Derrick Carter and the art of the perfect DJ mix

Plus A.G Cook, The Lemon Twigs and The High Llamas

Being a person of a certain age, I am more often asked for my favourite Werther’s Original than my top DJ. And yet, when someone does enquire, I have an immediate answer in Chicago’s Derrick Carter, on the grounds that he plays fantastic music and does brilliantly inventive things with it, using acapellas, beats and a DJing technique refined over more than three decades.

So good is Carter, in fact, that he can also play songs I don’t like and make me enjoy them, by force of his programming. A case in point: I used to have a Back To Basics mix tape on which he played Todd Terry’s remix of The Cardigans’ Lovefool, a song I intensely disliked. But he made me love it, by dropping the song at EXACTLY the right moment, when a run of hard, minimal beats made me ready for The Cardigans’ honied vocals. Carter has produced some brilliant music - The Innocent’s Theme From the Blue Cucaracha being a personal favourite - but it feels like he was put on this earth to DJ, so astoundingly well does he do it.

Sadly, I have only seen Carter DJ live once, at The End in London, sometimes in the mid 2000s; and I don’t remember that much of it, other than I really enjoyed his set and ended up having to walk six miles home, due to a well intentioned money saving scheme that went wrong.

So Carter’s reputation, for me, relies on his recorded mixes: the Back To Basics tape pack, the Ministry of Sound Sessions mix, Fabric 56 and - above all - his 1997 Cosmic Disco mix album, which is, for me, the best mix ever recorded. (With due apologies to Coldcut, 2ManyDJs, Jeff Mills etc.)

It starts with the song selection. The mix includes known classics - among them DJ Sneak’s filtered odyssey You Can't Hide From Your Bud, Soho’s jazzily ecstatic Hot Music, Cajmere’s yearning Only 4 You - as well as songs that would become classics for me after Carter included them here, such as Cricco Castelli’s Life Is Changing and Essentials’ Give Me Some Horns. 

Cosmic Disco is a house mix, by and large, so it doesn’t have the how-the-hell-is-he-going-to-play-this? eclectic range of, say, Coldcut’s Journeys by DJ. But within this, Carter finds admirable range, from the hard-hitting techno-isms of Green Velvet’s Land of The Lost to the soft and soulful strains of Jepthé Guillaume’s The Prayer, passing by Jedi Knights’ electro-influenced Big Knockers and Gene Farris’ ocean-deep Visions of the Future. There’s even room for some comedy, in Green Velvet’s welcome-to-your-bad-day jacker Answering Machine.

(Maybe I am getting old but these days the none-more-eclectic mix seems to have played itself out and I often wish for mixes that would stick to some four four house beats that I can get out of the shower to, rather than 90 minutes of globe-trotting sounds Ableton-ed together in a way that often sounds better on paper than in practice. Anyway…)

Fantastic as this song selection is, the real charm of Cosmic Disco is what Carter does with his selections. In 1997, when this mix was released, I had tried DJing, so I had some notion of what mixing was all about. And yet Carter’s work here seemed like sorcery, as he put records together in unusual but sparkling ways that have stuck with me to this day. 

On a basic level Carter’s mixes are long and smooth, with songs typically teased, mixed in, played unencumbered for a while, mixed out and then sometimes mixed right back in again, as the moment demands. The vocal sample in Gimme Some Horns, for example, comes back into the mix over You Can’t Hide From Your Bud just when you thought it had gone for good, as a kind of ecstatic punctuation; or there ’s the air-raid siren noise in Visions of the Future riding roughshod over DJ 78’s weird and wobbly Action 78.

Then there’s Carter’s use of the Jepthé Guillaume acapella. I suppose at the time I must have known what an acapella was; and yet it wasn’t until I bought The Prayer on a Spiritual Life compilation some years later that I realised that what I had heard on the Cosmic Disco was, in fact, the vocal from Jepthé Guillaume’s song laid over the beats from Jedi Knights’ Big Knockers, a mix so perfect it seemed absolutely as it should be. In fact - and I apologise to all parties here - I don’t like The Prayer in its original version a fifth as much as I love Derrick Carter’s Cosmic Disco mix.

