DJ Set: Episodes 1, 2 & 3
Dreamy vocal fragments shudder and swirl in mesmeric loops over a jittery chorus of electronic trills, hisses and groans while an assortment of dream-beats clatter, clash and boom chaotically beneath. This is the sonic universe of DJ Set, captured here on this tape: Episodes 1, 2 & 3. It is a world brimming with symbols and textures sampled from elsewhere, cut, shaped and ordered into heady assemblages that are, at once, ecstatic yet sombre, rhythmic yet reflective. This dynamic interplay between feelings of joy and sorrow, of cheer and despondency, is what imbues DJ Set’s Episodes 1, 2 & 3 with an emotional gravitas and dimensionality uncommon in most dance music, furnishing the propulsive nature of DJ Set’s music with a sense of yearning and introspection. Indeed, in the warbling synth tones and wonky bass notes that underlie the rapid-fire succession of drum beats and samples, we hear a distinctly modern paradox sigh out to us, one that is simultaneously excited by the modern world as well as exhausted and confused by it. At the intersection of hedonism and melancholia, rapture and despair, love and sadness, vitality and exhaustion, is a dance floor forever playing DJ Set.
Do you ever get the sense that the shape and contour of the world is eroding?