6 of the Most Interesting DJ-Kicks Mixes
The DJ-Kicks series was born in Berlin in 1995 and lays claim to the title of the first officially licensed DJ mix series available commercially. Since its inception, the series, released via !K7 Records, has championed electronic music—house and techno, drum & bass and downtempo, and genres that keep popping up before the identifier gentrification names can appear.
For the sake of business—money remains the answer to all questions in life. It provided a face, an artist, and an idea for this once boutique music that now generates billions of dollars year after year. Here are some of the more interesting entries to appear in the series.
Kemistry and Storm (1999)
Released on January 26, 1999, this remains the standard for so many non-obvious reasons and one very tragic one. It’s the only full-on drum & bass entry in the series. It features sublime mixing, from tough steppers to atmospheric bliss, done with vinyl in just two takes. Boisterous, raucous and soulful, that broad-minded frequency—techstep, liquid, Darkstep, jump-up—represents the music with a grand introduction for the non-familiar. On a personal note—for three years in San Francisco, when drum and bass ran through that city with fervor like a Derrick Henry Angry Run this mix doubled down on what DJs in the know featured during peak moments in their sets, instructing newbie drum and bass DJs, dancers and scenesters what this aggressive breakbeat music could do: Help create a culture that twenty-some-odd years later would generate $6.2 billion in business. That’s all in one year, folks.
Real electronic music people hear the term EDM and scowl. That’s a business money identifier, an ugly one that has certain connotations for those who love the music, not the industry. But on a sonic level? Yeah, this mix was SF Gospel.
On this bombardment of sound, Kemistry & Storm ran hits from 98, upcoming white labels, and then had them mixed and sequenced—in most cases properly. These groundbreaking DJs, who selected tunes from their friends and not just from their affiliated Metalheadz imprint (Goldie’s label) played the legendary Eklektic party in SF. The drum and bass royalty standard in the city, run exclusively by women. A middle finger aimed at breaking down that “all-boys club bro-shit.”
Moreover, just in terms of style, Storm ran the dark, ruff-and-tumble stuff like a soldier, and Kemistry always found space to let in the atmospheric drum and bass light, bringing contrast and context to the mix; they laid that drum and bass foundation down so hard, it worked mood and vibes back and forth, curating it into a formula drum and bass DJs still run in their mixes today. That’s the collective pendulum they operated with.
Matter of fact, I pinched “Clear Skyz” by DJ Die and the anthem of 2000, Sci-Clones’ atmospheric gold “Everywhere I Go” from this mix. Rocked those joints for years, son. To great dancefloor acclaim. Salute and flowers to those Ladies handling biz, for sure.
Now, the non-secret. Three months after this mix put drum and bass into that global Bat-signal in the sky, Kemistry died in a freak car accident coming home from a late-night gig, which shook dancefloors from the East Bay to Brazil. This mix not only delivered on the promise of what this music could do when in the right company of special musicians, but it also left a vivid legacy unfinished.
Laurel Halo (2019)
So I go back and forth with “The Most Trusted Voice in Music,” old Pitchfork. Sometimes that voice has a frog—it’s called an agenda—in it. On the Laurel Halo DJ-Kicks mix, they kinda nail it: “Body music for heady dancers, this is a triumph of dance music at its trippiest.” But it tracks; it’s Uncle Phil with the spot-on words. That’s Philip Sherburne for the normies, his batting average remains savage, much like this mix. Halo, the American-born producer, musician, and DJ, had released four dissimilar studio albums previously that moved briskly from experimental pop through minimal techno to evergreen ambient textures.
Released in March of 2019, this is the period in time when this mix series of releases are starting to represent DJs slugging it out in mixes on the radio, internet, and the clubs. Not computer gangsters talked and gassed up by publicists (no disrespect) but folks—more specifically women and people of color—making their name by holding it down behind the decks. Making a rep that sticks by moving asses by the pound, making folks sweat.
Presenting 29 tracks in 60 minutes, dragging friends, unknown artists, and avant-garde thinkers to walk through this door with her, Halo was moving like a car mechanic dying to use every tool in the garage; the amalgam captures a specific eagerness. With tempo, dressed in polychromatic tones, throttling past our eyes and ears, Halo caters the style of the mix to the terrain of the song, maneuvering through fierce arpeggios, ruff bass lines, space-age micro-house, underwater techno, and machine-like landscapes.
I’ve never gone clubbing in Berlin, but this feels like that wayward one night (or weekend depending on if you make it into Berghain | Panorama Bar) soundtrack. In contrast, nowadays Halo has rediscovered the piano and is doing work in the ambient space—but this was a fantastic blur.
