flyover 3: kerosine
Kerosine spent the pandemic building an arsenal. After taking photos and designing covers for the first two flyover releases, the St. Paul via Bismarck DJ, producer, photographer, and bartender stepped into the booth with a newly acquired reverb pedal and a third deck borrowed from Sarvesh (a.k.a. Icarus Redux) to record his most thoughtful mix to date. Though he says it’s not intentional, he captures the many vibes of pandemic living in mix form. Moving seamlessly from sad, longing, atmospheric tracks made all the dreamier by the additional reverb to nightmarish looping vocal samples drowned out by static, this mix sounds like what the past 13 months have felt like.
If you run this theory by Cameron, he’ll tell you he just wanted to play the best tracks he’s found lately. Describing his selection process, he said it “was just like, these are the fucking tracks. These are the ones that are really hitting right now….I tend to look for tracks that have that wavy, Warp [Records] nostalgic type sound, with really melancholy melodies.”
Not long after opening the mix with a hazy intergalactic vacuum cleaner of a track by Ghostride The Drift, released on xpq?, a label whose output Cameron calls “very weird experimental stuff...some of it is very dance-oriented but a lot of it is very dusty warped-out fucked up sounding stuff,” he dishes out dance music comfort food in the form of a newish Burial track that would’ve fit right in on Untrue if it weren’t snapped to the grid. The infamous London producer is one of his favorites. The track has “that chunky, synth bassline which is very cluby, but yeah it definitely has like a melancholy that only Burial can bring...that’s something I would love to hear out, people playing more stuff like that. Just a little sprinkle, not all the time...he’s just like such an iconic electronic artist and relates so much to the club experience. He talks about [his sound] in his interviews, like it’s about being outside the club...those sort of ringing in your ears aspects of the tracks.”
Though they aren’t in the tracklist, the influence of Boards of Canada, another Cam favorite, is evident throughout. Whether it’s the synths on Patricia’s “Apoptosis” or the earlier vocal sample that calls to mind a numbers station broadcast, unsettling dreamlike nostalgia permeates the mix. The nightmarish looping static from Lucy’s “Milgram Experiment” is reminiscent of BOC in spirit if not sonically. “That track in particular is definitely a lot more dark than the rest of the mix...I guess there is an aspect of like, at in-person parties, sometimes you do go through those points...you have those moments where things get kind of dicey, but you also have those moments of pure ecstasy and there’s kind of that contrast between that track and the next track.” Afterwards, Cameron provides some much-needed relief with “Heart Piece,” a blippy playful cut from Two Shell.
Though it’s been a rough one for a while now, and the current state of affairs leaves no reason for optimism, there is one thing to look forward to: we might soon be able to resume gathering communally in front of large sound systems. Hardly a weekend goes by without someone in the flyover pod saying “I want to stick my head in a speaker.” With that in mind, Cameron closes the mix with a sample from a video recorded in the early 90s of UK ravers still dancing long after the music has stopped. “I thought that part was funny and cheeky, and kind of lifted the mood a bit...we’ve all been there...it was a little bit of hope at the end. Like a ‘we’re going to get to do this again’ type of thing.”
Follow Kerosine: SoundCloud / Instagram
Tracklist:
Ghostride The Drift - A1 [xpq?, 2019]
St. Vincent - Masseduction (Midland’s Mass Seduction remix) [Loma Vista, 2019]
Christopher Rau - Slu Terms [Smallville Records, 2020]
Waage - W7 [X/OZ, 2019]
Burial - Rodent [Hyperdub, 2017]
Leibniz - 32 MB [Molten Moods, 2019]
Jabes - Glass Censors [Klunk, 2019]
Graze - Ripley [New Kanada, 2014]
Keppel - Taken For Granted [Well Street Records, 2020]
Neinzer - Rassalin [Where To Now?, 2020]
Leonardo Martelli - Popolus [Antinote, 2020]
Robert Fleck - Set Point [Well Street Records, 2018]
Lucy - Milgram Experiment [Stroboscopic Artefacts, 2012]
Two Shell - Heart Piece [Livity Sound, 2019]
Pugilist - Acid Flange [3024, 2020]
Jonas Friedlich - Jazzersizzzze [RFR, 2018]
Appleblim - Vurstep (Shed Remix) [Boogie Box, 2018]
Ike - Kiwami Formed [INDEX:Records, 2020]
Arkajo - Untitled (Run Away With Me) [Aniara Recordings, 2019]
John Selway - Sliders [Gyroscopic Recordings, 1996]
Patricia - Apoptosis [2020] BOC
Syz - Metafauna [Pseudonym Records, 2020]
Savile - Talk Smile Bite [2017]
Silicon - 0% [Frustrated Funk, 2005]
Asmus Odsat - Tykaepyzo [Fever AM, 2020]
Peder Mannerfelt - A Queen [Voam, 2020]