TRENCH Radio 111: The Best Mixes Of The Week

Words: James Keith
Photography: @mousasw

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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Mo Ayoub for The Lot Radio

Originally from Liverpool, Mo Ayoub has spent his time zipping between London, Barcelona and a few other cities along the way. Most recently, he made his way over to Greenpoint in Brooklyn to spin an hour of house, funk, soul, and hip-hop, all of which he tied together with a smokiness that’s somehow as energising and invigorating as it is relaxing. A foolproof tonic if you’ve had a rough week.

Gina Jeanz for Mousai

Originally hailing from Namibia before moving to South Africa in her late teens (where she developed her love of Kwaito music), Gina Jeanz now calls Zurich her home. Like all good selectors, her sets always feel quite personal, informed by a life lived all over the world. For this latest mix, she focuses on Afrocentric club music with a power-hour of tough, cosmic, hip-swinging, foot-stamping dancefloor energy from across the continent and the diaspora.

DJ Perception for Rinse FM

For years now, DJ Perception has had the respect and admiration of garage-heads in the know, thanks at least in part to an unwavering focus and a formidable library of white labels and dubs. However, in recent years his dedication to UKG’s underground side has, paradoxically, brought him to wider and wider audiences and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a mixture of tightly-wound garage and 2-step, with a few doses of house, but it’s the slightly more chilled, more melodic moments, like his own “Jupiter’s Lullaby”, that really stand out.

Leon Vynehall for Mixmag

Leon Vynehall has always been a tricky one to pin down, zipping between house, techno, jazz, funk, and the list of sounds and styles he explores only seems to expand with each passing year. More recently, he’s been diving into rap, producing tracks for the likes of KAM-BU, Wesley Joseph, and Jeshi (although he does retain a twisted club bent more often than not). With this latest mix, he’s back on the dancefloor, focusing squarely on all things percussive. Listen out for thunder from Roska, Tribal Brothers, DJ Swisha, and a storming Mosca remix of Four Tet’s “Sing” at the apex.

Manuka Honey for Sónar Festival

As we start to look forward to festival season, Manuka Honey is already priming us for their appearance at Sónar Festival in June. As co-founder of London-based, Latinx collective and party SUZIO, alongside Cocada, Makuna Honey is an encyclopaedia of all things dembow and a tireless advocate for the UK’s Latinx club scene. You can find plenty of that here as they take us from “Jamaica to Brazil and Martinique to Mexico”, often with a veering into the darker, heavier, and most sweat-soaked sides of all those sounds.

EQ Why for Threads

If there’s one thing that defines footwork it’s speed, and that’s not confined to the racing drum patterns and frantic dance moves. The ideas themselves seem to pass just as quickly and many producers in the footwork scene are marked by their prolific release schedules. Still, even by those standards, EQ Why’s output is prodigious. This year alone, he’s banged out two EPs, an album, an enormous 60-track mixtape, and a smattering of singles—and it’s only March. Clearly a man with a mind that simply does not switch off, this mix for Threads is just as agile, slipping so seamlessly from Chicago footwork stutters into grizzled jungle and darkside D&B it’s almost imperceptible.


Posted on March 24, 2023