TRENCH Radio 138: 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.

💥💥💥

Matty Chiabi for Pound And Yam

Capital Dance host and 1/4 of Girls Don’t Sync, Matty Chiabi flew solo this week with an hour of house, funky, garage, a little piano, some Jersey Club, and a few other sounds besides. When on deck with the rest of the team she’s often seen, mic in hand, assuming the role of rabble-rouser, quite literally commanding the crowd. On a solo tip, her energy’s just as infectious as she hurtles through the floor-fillers, weighted heavily towards joyously outlandish club edits.

p-rallel w/ Scott Garcia for NTS

It was all about reaching across the generations on p-rallel’s NTS show this week. Joining him in the studio was garage legend Scott Garcia, and together the pair made for quite the match-up. Setting the tone perfectly, the show opens with “No Future” from new-gen trio Zefer, Wilfy D and Shawty before moving into some Zed Bias and co. Aside from being a clever theme, it’s also fun to hear what’s changed since Garcia first started and which elements remain central. There’s also an ever-welcome chance to hear p-rallel’s “It’s A Lundun Thing”, which we’ll never turn down.

1-800 Girls for Balamii

1-800 Girls’ leap from keyboard player in a new wave band to house and garage DJ/producer might seem like a dramatic one, but if recent singles “90%” and “Looking Back” tell us anything, it’s that the new wave scene’s flair for the emotional actually feeds in rather well to his favoured strains of dance music. Case in point: this week’s set for Balamii, which manages to keep the energy at a constant while keeping the spotlight on moody synth washes, pained vocal cries, and an almost gothic colour palette.

Nikki Nair w/ Chloe Robinson & DJ ADHD for Rinse FM

Chloé Robinson and DJ ADHD’s collaborative partnership we’ve seen blossoming over the past few years has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving. Whether manning the decks together or producing gems like last month’s Dream EP, they’ve tapped into something special. This week, they dropped by the radio show of their Pretty Weird label mate Nikki Nair who, incidentally, will be joining them on a massive tour across North America next month. As a primer, the trio whipped up a two-hour session of beefy, foot-stomping house and club music.

Goldie for Resident Advisor

Billed as a mix that shows off “the history and future of drum & bass”, this new set tells a lot of its story with Goldie’s own productions, including a Doc Scott remix of the track named after the late, great Kemistry. In between that, he throws in Dillinja’s twisted, metallic “Silver Blade”, Calibre and Fats’ light-footed and soulful “Drop It Down”, plus gems old and new from Doc Scott, Grooverider, dBridge, a golden Marcus Intalex remix, and plenty more. That he’s able to tell D&B’s story almost exclusively with Metalheadz remixes is all the more impressive.


Posted on October 13, 2023