I love music that plays somewhere in that glitterball-lit realm between disco, house, dub, funk, rock 'n roll, and pop. This site will host mixes I've made and songs I like that dance across the genres. Let me know what you think. And if you've got a party or night you'd like moving to this sound, drop me a line on rorychallands (at) gmail (dot) com.

Summer In The City

Here's some music for urban heat. London's wonderful current spell of sizzle demands only one course of action.... move the boom box out onto the front step, grab a frosty bottle from the fridge, and sit enjoying summer pass by. These are tunes that just wouldn't feel right in the countryside. They need blaring car horns, yellow streetlights, and mile after mile of concrete to sound as they were meant to.

Quincy Jones' Summer In The City is perfect. The cover of the Loving Spoonful's most famous song has been sampled, pilfered from, and robbed blind umpteen bazillion times, but it still retains all its shimmery glory. Hazy keys, soporific bass line, purring female vocalist. It smells of blistered asphalt and lingering perfume.

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Detroit's Underground Resistance label make tracks as uncompromising as music gets. Its signature sound is purist techno that often sounds like misanthropic machines locked in a perpetual diatribe against humanity. However, The Jaguar is the bunch at their most delicate and humane. This track still bumps and rolls, but the soft bubbling synths and swung percussion give The Jaguar a beautiful sense of yearning. Perfect for a night time drive along deserted fly-0vers.

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Attention all raving crew! Throwback is a scorcher. This could easily fit into any set of mongrel London bass music going back as far as 1991. Weirdly, despite its overpowering whiff of Croydon, it comes from Texas, and has only just been released. If there's an old pair of Reebok Classics lurking in your wardrobe, pull them out and get stepping. Then holler for a reeeeewind!

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And something sad to finish with. I'm a huge Nina Simone fan, but I'd never heard Baltimore until very recently. It's off her 1978 Baltimore LP and it's a reggae requiem for a dying city. Yup, Nina doing reggae. This Ex-Friendly edit from Nottingham's Justin Turford just gently turns up the dub a couple of skank levels, and adds a few swooshy effects. It draws the track out nicely and doesn't do anything to get in the way of Ms Simone's peerless voice. Melancholy magic.

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