Max Watts- minimal detroit vol. 105

Techno has been reclaimed and refined in the last few years. For Ghanaian-American Discwoman associate Akua (@akua_b), that means a deep dedication to bringing forth narratives about the genre's history. It's about original, authentic and rebellious old school values of the sort that Underground Resistance defined so early on. It's about breaking modern expectations with a fresh sense of attitude. Her recontextualisation of techno centres its long lineage for contemporary audiences. All this most often plays out in Akua's blazing sets, most often during the late-night and early morning hours of the clubs around her New York City hometown. They find her transmute 90s nostalgia while connecting the dots between past and present. "Playing fast feels cathartic," she says, "and helps me deal with the nostalgia I have for a time that I never got to experience but remember and connect with so fondly.”

This week's mix is a testament to that: it starts with 1994's 'Global Warning' from the late great K-Hand and goes on to cover decades of history at warp speed. There are frenetic layers of percussion and hammering kick drums, bouncing bass lines and arresting rave synths all threaded together into something hugely powerful and muscular. It is only a DJ with Akua's sense of control that can serve up a chaotic collision of sound in such a compelling way.

Tracklist
K-Hand - Global Warning [Warp, 1994]
Voltage 9 - Untitled B1 - Candema [Synewave, 1994]
Drax (Thomas P. Heckmann) -  Search [Trope Recordings, 1998]
Mike Dearborn - Warning [Majesty, 1994]
Gene Hunt - Juno 106 [Contaminated Muzik, 1998]
NYCO - Plasticity [ESP Collective, 2021]
DJ Shufflemaster - 808 Cosmetics [Self-Released, 2018] 
Mike Dunn - Damn You All [Trax Records, 1994]
DJ Powerout - Lift [Synewave, 1995]
DJ Slugo - Taris Sleeps Wild [Dance Mania, 1995]
DJ Rush - Control Yourself [Djax-Up-Beats, 1999]  
Fuzz Face (DJ Hyperactive + Woody McBride) - New Ones [Communique, 1996] 
DJ Slip - Bushwick Birds [Kanzleramt, 2001]
DJ Hyperactive - Get In [4 Track Recordings, 2008]
Joey Beltram - Caliber [Warp, 1994]
Surgeon - THX-1139 (Level) [1996]
Creeper - Spoke [Cluster Records, 1997]
DJ Jes - True Honesty [Contaminated Muzik, 1998]
Tevatron - Molekule [Re-load Records, 1998]
Jana Clemen - Momentum [Convex, 2001]
Decoder - Populations [Self-Released, 2021]
Unknown Force - Internal Drive [430 West, 1995]
Bios - Basic Black [Black Nation, 1998]
DJ Apollo - Hooligan Stomp [Head In The Clouds, 1996]
DJ Genderfluid - Dirty Funker [Wet Trax, 2021]
Woody McBride + DJ T-1000 -  Test Three [Generator Records, 1995]
Fumiya Tanaka - Micro One [Torema, 1995]
Max Watts - Ichi 3 [ESP Collective, 2021] 
DJ Rashad - Acid Bit (Feat. Addison Groove) [Hyperdub, 2013]

Tracklist

Dekmantel Podcast 350 - Akua

Black Lodge Radio EP 96: MAX WATTS
1st hour is a special guest mix from LA born MAX WATTS who now resides in Detroit and runs the excellent new label https://soundcloud.com/limitednetwork. The young protege provides an all vinyl set steeped in the traditions of Detroit luminaries such as Claude Young and DJ Bone and will be performing his BL debut at LAxD Aug 20th 2022. Kosmik steps up to the decks after with his own on-the-fly vinyl sesh of old and rare Detroit and midwest classics pulled deep from within the BL vaults. Enjoy 🚀🚀🚀
Broadcast on Sutrofm and Mutant Radio

BL Radio EP 96: MAX WATTS

Locked Groove Transmission #04: LYDO

March 2023 show with host Santiago Salazar and guest DJ B. Rod @user-830979392 (Limited Network, Detroit)
(support Dublab: www.dublab.com/support/memberships)

Santuario March 2023 With B Rod

"I am going to take you on a ride where I will challenge you to back down or go with me," Parrish Smith says in the interview below. "If you don't like to do this, and you see a glimpse of me, you will dislike me. But the second time it happens again, I will be there to change your mind again, just to be challenged."

It's a confident, confrontational idea that goes with an unusually confrontational RA Podcast, a mix that represents a truly free spirit in the European dance scene. Smith, who also moonlights in the band Volition Immanent with fellow Dutch trailblazer Mark Knekelhuis, makes and plays hard, aggressive techno. But instead of gabber BPMs and overdriven kick drums, he directly incorporates ideas, sounds and influences from rock, punk and metal, a tricky combination that he nails like few others have been able to. (Just check his album Light, Cruel & Vain.)

Case in point: this mix blends Regis, Tzusing and Playboi Carti with Sepultura, Juno Reactor and Celldweller. It's a journey to the end of aesthetics, where opposites don't attract so much as crash and melt into each other. It's a fierce hour-and-a-half but never quite overbearing or overwhelming, gracefully weaving in and out of chaos like the work of someone who knows the real impact and art of heavy music.

@parrishsmith

Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/874

RA podcast

RA.874 Parrish Smith

“I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.” — Jacob Taubes

In his “On the Concept of History,” the messianic-communist philosopher Walter Benjamin asks us to imagine an angel who is unable to stop the suffering of the world. The angel cannot do anything at all but be witness to the ruin of the world, because the angel cannot close their wings, which are held open by a strong storm called “progress.” Before this angel is the entirety of history as wreckage and ruin, one single catastrophe piled up before the angel. The proof of this vision of history is given in the remarks by Benjamin that feel as if they could have been written today as we marvel at the stupidity and cruelty that must be protested over and over, “One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is _not_ philosophical.” 

