s.drift dj set at mickey zoggs - side eye 18.02.24

After the last two weeks' high-octane entries, @slipdrifta arrives to RA Radio with an odyssean wend through stellar textures, humming ambience, technological soundscapes and flickers of glitch.

Across live sets and a number of self-published productions, s.drift has cultivated an uncategorisable sound that slinks between ambient, sound-collage and the variegated rhythms of dance. Yet his music never settles satisfied into any of these and implies always something exceeding the confinement of a label and beyond the bounds of writing.

It's still difficult to describe both Cal's tunes and the way he mixes, where every echoic cymbal, every thrum of bass, every shift in pattern manages to come across laden with an unearthly significance. One thing Cal and I connected over was videogames, and there's this idea in game studies about the technological sublime... that the trick of sublimity in a game is that it always appears to exceed what it shows - a game does not provide you an entire world, it intimates the imagination that the world one inhabits could be entire. There's something similar, albeit with the difference that there's no illusion here, in Cal's mix. A universe is always present, if only as half-dreamt conjectures. There are suggestions of mechanism and the discordance of industry, wisps of dislocated voice and the embers of disco and hardcore and dub. But it's always a peripheral universe, there being something innately charitable in the attitude to music... a universe as-yet undiscerned, a whole lifeworld built of shards into which only the listener's intrusion can clarify some personal coherence. A music that creates a canvas atop which the paints are particles and tinctures, oblique spaces into which the listener might build.

It's like there's a secret in the music only s.drift knows. But this secrecy allures rather than excludes. It adumbrates a planetscape alive and coruscating, an ecosystem of ooze constituting an invitation to the tangibility of fantasy. And because of the skill with which Cal can conjure worlds, fantasy is here simply the given of reality. 

tracklist:

Strategy - A Distant Destination
Pendant - NMQ-HYT
Obi Uto - a5 cyclone version
Igor Dyachenko - TimeStretch
JJ+JS - CRX
Davis Galvin - Humidity 14
O Yuki Conjugate - Black Magic Box
Pavel Milyakov - Mondpfad
Disjecta - Smokehead
dub - Electricity in mind
J. Albert - la flor
effekt - wiki
Shinichi Atobe - World 4
Unt - Grids
Ghost Dubs - Wired Version
exael - choeo3
ELIZA B.C. - B1
James Bangura - Monterrey
Daniel Stefanik - b1_dambala_experience_001
AEM Rhythm-Cascade - Volnushka
Quatremont College - Safari
JEMAPUR - Frictize 412
Jeffre Cantu-Ledesma - Non-person
Ivory Black - Blood Oath
African-American Sound Recordings - Gauze
Kassir feat. Shumopeleng - Tommy III
d.towards - a+r atmo
CA2+ - Stop Mixing Tracks Like This
AQ*8 - traffic gem
Echoplex - Taking Off
Kero X Tetzzie - Trench Mesh
bookworms - disco demo
ccctyyy - C_RA_001
iokera (RIP) - asphodel fields
cypha - Xzirow Command
Hesaitix - Anticrime
Eszaid - Chained
xtclvr - deep scanning
Conna Haraway - 1702

artwork by @frasier77777 // addditional art and typesetting by @manicpixiedreamgirl555

Realist Alive Radio 004: s.drift

Club Disk "CY(ou)" live on Bandcamp and Nina 

Cover creator @slipdrifta 

Club Disk "CY(ou)"

https://soundcloud.com/bb948 

Cover: https://soundcloud.com/bhkr2
Mastered: https://soundcloud.com/bb948

2focused w/ bb948

instagram.com/sdr1ft
soundcloud.com/slipdrifta

Tracklist:
SZTVO - Untitled (B1)
Rod Modell - Aloeswood
Sth - Mod
Stereometrix - Orbital Waves Take_2
8004 - 8007
Dynamo - Varaus 1
DJ Fitness - Rooster Dub
Konrad Wehrmeister - flewAM
Daniel Stefanik - dambala experience #2 A1
Iri.gram - 04
Ivan Yerofeyev, ASTROJOKE - ph
Selm - InFnt 03
VASE - T2
Xth Réflexion - 2
Igor Dyachenko - Invert
mos fet, Eustress - Raidillon
Yunzero - Lime In A Tinted Van
trailcam - Albion Road
PS - Freak Walk
STL - Foggy Beatz
Chris & Cosey - Intro
DCF/WZRDRY - Last House On The Right
IC Lander - Pseudo
DJ Trystero - Untitled 4
girl scout cookies - silence vorm sturm
Lint - No Time for Distance (Axine M Remix)
a b - joskfodl dub
defled - 3.w4nd4
iokera, iji - deadhive
tofudj - rework

df9

brainstalks

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