CD REVIEW : Optimo presents Psyche Out

CD REVIEW : Optimo presents Psyche Out

DJ mix CD is supposed to be a representation of what it’s like to hear the DJ playing full flow in a club, even if it’s a chronologically compressed snapshot, listened to in repose rather than with moving feet. Yet the majority of mix CDs are not recordings of performances taking place in actual time.

The DJ mix CD is, and for much of its history has been, a studio artifact, currently created most often using digital audio files lined up to exact tempo by engineers using Pro Tools software—the DJs looking on and giving instruction need never dirty their hands touching a record deck.

The CD covers rarely mention the technology or the recording studios located on run down industrial estates or the professional technicians required to run them, and it’s hardly any wonder, as this would clash with the cover images of tanned DJs with artfully arranged hairstyles that hide receding hairlines and expensive sunglasses that shield their eyes from the sunlight of whichever blue-screened exotic location pictured.

As superclubs struggle and digital music playback technology becomes cheaper, more powerful and, most importantly, more efficient, things are changing however. The use of technology by DJs is increasingly not effaced. Even Sasha, the epitome of the big room trance and house superstar DJ, is openly using software to mix now, albeit preceded by elaborately boastful countdowns that ensure that the listener knows how advanced he is being.

DJs JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, who since late 1997 have been running Optimo, a fiercely open minded Glasgow club night capable of making people stay out until 3am on a Sunday, are rather better placed to explore the unique benefits of using laptops equipped with mixing and virtual effects software. Optimo use Ableton Live, developed by Robert Henke of German dub-techno duo Monolake, to twist otherwise incompatible pieces of music into sync and to perform on the fly re-edits.

Whilst their previous mix How to Kill the DJ (Part II) was an 72 minute ADD trip through 42 tracks in almost as many genres, here they stretch out with half as many tracks and only one genre, psychedelia, albeit in their own wide ranging interpretation. Record collector scum usually abbreviate ‘psychedelic’ to ‘psych’, so it’s telling that Optimo also include an ‘e’ as their definition, and this collection, includes music as wide ranging as the early 90s Warp Records bleep-and-bass of The Step and Sweet Exorcist, the acid house of Eddie Richards and the synthesised jazz funk of seventies Herbie Hancock.

This is head music that doesn’t forget the body. The mix opens with some of the most obviously psychedelic music of the set, Hawkwind and the Silver Apples, although it’s still one remove from anything canonical. “Hash Cake ’77″ by Hawkwind channels Barrett-period Pink Floyd into the brutalist tower block landscape of late 70s Britain—like getting high on cheap resin rather than a sugar lump dosed with LSD. The jerry-rigged synth and drums duo of Silver Apples sound more hopeful and expansive, as befits a group formed in 1967 but their minimalism and rhythmic concern allows them to mix neatly into one of the most modern tracks here, a 2003 remix of Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom by the DFA.

Among the highlights are Chris and Cosey’s mid-80s EBM gay club favourite “Walking Through Heaven” mixed into the camp electro of the Skatt Bros’ “Walk the Night” and the entire final third of the mix. This runs Belgian techno into “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” by The Temptations (you can hear the software timestretch algorithms working on the warp and weft of the sound) to, most beautifully, Arthur Russell project Dinosaur’s propulsive and messily human disco into the endlessly hopeful psychedelicised funk of the Chambers Bros’ “Time Has Come Today.”

It’s an ending as blissful and unashamedly ecstatic as that of any house set, one that avoids the usual pitfall of self-styled eclectic DJs, that of an ironic distance from the material played. Optimo are DJs prepared to get their hands dirty, to get right into the tracks they play and make them work up a sweat.