TRENCH Radio 118: The Best Mixes Of The Week

Words: James Keith
Image via Instagram

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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Saige Sounds for Balamii

If you’ve tuned into Saige Sounds’ Balamii show or, even better, caught any of the video footage, you’ll probably know it as more of a collaborative affair with her pals shaking a leg in the studio, even hopping on deck, or grabbing the mic for a chat. This week, however, Saige was flying solo, and as fun as it is when she’s with her people, it was hard not to get sucked in by her selections. Quite a versatile one, the warming, soulful house, crunchy broken beats, and enticing jazzy moments are just as well-suited to a pre-party, an after-party, or even that grey moment the day after when you’re at your absolute lowest and an urgent and lasting dose of serotonin. Featuring jazzy tonics from Chicago house legend Glenn Underground and French-born Laroye, an unexpectedly soulful turn from DJ Stingray, and a rousing Afro-house remix of Mary J Blige’s “Good Morning Gorgeous”.

Bakey B2B Prozak for Worried About Henry

Recorded live at Printworks back in March as part of the Garage People line-up, Bakey and Prozak’s B2B set proved to be a big hit with the throng of ravers crammed into the Inkwells that night. Light-footed, energetic garage is the guiding force in this mix, but they also stir in plenty of breakbeats, some grimey moments and even some touches of bassline, packing as much low-end heft into every second as they. There’s a bag of memorable points and they come early, too. For our money, it was the playful slip from Flowdan’s rugged “Shell A Verse” into PJ Bridger’s nifty refix of “Battle For Middle You” that had us hitting the rewind button over and over. That’s in the first nine minutes and they maintain that energy to the bitter end.

88 for Dublab

Brooklyn-born, L.A-based, and with roots in the Caribbean, Club Paradise founder 88 has an unmistakably global view of club music. His roots remain in the rap and dancehall that raised him and from those moorings, and for this latest radio show he takes us on a two-hour cruise through ‘90s house classics, the triangle of Baltimore, Jersey and Philly club music, soca, Baile funk, UK funky, ballroom, gqom, and anything else that fits (preferably with some big, bouncy drums). Built only for the sunniest of climates.

Conducta for Mixmag

We are right in the heart of Conducta season at the moment. Yesterday, May 18, he officially kicked off his US and Canada tour with a date in Washington DC, but the big news here on Brexit Island is that he’s got his debut EP—In Transit—well, in transit. That lands June 28 and we’ve already had a couple of singles, but before we cast our gaze too far into the future, take in this utterly barmy set he recorded for Mixmag. The two above-mentioned EP extracts, “3FALL” and “Get Busy With It” both appear, sprinkled into a 75-minute mix that includes a blend of Hardhouse Banton and Megan The Stallion, a Murder He Wrote refix of “Boy’s A Liar”, Headie One and Skepta set against a pounding remix of Future Sound of London, and a battering take on Zinc’s iconic “138 Trek” from the Kiwi Rekords boss himself.

Nala Brown for Outlook Origins

We’ve featured Rotterdam-born Nala Brown—one fifth of the Ampfeminine Collective—a couple of times in this column and yet, even after taking this new mix in, it’s still as if we’re hearing her mix for the first time. Sadly, one of the mixes we featured has since been removed so all we have to go off is that I apparently thought it was “intense, hypnotising and soulful all at once”, but the mix we featured the previous year was raw and rugged, tapping into some caustic shades of electro and footwork. Her latest, however, takes us in yet another direction. It’s not entirely disconnected from some of those abrasive grooves, but there’s a much greater emphasis on bass and even more so on breaks that should send you reeling into a claustrophobic club with an unreasonably large sound system and a low ceiling dripping with the sweat of strangers.

Toumba B2B James Bangura for Rinse FM

Since starting out as a producer in 2020, Jordan-born Toumba has been working tirelessly to push his distinctive blend of UK club music, taking the chunky breaks and thumping basslines and melding them with the rhythms, microtonal scales, and timbres of the Middle East. Back in February, he brought that cocktail to Hessle Audio by way of the Petals EP, and we got a little more of that this week when he went B2B with Black Rave Culture co-founder James Bangura for a four-deck power-hour of bumpy, percussive club thumpers with some real thunder behind them. And, as luck would have it, you can catch Bangura tonight at Tola in Peckham with Lora and Saroor.


Posted on May 19, 2023