Wire Mix 012: Basslines for Basement Windows
Sixty minutes of low end built for rooms where the only window is at street level. Mixed by Ada Kwon.
Wire Mix 012 is about how bass travels through a building rather than through a pair of headphones. Basement flats. Ground-floor front rooms where the window sits at ankle height and the street walks past your head. The last carriage. Every track here was tested through a wall before it was tested on speakers, and two candidates were cut because they fell apart the moment the mid-range was gone.
What holds the hour together is a four-note figure that keeps turning up uninvited: as a bassline, then as a horn, then at the end as something that might be a door. We have followed that shape around before. Tempos run 118 to 128, everything below 90 Hz is mono, and none of it will work on a laptop speaker. Tracks five through seven came out of a night on a Sao Paulo rooftop that Silas Reyes wrote about in his report on the warehouse grid, played back through a generator-fed PA at four in the morning.
- DJ Provenance — Catalogue No. 7
- Halva — Street Level
- Nadia Volt — Overcurrent (Dub)
- Kilo Nova — Load Bearing
- Junior Meridian — Airbrick
- Barometric — 1004 Millibars
- Sable Ferry — Damp Course
- Velvet Static — Cold Aisle (Bass Mix)
Discussion