TRENCH Radio 157: 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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Introspekt for Boiler Room
Introspekt continues her speed run to the top, knocking off career goals at quite a rate. She didn’t take any shortcuts either, earning her stripes on radio and in sweatbox clubs, picking up kudos for her tirelessly championing UKG (and the UK underground in general, it has to be said) all the way out in L.A. She’s reaping the rewards now and this week she made her Boiler Room debut. Joined on the line-up by rRoxymore, Red Rey, Annabelle Gaspar, and Simon Caldwell, she serves up a warming, energetic set of 2-step, garage and deep house bubblers.
N-Type & Friends for Rinse FM
It feels like we’ve had quite a few landmarks anniversaries this year, most of them surrounding Rinse. Of course, the station’s 30th anniversary is the big one, but Rinse veteran N-Type hit a couple of significant milestones of his own recently. Celebrating 20 years on Rinse (it’s also 15 years since he set up Wheel & Deal), the dubstep legend brought in some pals from across the sound system spectrum, with Silkie, Ila Brugal, Spooky, Lost Dubs, and DFuse joining the Wheel & Deal boss on decks and MC Crazy D, Blacks, Aaze, Doni Rampage, Janset and, of course, Sgt. Pokes on mic duties to keep the room extra lively. The perfect balance of old school expertise and new gen freshness.
UTAH? for Mondo Radio
UTAH? first came to our attention with Bronze EP on Coyote Records back in 2019 and although it’s been a couple of years since his last release (2022’s Last Light), his Mondo Radio show kept us well fed this week. Chock full of what Coyote founder/boss Tomas Fraser calls “monochrome grime-club instrumentals”, it’s a goldmine of what happens when grime instrumentals are given a spring in their step and not too weighed down with sludginess (though there is a time for that, of course).
Mia Koden for Dekmantel
Since the dissolution of Sicaria Sound, Mia Koden has been pursuing a broader and broader sound. With this one, she still sticks largely to 140, but it’s a lot more eclectic than the stuff from her SS days. There’s the occasional bit of dubstep-ish stuff in here, but there are also choppier, more percussive tracks and a whole bunch of club sounds you’d be hard-pressed to put a name too.