(This, perhaps, as why I have never really been that taken by mash ups. Because isn’t putting together two different songs what DJs should be doing anyway? How many perfect combinations does Derrick Carter put together in one night’s DJ set?)

That Carter then brings back the Jepthé Guillaume acapella two songs further down the mix, just as Roach Motel Present 2 Stupid Dogz’s Trouble is working up a head of steam, is the icing on a smooth but sticky disco cake.

And this is true of many of the songs featured on the Cosmic Disco. They simply sound better here than in any other environment, be it their original form of mixed up by other DJs. I adore You Can't Hide From Your Bud. But I can’t hear it now without hoping for that added boost that Carter gives Sneak’s song by it mixing it up with Gimme Some Horns and Vision of the Future. Similarly, Green Velvet’s Land of the Lost and Cajmere’s Only 4 You (Derrick Carter remix) are indelibly linked in my mind, after Carter lovingly joined the two songs at the end of Cosmic Disco.

Finally, there is the perfect pacing that Carter establishes on the Cosmic Disco. My friends used to say, when we first started going to watch international DJs, that British DJs had the knack of taking the crowd up; but American DJs could take the crowd up, drop them back down and then take them up again, which was far more exciting.

This is precisely what Carter does here. The mix starts slow and minimal, builds in gorgeous intensity until you’re practically screaming from the roof around the time of Visions of the Future, at which point Carter pulls out Action 78 to take proceedings back down again, like the master that he is. Things build up again over the next 15 minutes, until Answering Machine throws a mood curveball, leaving the mix’s last 10 minutes in a slightly more sedate state. 

And then, at 68 minutes two seconds, the mix is over and you’re left to pick up the remnants of your life. For me, 25 years on, the Cosmic Disco defines what a perfect mix should be: inventive but never at the expense of the dance floor; both clever and funky; a mix that impacts the listener way beyond its brief run time; that pays tribute to the songs employed by making them better; a mix where the DJ’s skills are used at the service of the music, both ego free and outstanding.

Most of all, though, if you can listen to the Cosmic Disco without wanting to run to the nearest discotheque, you are clearly made of stronger stuff than me.

PS I would love to know your favourite mixes. So please get in touch. 

Some listening

A.G Cook - Silver Thread Golden Needle

It may only be early January but can we call breakdown of the year already? Two minutes into this 10-minute epic from A.G Cook - ambitiously / foolishly released on January 1 - a thumping house beat and trance-y synth riff gives way to a glittering, glitchy pattern of cut-up synth noises that chirps away like a baby bird with a semi-digested worm in its belly. Silver Thread Golden Needle is a song that earns its 10-minute status, skipping through melodies, ambition, percussion and noise. But it’s the breakdown that will stay with me.

The Lemon Twigs - My Golden Years

You know it’s the depths of winter when a band as young as The Lemon twigs are looking back on their golden years. Frankly, though, it would be hard to hold it against them when they do it this beautifully. My Golden Years is a perfect power pop song, where Beach Boys’ harmonies meet Big Star jangle. Alvvays and Teenage Fanclub would fight TO THE DEATH for a song this beautiful.

The High Llamas - Hey Panda

I was, for various dull reasons, wondering what had happened to The High Llamas - the best band ever created by a music journalist? - and it turns out they have a new album coming out in 2024. Nice synchronicity, the High Llamas. Hey Panda, the title track from that forthcoming album, sees Sean O’Hagan and co. turn their ears towards modern pop and in particular the inspiration of (not that modern but we’ll go with it) J Dilla. This means heavy, lurching drums, woozy keyboards and a classic High Llamas vocal melody.

The playlist

Bowing to the inevitable pressure, which suggests that 107-hour long playlist is maybe a bit much for people to take in, I have created a new playlist for 2024, cunningly titled the Newest and the Bestest 2024, into which I will be pouring my recommendations for new music this year. Please do like it or I will look like an idiot. And if you want the full-on 107 hour experience, well the original newest and the bestest playlist is still available here.