For those of us who seek something otherwise than history on the dance floor, the hagiography of raving does not serve us well in this moment. When Pat Parker tells us that “they will come” and asks “where will you be, when they come,” it simply is not true that techno or dancing or this community will save us. For too many “they” have already come and “we” have done very little, almost nothing, precisely as is allowed by the demands to survive in the world. In a very real sense, _we are them_. The hagiography of the dance floor may allow us to imagine that the reason the party sucks has everything to do with them, but the dance floor is us and we share it alike with our favorites and violence workers from Palantir, lovers and unkown abusers, those who are committed to this life despite the financial burden and those who fund their lifestyles with dirty family money, and so many of us are substance users whose favorite chemicals are caught up in exchanges of violence beyond any single person’s control, as well as other angels with dirty faces. 

Crafting a slow burn that ends in ecstatic and intentionally wasteful movement, this mix meditates on the idea that techno is not about release, not about community as a mystical body hiding its relationship to power, not even about freedom in the usual sense we take the term. Perhaps the power of techno's 4/4 beat is the way it captivates, allowing for somatic and sonic access to the deeper experience of world-captivation. To recognize techno and the movements it provokes in the body as a meditation on the inextricable link between submission and resistance may allow us to to reject the hagiography of the dance floor and recognize that in the struggle for pleasure the greater struggle is with the self. That even if and when the external oppressor is subdued, the oppressor within us may still lie in ambush. Techno allows us to give attention to the idea that the meaning of liberation might be the very undoing of the borders between us and them, between good and evil, between servitude and freedom. 

As these thoughts guide the mix, brought tracks by friends into conversation with older and new tracks by some of my favorite contemporary producers. I have also included a number of my own unreleased tracks as well as two off of my recent EP, available on Cathexis Records. Track IDs happily available upon request.

One Single Catastrophe (They Will Come)

There are DJs, then there are DJs who capture—and live—a moment in dance music's evolution. Born in Los Angeles, but based in New York for the better half of a decade, Akua has established herself as the latter, an important voice in the North American techno scene. Akua's DJing practice is fueled by her research in the '90s techno music archive, with a special interest in the history and roots of techno within America. 

Akua's sets are raw extensions of the foundations laid by the pioneers of '90s U.S. techno. Most prominently, the work and influence of DJs like Jeff Mills, Claude Young and Jay Denham can all be heard across her mixes, as well as the spirit of Underground Resistance. Her interest in fast-paced techno comes from these traditions as well as own individualist streak—while there's no shortage of DJs who play high-BPM techno, you won't hear anyone else play it quite like she does.

Her old-school meets new-school sound has catapulted her from the New York underground into the European techno circuit, where recent gigs have seen her perform at dance music institutions like Berghain and Dekmantel. Akua's RA Podcast is her in full-throttle mode, featuring all the stripped-down, hypnotic groove of early techno aside rushes of searing acid, carefully speeding up until closing at a healthy sprint.

@akua_dj

Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/878

RA.878 Akua

"Live improvised hardware connects so directly to the fundamental rawness of electronic music." UK techno lynchpin Surgeon reflects on his connection to machines and making music on the fly.

Surgeon, also known as Anthony Child, has been one of techno's most influential and consistently brilliant artists since the mid-'90s. For the last decade, he has spent most of his creative resources on developing his abilities as a live performer, in his usual techno environment as well as more abstract settings. As Child reinforces in this live Dekmantel Exchange with Aaron Coultate, his live performance practice is at the heart of his creativity. "There was literally one day I woke up and realized that having the computer—DJing, as it were—was getting in the way of taking this form of performing further," he says. "That was determining the structure of what I was doing. And to be truly freeform and improvisational I had to be free of this imposed structure."

This archived conversation comes on the heels of Surgeon's most recent LP, Crash Recoil, which RA music critic Kiana Mickles hailed as "one of his best albums ever." To get an inside look into this risk taking artist's production process and approach to dance floor composition, listen to the episode in full.

EX.655 Surgeon Talks Live Performance and Improvisation

"been kinda frustrated w/ a lot of things lately so this mix is pretty much me letting loose and setting it all free :)" - @akua_b

Full Q&A and tracklist: http://discwoman.com/mixes/akua

DISCWOMAN 51 x Akua

R.I.P MIKE HUCKABY

you will be missed 
X
-
I found this mixtape on a concession stand at a rave in LA in the mid nineties it was the first heard of him and I was really into this sound and buying lots of records related, it was the peak of nineties techno and I was also always hunting for tapes like this to study and better myself as a DJ. Over the following years I had quite a few conversations with Mike from his days at Record Time in search of the rare gems that I was having a hard time finding in LA. Years later Mike came to Los Angeles for the NAMM show and I put together a party and had him play, he stayed at my place I hadn't released any records yet and he kindly gave me production tips and shared some old stories about his days in Detroit sitting in my living room till the late hours of the morning. I am doing for him as I would like for anyone to do for me when i'm gone and share something positive to remember someone by.

I know many know Mike for his house music, I knew Mike as a Techno Dj from Detroit. Here i share a very rare Techno mix from Mike Huckaby I had this on repeat that summer, Enjoy !

 -Adrian (Developer)

Max Watts- minimal detroit vol. 105

minimal detroit

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