TRENCH Radio 105: The Best Mixes Of The Week

Words: James Keith
Photography: Jessica Eli Hill

Between SoundCloud, YouTube, Mixcloud and everything else, it can feel like we’re being overwhelmed by an impenetrable, almost 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.

Dive into TRENCH Radio’s best mixes of the week below.

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Reni f/ MJK for NTS

Countering the Sunday night sadness, NTS host Reni gave us one last burst of endorphins with her latest monthly re:lax show. This month she was joined by MJK on guest mix duties who countered her tornado of techno, grime, funky and perc trax with a fat stack of 140 bouncers of his own. Listen out for scorchers from Benga, Dexplicit, Neffa T, Scratchclart, and more.

Introspekt for Shuffle ’N’ Swing

From her outpost all the way over in L.A, Introspekt has been a tireless supporter of all things UK for a while now. Her expertise is broad—vintage hardcore, UK techno, grime, jungle, garage can all be heard in her sets—but her knowledge is anything but surface-level. For this latest one, Sage dives right into UKG, speed garage, and 4x4 bassline—and clearly has a blast with it. No wonder she’s so sought-after by radio shows, online platforms, magazines and club promoters the world over.

Hayz w/ Jamakabi for 1Forty

A friend and fan of Lockt’s 1Forty label almost since its inception, Leeds-born Hayz has been getting more and more involved with the label lately and last year he officially joined the team as label manager. Rounding off a triumphant year, Hayz and the team threw a massive label takeover set at local club HiFI. Jumping on deck for the closing set, Hayz whipped up half-hour of dubby, 140 power with none other than Jamakabi handling mic duties. That was way back in November last year, but for those not lucky enough to live in West Yorkshire, this set just made its way online this week.

Chinese Daughter w/ Wu-Lu for Balamii

When South London’s Wu-Lu debuted with his Ginga EP in 2015, he slipped under most people’s radars, so we should be grateful of his patience because last year’s Loggerhead album was a thunderclap of creativity, breathing fresh life into homegrown rap with new takes on lo-fi fuzziness, ambient textures, caustic boom bap and beyond. So when he joined jungle adventurer Chinese Daughter on Balamii this week it was a perfect pairing. Finding a lot of common ground between their respective sounds, there’s also plenty of dubstep classics and forgotten gems to tie it together. Light the chalice accordingly.

Freshta w/ MIC for Rinse FM

This year, Freshta’s been using her Rinse show to do something a little different. As much a fan of grime and rap as she is of house, techno and electro, her past few shows have seen her bring those two sides together. Last week, she brought in Jammz and set him off against a bed of electro and techno, and he took to it like a duck to water. This week, however, she cranked things up a notch when she brought M.I.C into the studio and gave him a rip-roaring bed of hardcore and breakbeats to take on. You can probably imagine how nuts the whole thing was, but if your heart-rate could do with a boost, pop this one on nice and loud.


Posted on February 10, 2023