"This month's show features a special guest mix from an old friend, Icarus Redux. We met ages ago running in the same circles in LA before he made the move out to Minnesota. Over the past year or so, he's been chipping away at a deeply conceptual, emotional, and political mixtape that I've been excitedly anticipating since our initial discussions. In his own words:"

"What does it mean to relive uncut human experience? Not just a memory, not just a dream, but something more. The past inside the present.

In his seminal “In/Flux”, the EP from which Mixmag dubbed the term “trip-hop”, DJ Shadow opens with a narcotic vocal sample, “It's a song about life, death, love, hate, wealth, poverty, racism...Just a few things been running through my head...” That quote, along with the souls of a whole host of talented musicians and DJs, both living and dead, inform the work you’re about to hear.

Later, in Endtroducing, Shadow uses his “Transmission” interludes as a sort of frame story, suggesting that his album is being beamed to the subconscious of his listener from the future. This mix operates in a similar way, and has its own interludes, though from the past, a wiretrip, a blackjack clip à la Strange Days. Because this is a story about Minneapolis, about the Twin Cities community of activists and ravers, about me, living breathing sleeping shitting pissing doping our way from January 2020 to the Derek Chauvin trial. It is a chronological mix, though there are tributes sprinkled in to the dearly departed. There is George Floyd, there is Philando Castile, there is MF DOOM Andrew Weatherall Phil Asher and DMX, there is dodging rubber bullets and tear gas and flashbangs and kettles and watching a precinct burn. There is mutual aid. There is the despair and desperation of it all, as incremental reform takes over anarchic energy. There is a retreat to chemicals and its fallout. There is the strange, ambiguous sense of relief at some measure of justice, and there is anger at seeing new administrations retreat to the clinical and brutal doublespeak of late capitalism. It’s all there, if you hear it with the right set of ears."

Guest Mix: Icarus Redux

Mix series, cassette label, and party based out of Los Angeles, run by @coopersaver & @jenniferrrer.

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