Saturday Live

If we're accepting that a DJ playing records in a club- selecting a set that builds, mixing and cutting between decks, adding FX and making something new out of existing older music- is a live performance as much as a band playing a gig with instruments (and I am) then DJ sets qualify for this series as much as any other kind of live show. The only cheat with this post is that the set was not played live in front of an audience but is a recreation of those live club sets. In this case, this is an attempt to recreate the DJ sets by JD Twitch from Pure in Edinburgh back in the early 90s. This was originally released on cassette in 2021 and has just recently come out digitally as two downloads, forty five minutes each, and titled Raise Your Hands If You Understand. 

Twitch's set here is ninety minutes of sublime ambient house/ ecstatic electronic music, a counterpoint to the faster, more hardcore sounds played elsewhere at the time. Twitch sees this as E- Musik, a spacey blend of ambient, house, new age, utopian, tripped out, edge of trance, turning tribal music. The first half opens with a long ten minute wash of warm synths, joined after a while by a voice and then a eventually a heartbeat tempo drum kicks in. 'Come together in peace and harmony', the voice says as the rhythms pick up a little, the bass throbs and piano runs tinkle in. It's wonderfully evocative and progressive stuff. The two halves of the tape are available at a Free/ Pay What You Like deal but any money raised is going to the Glasgow food bank so every little helps. The cassette version from two years ago currently change hands for somewhere in the region of £30. You can get them here. 

Ten years ago JD Twitch turned up at the Parisienne website I'm A Cliche, a music label that gave away free edits. Twitch's gnarly, stompy, acidic version of Bill Callaghan's America was a highlight, the gritty guitar line running through it like an oil spill in a river.

Edit Service 22 (JD Twitch)

As half of Optimo Twitch remixed Jeremy Deller's version of Voodoo Ray. In 2013 Deller exhibited at the Venice Biennale, part of his ongoing exploration of rave culture. Twitch's remix of Voodoo Ray is a joy filled, hands- in- the- air version, the sleeve emblazoned with the hook from the vocal sample, 'Ooh- oo- hoo- ah ha ha yeah'.

Voodoo Ray (Optimo Remix)