TRENCH Radio: 10 Of The Best Mixes This Week

SoundCloud (while it still lives) can be an impenetrable, infinite stream of music, often of varying quality. You need a soundtrack to start your weekend right, but you don’t have the requisite lifetime to trawl through the week’s new DJ mixes. To help you out, we’ve done the busy work for you. We’ll be running this series every single Friday of every single week to bring you the very finest house music, grime, techno, bashment, R&B, trap, D&B, Amapiano, and no doubt a bunch of stuff that doesn’t have a name yet.

First up, Kulv Reyatt gave us a snapshot of what he has on heavy rotation, including plenty of Afrobeats, Amapiano, rap, garage, a little bassline, and plenty of house music; Dutch selector Antunes kept it strictly piano with a solid hour of rumbling, scorching SA rhythms, including gems from Vigro Deep, Musa Keys, and more; Ikonika dodged the heatwave by hunkering down in her flat, but still chose to make us sweat even more with two hours of the most intense Amapiano, funky and house music going; Dubstep veterans Jakes and N-Type showed off dubstep’s deepest, weightiest potential, but still stirred in a few uptempo skankers and a hint of grime and garage; Coki took us to the wobbly, bouncy end of the dubstep spectrum (with the requisite amount of DMZ bangers) ahead of his set at the Outlook Festival’s Tisno edition; Finn celebrated the sugar-rush bounce of speed garage with an hour of, in his words, “speedy Gs for speedy Gs” (including his DJ Q collab of the same name); Mi-El showed us round her earliest inspirations, including noise, movie soundtracks, techno, and brutalist footwork from names like Walton, Objekt, Giant Swan, and JK Flesh; JD. Reid zipped through hazy, trippy, cosmic club jams courtesy of everyone from Notion and Joy Orbison to Baby Keem and Playboi Carti, before handing the reigns to Halogenix for 45 minutes of soulful, liquid-leaning D&B; junglist outfit Bomb Shelter Crew called on South Londoner Anti-Traxx to help celebrate the recent release of his Only Way EP with four straight hours of 160 sub-smashers; and finally, Zambian DJ/producer SHE Spells Doom used house and techno as the foundation for an autobiographical tour of ’80s sci-fi/horror movies, gqom, early 2000s rap, and Congolese Rhumba and Soukous.

This is TRENCH Radio’s best mixes of the week.

Photography: Jayem Riches


Posted on July 22, 2022