Deep Mind Music: Aos

Vera Dvale: from h3ksh3im to Pähklipuu II

In a recent book, Music Beyond Airports: Appraising Ambient Music, writer and musician David Toop questions what ambient means nowadays. The “first wave official ambient” of early Brian Eno albums had ideas about music as “a tint, an ignorable background” that has since “diminished [it] to the level of a design feature”. Toop finds this difficult to square with what he sees as a contemporary appetite for focus and intimacy: “Does it supply a perennial refuge for temporarily forgetting the precarity, hysteria and threat of current conditions or can it be a vehicle for engaging with those same conditions?”

Two recent ambient mixes that tap into these ideas come from Seattle-based Aos and Norwegian producer Vera Dvale. Aos’s mix is just shy of an hour and moves at a surprisingly lively pace considering the tone of the music, blending tracks by giants such as Moby with underground names such as Ondo Fudd and the late Susumu Yokota, as well as Aos’s own field recordings and instrumentations. Dvale’s mix is markedly stranger and seems unconcerned with the genre confines of “capital-A ambient”, as Toop wryly writes. It has a remarkable sense of spatiality and texture to it – the piano moments are particularly gorgeous – which makes it a memorable listen.

Mysteries of the Deep CVIII: Israel Vines – Mills Exploratory

Israel Vines is a seasoned techno artist who, like so many other DJs from the American midwest, built a loyal following while barely playing outside the US, and well before social media took over. In this mix for the Mysteries of the Deep series, Vines explores the more esoteric productions of Detroit techno legend Jeff Mills, with a focus on his lifelong love of science fiction; Vines says it goes “somewhat overlooked because of his legendary status as a dancefloor DJ”. Perhaps by coincidence, Mills will release a three-part compilation next month – Sight, Sound and Space, on Axis – focusing on his more intergalactic sounds and cinematic scores. This mix makes a fine companion piece.

RA Live: Skee Mask at Dimensions Festival, Croatia

Skee Mask released one of last year’s best electronic albums in Compro. A sparkling trip through ambient bass and breaks, it sounds like being the last astronaut left on the space station, floating in the cosmos with only the hiss and click of surrounding machinery for company. As a DJ, though, the German can move at whiplash speeds. At the last ever Dimensions festival in Croatia this month, he played a wicked set of caustic jungle and drum and bass breaks, thundering hardcore, and deep, rolling techno. It’s one for hogging a podium to.

Nowadays Live and Direct 003: Physical Therapy

American producer Physical Therapy runs a label called Allergy Season, which champions contemporary underground house and techno and releases compilations to raise money for social justice causes. He’s also one of the resident DJs at New York City club Nowadays, and his mixes convey the feeling of dancing underwater. In this recent recording, he rattles heads: there’s downbeat digi-dub and colourful flickers of dancehall, low-slung southern rap and soulful R&B; drum and bass and left-field house are woven in, too. Blending Aaliyah into jungle breaks might read as gauche, but it works in this playful and confident 90 minutes.

The month's best mixes: blood-pumping beats and meditative techno Read more

Crack Mix 307: Via App

Via App’s sound is, in a word, jarring. Aesthetically, they operate somewhere between the underground techno clubs and punkish noise shows of Brooklyn, binding trippy, dark dance music with industrial electronics and sound-collage techniques. Listeners can feel rinsed through, gargled in the murky swirl of it all. In this mix for Crack magazine, they’re on creepy, confrontational form, drawing from truly global styles. There are deconstructed polyrhythms from Slikback, Imaabs and Wasted Fates, analogue techno workouts from Orphx, heaving bass from Turkish producer Gantz, and hot new experimental vogue beats from quest?onmarc as well as several of Via App’s tracks and remixes. Ideal if your sound palette tends towards the bitter.