dub techno. The “techno” part of that equation is largely notional; there are virtually no beats to speak of, save for Ekeko’s “Eye Ache,” which channels the alchemy of shadow and hiss practiced in the ’90s by the Chain Reaction label. LDS’s even blurrier “Path to Kepler” sounds like Basic Channel resonating through a cistern, while Mura Oka’s glitchy “Keepsake” recalls Pole. But those moments are as clearly defined as it gets. The rest of the set is a pastel swirl of soft-edged arpeggios, cottony pads, and pneumatic delay, all of it as airy and warm as a feather duvet.

The Russian producer Koyil’s “Vāɡ,” released late last year on the Ukranian/Estonian label Muscut, is a thing of quiet wonder: a soft, pulsing ambient etude whose sense of mystery is far greater than the sum of its modest parts. A similarly otherworldly sensibility distinguishes the opening stretch of Koyil’s podcast for the Gost Zvuk label (performed under his own name, Leva Zhitskiy). What sounds like some far-out kosmische journey from the late ’70s actually comes from the 1995 cassette from a group called Шесть Мёртвых Болгар (Six Dead Bulgarians), from the city of Arkhangelsk, some 776 miles north of Moscow. Though little of what follows resembles that revelatory piece for guitar and reverb, the entire mix is built around songs drawn from Russian and ex-Soviet industrial and new-wave cassettes. One atonal track, early in the mix, sounds like it could be a hymn from a religious cult living far off the grid; there are passages of easy-listening funk-punk, hair-raising deathrock, deranged circus music, and Dadaistic drone. It’s uniformly strange, and for listeners unacquainted with the terrain, virtually every song feels like the entryway to a whole new world.

The British group O Yuki Conjugate have spent the past 39 years massaging drones, hand drumming, and ethnographic samples into a style you might call “Fourth World industrial”; they prefer “dirty ambient.” They make a good fit for Personal Border Assistance, the Russian experimental musician Perila’s occasional radio series exploring “the borderline where sound and emotion melt into one tangible movement.” The mix begins on a guileless note with “Daydreaming” (also the title of the mix), a 1962 song from Doris Day and André Previn’s piano trio. But its lilting tones quickly disappear down a Lynchian spiral of reverb and delay, initiating a journey to points unknown. Over the next hour they take in Belong’s mossy post-shoegaze, Toshinoro Kondo’s gelatinous muted trumpet, and Koen Holtkamp’s sparkling pulse minimalism. After cruising through passages of lysergic easy listening and glitched-out dub, they finish as they began: with Doris Day and André Previn’s sweet sandman serenade leading the listener deep into the realm of the unconscious. It’s a tempting invitation to knock off early and nap the rest of the afternoon away.