Tracklist
Liner Notes
The opening is extraordinary. Nox Vahn & Marsh's "Come Together" runs for eight full minutes before the second track arrives — the longest unbroken single-track passage in the archive so far, a slow-building melodic piece that announces its intentions with patient confidence. Then, at 8:00, Nina Simone's "Strange Fruit." A jazz recording about lynching in the American South. It's June 2020. George Floyd was killed on May 25th. The inclusion — not as a sample, not as a remix, but as a standalone piece placed between melodic dance tracks — is the most politically direct moment the archive will ever contain. It says nothing except everything. And then the mix moves on, into HOSH & 1979's "Midnight (The Hanging Tree)" and its MK Remix at 10:30, and the weight of what just happened doesn't disappear. It settles into the floor.
Tinlicker & Helsloot's "Because You Move Me" appears three times — at 13:15, 55:15, and 57:15. Three returns to the same track across an eighty-nine-minute session, each placement altering its meaning. The first time is an introduction. The second, deep in the back half, feels like a recapitulation — the theme returning transformed by forty minutes of intervening music. The third, two minutes later, feels like insistence: you will remember this melody. It's a technique borrowed from classical composition, the return of the subject after the development, and it gives the mix a formal architecture that pure sequencing never achieves.
The energy arc is the most dramatic the archive has produced. The opening quarter is quiet, restrained — that eight-minute ride, the Nina Simone pause, the Tinlicker introduction. Then the second quarter surges to the highest single-quarter energy reading in any mix to this point. It's genuine architectural intent: slow opening, rising middle, peak, descent. The DJ has learned that a mix isn't just a sequence of tracks but a single arc with a beginning, middle, and end.
Techno claims its largest share yet — tied with electronic at 15%. Carlos A's "Soma" at 39:45, Paul Kalkbrenner's "Azure" at 40:45, Chymera's "Episode" at 50:00 and again at 53:30, Gary Burrows' "It Doesn't Matter" at 43:30 — these are darker, more insistent selections than the melodic house that defined recent mixes. The pandemic is three months old. The novelty of lockdown has worn off. What's left is the daily grind of isolation, and the music has shifted to match: heavier, more propulsive, less interested in providing comfort and more interested in generating momentum.
Morgan Page's "The Longest Road" in the deadmau5 remix returns at 32:00 — now on its third appearance across the archive. The track's title feels almost too apt for a mix made during lockdown, the longest road anyone was walking in June 2020 being the one inside their own head. Shura's "Touch" in Four Tet's remix at 42:45 continues the Four Tet thread, and Jean-Michel Jarre & Tangerine Dream's "Zero Gravity" in the Above & Beyond Remix at 45:45 reaches across four decades of electronic music to bridge the pioneers with the present. Paul Keeley's "A Sort of Homecoming" at 50:45 — another title that reads differently in 2020 — sits in a cluster with CamelPhat & Cristoph's "Breathe" at 55:00. These tracks weren't chosen for their names, but the subconscious doesn't care about intent.
Drake's "Chicago Freestyle" at 1:00:45 is the only hip-hop selection — late-night, atmospheric, melancholic enough to fit the mix's mood without disrupting it. The pop crossovers that peppered the early archive are almost entirely gone. The genre palette has narrowed to its most focused yet: Dance, Electronic, Techno, House. Four pillars. No distractions. Kidnap's "Grow" appears twice in quick succession at 57:00 and 57:45, the extended mix and the dub back to back, another instance of the double-version technique that has become an archive signature.
YOTTO's "North" at 1:11:30 and Moon Boots' "I Want Your Attention" at 1:11:45 mark the beginning of the descent. Then Lifelike & Kris Menace's "Discopolis 2.0" in MEDUZA's remix at 1:20:00, and the mix drifts toward its close through Dirtwire's "Sailing the Solar Flares" at 1:25:45 and Dawn Deep's "The Cure" at 1:27:00. The final tracks are ambient and atmospheric, the mix ending not with a beat but with a texture — the sound of open space after eighty-nine minutes of compressed, purposeful music. It's the most graceful landing the archive has achieved. A mix that knew exactly how long it needed to be, and stopped precisely when it was done.