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The ability to find beauty, both backwards and forwards, is something I've learned from our Very Special Guest, my friend Earl Carlson, who I've known in New Orleans, New York, and now the Middle West. Every month we challenge each other's taste by trading five songs based on themes like "camp" and "death". He's always fiddling with surprising projects and making genre-blurred music, such as this magnificent track that soundtracked my night flight to Vienna.
“So the gist of this is we start in a weird cosmic but grounded space that feels familiar but a bit strange. It's techno. It's dancy. It's leftfield. But also comfortable. It's our vibe right now. Or my vibe right now. I've always tried to make things that impress my friends, that resonate with my friends, but I also struggle with making 'normal' music. I find myself getting frustrated with the output. It's never quite what I hope it'll be. The artists in the first section of tonight's mix seem to be finding their own spaces. Things that feel real."
"I moved back to southeastern Michigan a couple years ago, and I think a lot about Berlin's techno scene being added to the UNESCO world heritage list—this feels like the erasure of something important, while honoring something else important."
"This year I tried my hand at making dub techno, but I struggled to be engaged. I found myself asking why? Why am I using this minor chord—what's beneath this? These subtle drums—am I making muzak or am I making something that sings?"
"Ras G passed away, and it hit home—not because I loved him, but because I recognized he was in our lineage: an SP-404 and a belief he could ride with the ancestors if he sampled them just right. Carlos Niño is doing the same but through a different lens, which tapped into something here. Mandré was a new find for me, from 1977, a decade before I was born, but he's here in the lineage. And my god, Gil Scott—this is the despair that sits as a partner to the cosmos. Any minority voice knows that despair, rage, anger, hopelessness is part and parcel along with the expansive hope and possibility of the cosmos. Black Atlantis."
"Cannibal Ox was my first touch of this vein, this river, this experience. It was them or Binary Star—I didn't know that rap could sound like this, or maybe that music could feel like this. These two projects were the doors for me. This mix is an answer to the question of whether I believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe."
"The written answer is: I don't know. What I do know is that stepping into this river, feeling the current—it feels right. For the first time, it feels like I'm part of a lineage. It's the horrors, it's the sorrow, it's the pain, it's a country, a separate lineage telling us that we aren't enough, that we need to show up differently. It's the joy, it's the community, it's the knowledge that my ancestors are singing spirituals, and before that singing in languages I don't know. It's knowing that after me there will be more."
"I know that I was raised looking up to a white Christ with a pastor telling me I'm born with sin. I looked for my own answers, searching desperately for meaning. Only now, as I raise my own part of this lineage am I starting to feel settled with the answer of 'I don't know but I want to swim in this river.'"
Tonight there will be no extravagant sheets of reverb or uncomfortably long slow-motion songs. Something gave me the sense that I should leave Earl's mix alone. Maybe because there is the clear sense of a rarefied vision within this sequence of songs. Or maybe because Earl sent me a fully mixed audio file and said, "You should leave it alone."
He's right. Sometimes there's nothing to do but step aside and let the music play.
- JakoJako & Rødhåd - Passeri/Helonias
In Vere • WSNWG, 2022 • Bandcamp - Lyder - Brack
Weird.fishes • tunnel.visions, 2025 • Bandcamp - Rrose - Rib Cage
Please Touch • Eaux, 2023 • Bandcamp - Skee Mask - Session Add
Compro • Ilian Tape, 2018 • Bandcamp - Polygonia - Ceaseless Motion
Ceaseless Motion • Timedance, 2026 • Bandcamp - The Upsetters - Super Ape
Super Ape • Black Ark, 1976 - Prince Far I & The Arabs - Final Chapter/Shake the Nation
Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter III • Daddy Kool, 1980 • Bandcamp - Ras G - Been Cosmic
Back on the Planet • Brainfeeder, 2013 • Bandcamp - Sun Ra & His Arkestra - Door of the Cosmos
Sleeping Beauty • El Saturn, 1979 • Bandcamp - Carlos Niño & Friends - It's All Happening! (featuring Madlib, Jamire Williams and Dexter Story with strings by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson)
Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening! • Stones Throw, 2016 • Bandcamp - Mandré - Solar Flight (Opus I)
Mandré • Motown, 1977 - Gil Scott-Heron - Home Is Where the Hatred Is
Pieces of a Man • Flying Dutchman Records, 1971 • Wax Poetics - Cannibal Ox - Iron Galaxy
The Cold Vein • Definitive Jux, 2021 - Binary Star - Reality Check
Masters of the Universe • 2020 • Bandcamp - Wata Igarashi - Mineral
Mastery Quantum Sound • Houndstooth, 2026 • Bandcamp - Vince Staples and Lil Baby - East Point Prayer (Vocals only)
Ramona Park Broke My Heart • 2022 - Erykah Badu - Out of My Mind, Just in Time (Vocals only)
New Amerykah, Part Two (Return of the Ankh) • 2010
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