“I would like to create the 0.1-second sound which condenses all emotions in the universe. When I listen to it, maybe my mind and existence itself will collapse.”
Beat Connection: Michaelangelo Matos’ Essential Newsletter on Classic and New DJ Mixes
The pitch behind Beat Connection, writer Michaelangelo Matos’ newsletter, is basic. Described, simply, as “DJ mixes and the DJs that play them,” the Substack-published column goes deep on said mixes, recommending at least five per mailing.
An authority on beat culture, electronic music, 1980s pop and more, Matos is the author of The Underground is Massive, How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America and Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year, and has written for all the publications over the years. His input for The New Yorker’s Nightlife column offered deep, concise insight on the city’s dance music scene. He’s also obsessed with DJ mixes, and Beat Connection is his way of bringing a modicum of order to the infinitely chaotic world of online techno and house mixes and sets.
His most recent installment, for example, focuses on British DJ Ben UFO. If you’re not familiar with his Hessle Audio shows on Rinse FM — I wasn’t — be prepared to be obsessed. Matos recommends a 2022 set featuring Ben UFO and Four Tet, one captured the day after a Four Tet/Floating Points tag-team. “There’s no floor to fill or keep, so they just let fly,” Matos writes. “The tempos are all over—torpid opener, then a cuddly, pebbled groove that makes even Gwen Stefani bearable; it builds to a trading post of OTT bass lines, and not long after that it’s proto-jungle-style breakbeat loops—but that’s what you want from these two.”
For a post on the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, a list of sound recordings deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant by the Library of Congress, Matos picked five classic DJ mixes that should be in the Registry. Among them, the earliest known Frankie Knuckles mix. Writes Matos: “Part of the mammoth and crucial SoundCloud holdings of Manny’z Tapez, this is the earliest known and verified DJ mix by Frankie Knuckles we yet know of, and not only does it stand in as a representative snapshot of the very earliest house music, it’s a scorching example of disco at its most vibrant.”
Beat Connection’s full archive is available on Substack for $5 a month, and it’s more than worth it for the sheer volume of doors it opens, mix-wise. (Non-subscribers can still access a decent number of posts.) An authority on Berlin and Cologne techno, Matos loves a good Kompakt-connected mix. In June, he highlighted rising Cologne DJ-producer AMSL’s killer new mix, Connecting the Dots, calling it “deeply psychedelic—not an unheard-of trait for Kompakt, but seldom so potently concentrated.”
He continues:
It’s more like a light mushroom idyll on a summer day than a dark night of the soul, though. It takes a little bit to get there, via the Orb at their most deep-spacey, but that mood maintains even when the tracks might not have suggested it in other settings. She picks things that are minimalist as in disorienting (which is her ear), not just minimalist as in cute (which is the label’s fallback), though obviously there’s overlap. She really has a taste for bleeps. She also has a taste for melting timbres.
Matos devoted another recent installment to a Q&A with John Darnielle, who makes music as the Mountain Goats. A musical omnivore, Darnielle picked 5 Mixcloud sets for the newsletter. Musically, it’s all over the place — wonderfully so. Here’s Darnielle on a Krish Raghav mix, “Play That Afrobeat, Mr. Raaja.”
Darnielle “… Look at the cover. Look at the skull on the train, and you’ll have your answers to how I wound up at that. But the description is: ‘One of 12 mixtapes connecting the music of my childhood (Tamil pop) and the music that influenced me (sinophone indie) to the music of my new home, the Netherlands.’”
In the immediate wake of the late, great LA DJ-producer Silent Servant’s death, Matos identified five mixes that captured the artist’s range and essence. After listing four other mixes over the years, he offered this rationale for the final pick. “I went with this one after my friend Ilse, a designer in New Orleans, nominated it thusly: ‘I would lock myself in my room, dress up/design/perform religiously to this set. Helps me remember my creative sense of self.’ No wonder: From spidery twitch to spiky acid to florid melodrama, it hits all the Silent Servant marks with aplomb, something he did again and again. R.I.P.”
