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I listened to both parts of this yesterday. Being a second room citizen I naturally gravitated towards the back room first. What I found was a typically entertaining Dave King breaks mix – energetic, exciting and eminently danceable. At one point you had me dancing around the bread aisle in Sainsbury’s before I knew what was happening. The mid-set plunge into daft electro edged a little too close to the cheesy side of “fun” for me, but it was an acceptably brief deviation. Welcome shades of your last Illuminaughty set with the opening, too.
Onto the main room. I’ve never been a huge fan of the “big room” clubbing experience. I like the big room sound, and the concept of enormous booming music in a huge space filled with thousands of hedonists is irresistible, but the reality is generally more banal – sardine-tinned dancefloors with endless hordes of people shoving past and stepping on your toes while DJs play it safe with a string of big stompy tracks in front of a crowd too large to read or really interact with, all combining to create a feeling of musical, personal and spiritual disconnection and a profound sense of existential despair... anyway, what was I saying? Ah yes, the mix.
For the most part you succeeded in evoking the mythical big room experience of my imagination – a kind of clubbing version of the ending to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, but with the aliens replaced with Carl Cox. Or, in this, instance, with J00F. Musically it reached a peak with the absolutely sublime transition into Timewave, which shat all over my much-vaunted mix into Relentless from a couple of years back, although the mixing in general was pretty spectacular. However, I kinda felt it got a bit overcooked near the end. I’m ambivalent about that Nick Sentience remix of Teleport, which starts to push the malevolent darkness of the original into trance-trousers territory, and for me that Wizzy Noise track is just silly. I think part of it is because this set is quite stripped-down and slow-burning for the first half, so the massive tracks at the end sound really, really massive to the point of absurdity. I’m sure you played equally big tracks in your December “I Like This” or Tales Of The Future, but because those sets were explosive from the word go the contrast wasn’t so marked.
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Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24
Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/
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yours is actually first on my list
