I've written some thoughts about Essential Mix and Cercle, including top 10 mixes:
http://blog.mathieuacher.com/EssentialMixCercle/

what are your favorites essential mixes? what do you think about Cercle?

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Behrouz Addict

quote:

Originally posted by matvei what do you think about Cercle?

Of course the videography is top notch. But the party experience must be so sanitized it'd kill coronavirus

I don't like where they film sometimes. They must disturb the animals and environment in those remote locations.

Leave nature alone and keep the music contained in the clubs. That's where it belongs.

Back in the days Essential Mix was really "the thing". Especially in the end of 90s and early 2000s, when accessing to properly recorded live sets by top or breakthrough names on rapidly growing electronic music scene wasn't so easy. I still have some 90s EMs on tapes, before I got stable internet connection
and now? now I totally don't care about Essential Mixes, Cercles, Boiler Rooms etc. Sometimes I get suggestions on youtube and usually there are promoted the same names just given in different packaging.
Personally I do much prefer to follow my taste and dig underground artists for whom catchy video shots of touching knobs at the top of K2 or at the bottom of a volcano (or other UNESCO locations) are not the most important thing, but the music as itself

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Talk about social distancing..

Cercle is over-the-top bullshit that serves to feed DJ's egos and make them, not the music, the centerpiece.

quote:

Originally posted by idoru Cercle is over-the-top bullshit that serves to feed DJ's egos and make them, not the music, the centerpiece.

someone is jaded


you guys are all old and cranky hahhahahaha.


Cercle has been doing some awesome work. the Ben Bohmer video in the hot air balloon is very well done. Fantastic stuff

I'm 99% certain that you and I have always had different tastes in, and fundamentally different views towards, dance music. There's no singular "right answer" for what we like or why we like it, yet so many of your posts over the years have talked shit about people who take a different approach. What makes you so uncomfortable with the fact that people like different shit than you do?

quote:

Originally posted by idoru I'm 99% certain that you and I have always had different tastes in, and fundamentally different views towards, dance music. There's no singular "right answer" for what we like or why we like it, yet so many of your posts over the years have talked shit about people who take a different approach. What makes you so uncomfortable with the fact that people like different shit than you do?

You aren't exactly being live-and-let-live with your own posts, are you? I'm sure he can and will shoot back that you're the one "talking shit" about Cercle for taking a different approach to dance music than you.

And to be honest, this moral panic about "the DJs being bigger than the music" is pretty tired by now. The DJs have been bigger than the music, whatever that means, for 30 years now. They were bigger than the music before you'd ever been to a club. Somehow the culture endures.

Regarding Cercle and the opening question, which was just a poor excuse to farm clicks on the OP's blog, there are a few things to say. Firstly: there will never be a "new Essential Mix". The Essential Mix is a cultural artefact from a different era, when hearing DJs mixing (mostly) uninterrupted for hours at a time was a rarity. Cercle is just one of many DJ mix platforms trying to distinguish itself from the vast online crowd through increasingly photogenic and/or "exclusive" settings. In this sense it's more of a Indiana Jones mimicry of the Boiler Room than anything resembling the Essential Mix.

Really, I think the concept is essentially harmless. It taps into one of the oldest ideals of dance music culture, which is the desire to stage parties in the most unusual and exotic locations, a desire which has lead all kinds of genuinely "underground" entities to shlep into deserts and rainforests and beaches to hold raves and psy trance gatherings down the years.

9 months ago it would be very easy to write sneering tracts about this outlaw spirit being commodified and commercialised for the inauthentic Instagram generation, yadda yadda yadda, but since we're all confined to our homes for the foreseeable future and don't have any opportunity to do this shit authentically, there's suddenly something quite escapist and uplifting in being able to sit on your sofa and watch two blokes play mediocre tech house from the top of some spectacularly impassive geological marvel.

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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/

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J You aren't exactly being live-and-let-live with your own posts, are you? I'm sure he can and will shoot back that you're the one "talking shit" about Cercle for taking a different approach to dance music than you.

I can agree that that is the sentiment conveyed given the tone I used in my first comment, but that's not what I had intended. The thread asks us about our opinions of Cercle, and that's what my first comment was - my opinion of Cercle and nothing more. I haven't slagged anybody off or judged anyone for liking it, nor did I suggest that people shouldn't be watching it, though in hindsight that implication is certainly there. That's my fault for shooting from the hip.

I think Cercle is garbage, everyone else is welcome to enjoy it if they like. Hell, if Cercle's content inspires other people to dig deeper then fuck yeah, but it's still not for me. After all, one man's trash is another man's treasure.

quote:

And to be honest, this moral panic about "the DJs being bigger than the music" is pretty tired by now. The DJs have been bigger than the music, whatever that means, for 30 years now. They were bigger than the music before you'd ever been to a club. Somehow the culture endures.

I completely agree with that in the broad sense, that's just how I personally enjoy it. There are clubs, artists and promoters that share that view, and there are others that don't. Both will always endure and there will be plenty of outlets for whatever we all like.

Last edited by idoru on Oct-23-2020 at 23:04

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J ...and watch two blokes play mediocre tech house from the top of some spectacularly impassive geological marvel.

You're talking about Disclosure at Plitvice right?

My opinion is that no mixshow will ever come close to the Essential Mix series in terms of impact on exporting the culture to the wider audiences. I have no proof, but I'm pretty sure that without EM the electronic music scene would be very different. When you push a message out, fast forward a few years and you start getting feedback.

On the basis of my own home nation in eastern europe, the amount of inspiration drawn from EM by the different producers here is impossible to overstate. Think its pretty much the same across the other post soviet countries aswell. Maybe I'm going too far in conjecture, but I think that we wouldnt have had a meaningful contribution to the electronic music from eastern europe without the culture export of EM.

I think that the queen ought to knight Pete Tong already. For curating the EM for the past 30 years.

As for Cercle, no they are definitely not the next Essential Mix. However they are extremely well produced and beautiful DJ mixes, some of which I have thoroughly enjoyed. Take them at face value and dont expect them to change our culture the way EM has done. Unless in our culture evolves in some very weird way in the next 30 years or so. Which is of course possible.

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check out:
dtb.planet.ee <-- A couple of my mix cd-s (Deep House & Progressive with a trancy touch