Every weekend brings a bounty of new DJ sets. Here are three of the best.
Tim Sweeney: Beats in Space Radio Show #1085 (March 9)
We stan a legend: Tim Sweeney’s Beats in Space has been on the air every Thursday for 21 years on New York’s WNYU-FM, many of them occupied by a who’s-who of guest DJs, from Carl Craig to James Murphy to Josey Rebelle. But Sweeney took the decks by himself for the show’s finale—a glinting, disco-heavy, all-underground-classics valentine to the era he helped to define, studded with several moving talk-overs from the host, offering his thanks. Sweeney intends to bring the show back in some capacity at a later date—but as he points out, there’s more than a thousand shows to explore in the meantime.
Luke Vibert: Essential Mix (March 13)
Speaking of dance music lifers, Luke Vibert has made darting, playful, engrossing records in a variety of styles since the mid-nineties, under a variety of names besides his own (Plug, Wagon Christ, and Kerrier District are three.) Amazingly, this is Vibert’s edition of BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix—and like Sweeney, he too dishes out one classic after another, concentrating on primo early UK rave classics rather than the after-hours, crate-diggers’ delights of Sweeney’s finale. (Tracklist here.)
DJ Python & Silvia Ponce: Rinse FM (March 10)
The Queens-based DJ Python once described his sound to Pitchfork as “ambient reggaeton music.” That’s the vibe of the first half of his Rinse show, a low-to-mid-tempo amble dotted with beguiling instrumentation—lonesome trumpet here, popping and fizzing percussion everywhere. The second half, courtesy of the rising Ecuadorian DJ Silvia Ponce, keeps up the bubbly ambience at house tempo—an immediately engrossing dream-world.