2 many DJs, Soulwax sessions volume one


You start with numbers before letters, right? Susie and Al copied this for me. I’d heard them before in Edinburgh. Obviously this is terribly clever stuff, and I don’t mean this is in a facetious way, even though they themselves are very playful and knowing with the songs they combine. These tracks are like hurtling through a music supermarket, you know this, you’ve seen this, you’ve heard it, you know some-one who owns this song or you used to, and they all collide monstrously, and it works no matter how much you sometimes don’t want it to. Here I’m hearing Blue Monday with “Sweet seduction in a magazine”…who is it singing? Are these 2 many DJs now the performers or weird ringmasters herding all these great songs together to cavort and sully each other in a fabulous mix? The old producer/performer debate is one that struck me even more with The Avalanches’ first (only?) album. I dreamt its title last night, it was called “Heidi wants one”. That’s not right, is it?

It’s interesting that when Sgt Pepper appears, these djs who render so many things unrecognisable and unexpected hardly do a thing to change the original Sgt pepper (reprise), and how “funky” the Beatles were, outside the other contenders of the 1960s. In the fade-out to Lovely Rita on Sgt pepper, the Beatles seem to have this weird direct injection through to a very Rn’B style current/contemporary/modern style. Listen to it and you’ll know what I mean. The DJs need do nearly nothing to render the Sgt Pepper reprise of a part with The Chemical brothers, Peaches, Madonna and all the other songs and artists weirdly coupled and babied with each other.

What is the deal with this? Is it like those old megamixes of the 80s? Jive Bunny and all that? The Wasteland by TS Eliot has often been accused of being something of a literary megamix (ditto Ulysses by Joyce), and this mosaic nature to the book is cited often by its detractors (who, I think, are usually afraid of missing a reference within the book and being marked as that which they most fear and so hold the book in contempt – we see a mathematical or scientific equation we don’t understand and are vocally awed and humbled by it. Confront the average person with a work of art, music, literature they don’t understand and they react with anger, claiming you’re trying to make a fool out of them). What is 2 many DJs work, but constant referral to the slipstream of music from the last four or five decades? Is it better to listen knowing each and every song? Or to approach each one as “brand new”?

The mix of God only Knows by the Beach Boys and Billie Jean by Michael Jackson is the thing that made me sit up about this album, when Susie played it me, happily moved into her new place in Exeter, the whole conversation stopped, everything stopped and still now when I try to describe this to people, they can’t understand it, and when I play it, it’s incredible.