On September 2nd, we’re hosting a night with Dummy at the Ace Rooftop in downtown Los Angeles and couldn’t be more excited to add The Dance Pit and Nargiz to the lineup. In anticipation of the night, we’ve asked both artists to record a mix for us, providing joint entries for Astral Plane Mix 120. Find more info on Dummy Presents: The Astral Plane here and RSVP here.
Started in 2013, Nargiz’s every-once-in-a-while Heat Ritual parties have boasted some of the city’s most on-the-cusp lineups in recent years, drawing together artists from the NAAFI, Fade 2 Mind, KUNQ and Mixpak universes since well before media outlets like Resident Advisor and Mixmag codified them in any sort of “scene”. Previous to Heat Ritual, Nargiz was a resident at Tokyo’s Laguna Bass nights cutting her teeth in a city with a dearth of options for left field club fans. Having spent time in a number of cities including New York, Philadelphia and Tokyo, Nargiz is something of a club music nomad and her music is no less complex than her geography.
Originally from Azerbaijan, Nargiz was introduced to many via “O’youn Oyun”, a highlight from Tobago Tracks’ 8ULENTINA-curated DISMISS U compilation that was released in April and features likeminded artists like DJ Haram and foozool. “O’youn Oyun” features a drum loop from the meyxanas performance genre, a blend of repetitive drum loops and freestyle rhyming and chanting. It also features a sample from Clipse’s “Grindin” and like much of the material on DISMISS U the two elements neither clash nor mesh, instead providing an in-your-face sonic dialogue between Western pop signifiers and Azeri rhythms and vocals.
Inspired by “spending too much time in random cars on Periscope driving around Azerbaijan,”, Nargiz’s Astral Plane mix is short journey through trans-oceanic club spaces and central Asian musics, fitting 16 songs into 18 frantic minutes. Nargiz’s own edits of Young Thug are positioned against recent work by Rizzla, Florentino and Leonce, while the instrumental to Mims’ “This Is Why I’m Hot”, also a collage of sorts, fits uneasily between two atmosphere-heavy tracks by “unknown” artists. It’s a brief, but strong introduction to an artist with only a few solo productions to their name at this point and if vision and experience are anything to go by it’s easy to see Nargiz emerging as one of the most exciting new producers of 2016.
The Astral Plane 