DāM-FunK (2016)
Do you want to discuss how to capture that dancefloor vibe in a mix? In the middle of “Poison Candy,” a futuristic funk parable by Reggie B., DāM-FunK gets so caught up in the bass-induced groove that he starts singing on top of the existing vocals. It’s a genuine moment. If you’ve seen him live at his now-defunct Funkmosphere party in Los Angeles, where he played a mix of rare ’80s and late ’70s bass funk records along with modern funk gems, you’d know that he catches the gospel and holy ghost playing these records. Yep, that’s vinyl. In the past, at the Li-Po Lounge in Chinatown, the former location of San Francisco’s Sweaterfunk party (a sister to Funkmosphere), DāM-FunK not only sang over the tracks he played but also announced the names and artists of the rare vinyl records in his DJ sets, which might have been unfamiliar to the average listener.
It was guaranteed that people would fly in from across the country and around the world just to make it to that swampy basement and listen to those rare records. And if DāM-FunK was on the lineup, that would be a bonus. It was the intimate connection that would make the crowd react with joy as if someone had turned on a much-needed fan to cool off the sweaty audience.
His 2016 DJ-Kicks Mix showcased different aspects of the musician, even surprising his loyal fans. I didn’t expect to hear the slow-moving ambient chords of “Broken Clouds” by Gaussian Curve, a composition that could be the theme of a new Terrence Malick movie. This was followed by the upbeat new wave sound of Tony Palkovic’s “True To Yourself,” the late ’90s house selection “Log In” by Gemini, and the spacey off-hand optimism of “Oof” by Moon B, all of which acted as perfect counters to the electrofunk of “Dial-A-Freak” by Uncle Jams Army. It was another unexpected turn, something DāM-FunK continually perfects in his diverse and still very funky career trajectory.
Peggy Gou (2019)
The first South Korean woman to DJ at Berlin’s techno institution Berghain, launch a collection at Paris Fashion Week in 2019, and have an Instagram following of 4,222,455 and still growing, Peggy Gou is a shining example of a millennial pioneer. But this one can mix. Gou is real. She worked at a record shop in Berlin before her globetrotting career took off. She enjoyed getting her fingers dusty, digging in those crates.
Peep her DJ-Kicks Mix; an across-the-board selection that’s radical and in line with a forgotten tradition. No genre boundaries here, Gou moves across disco, house, techno, and electro from 90 to 150 BPM. It’s a communal living room party feel where she plays her fave joints to her friends in a non-performative way. No Boiler room shenanigans here. Quite the opposite of what could be expected from “Gou-mania.”
“Fluorescence,” an all-timer statement of chill from 1993, by the iconic Spacetime Continuum from San Francisco (shouts to The Gawd Jonah Sharp), begins this personal soundtrack and leads us into Gou’s first-ever track “Hungboo,” a playful midtempo sentiment with birdsong, koto chords and weighty dub bass. Things move sideways quirky good with the elastic bass of “Earwig” by Pearson Sound that gets nicely blended into “Perseguido Por El Rayo,” the John Carpenter-like Jazz fusion of Pegasus, which next points us into the Rave Cave vibes of Sly and Lovechild.
Gou wants you to get close and familiar. She’s paid, I mean comfortable enough, to not care if the mix is not exact. She’s doing something outside the algorithm. Sometimes the statement is being in the moment.
Robert Hood (2018)
Oversight can bite you in the ass. Robert Hood, one of the original members of the pioneering Detroit techno group Underground Resistance, is an ordained minister and would probably not like the previous wording. But how did it take so long for the DJ-Kicks Mix series, which started in 1995, to feature Hood? His career predates the entire project by a couple of years, and you can hear his influence throughout its 25-plus years of existence (it’s in the Halo mix too). I have no idea why it took so long for this esteemed series to feature one of the originators of electronic music. But after just one listen to his 2018 DJ-Kicks mix, filled with sinewy minimalistic productions, Hood’s moody symphony of bleepy loopy overdrive will be forever stamped into your senses.
Rolling Stone provided the best summary: “Compared to the bullet-train rub and tug of modern big-box EDM, this music is a tantric escalator, with tiered builds and rolls climbing stealthily and peaks that reveal themselves like mountain-tops from cloud cover”.
AMEN.
Jayda G (2021)
Sometimes when creating a mix, it’s easy to forget that how you start is just as important as how you finish.
Jayda G‘s 2021 mix delivers a masterful Mancuso-esque class on how to build sound, create swirling clouds of open space, and bring a vibe that keeps listeners, record addicts, and future dancers engaged for the full chugging of techno and house music arriving hours later.
Brit-funk, rare-disco, proto piano-house, and some Don Blackman choice boogie keep the placeholders before Jayda G upshifts things with the bang-bang of Gerry Read’s “90’s Prostitution Racket,” and then we’re on the way to the Boiler Room version of Jayda G. This intro, one that new jacks NEED to study, showcases a full arsenal of a musical vocabulary that goes from one place to another maintaining a lineage.
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John-Paul Shiver has been contributing to Treble since 2018. His work as an experienced music journalist and pop culture commentator has appeared in The Wire, 48 Hills, Resident Advisor, SF Weekly, Bandcamp Daily, PulpLab, AFROPUNK and Drowned In Sound.