Mr Mixondo - DJ Travella
Pitchfork start their writeup of Mr Mixondo with this sentence:
The young Dar Es Salaam producer has morphed into one of the greats of singeli, a highly-caffeinated regional genre that relies on manically frenetic 200+ BPM tempos where it feels like the space-time continuum is going to collapse the moment you press play.
I had no idea what to expect going into this, and although that description is accurate it didn't prepare me at all for what I was about to listen to.
I'm very conflicted about this one. On the one hand, my initial experience of this album - "what the fuck is this? This is just chaos. This is noise" - reminds me almost exactly of my initial reaction on first hearing The Dillinger Escape Plan, who went on to become one of my favourite bands (if not my actual favourite - it's impossible to choose). I don't really know how that transition from "absolutely not" to "fuck YES" occurred. I assume I heard something that hooked me and allowed me to find a way in, but I don't remember it happening.
So while my initial reaction to this is a strong no, I wonder whether it's the kind of thing that might grow on me? But then I'm also thinking about the context in which I might listen to it. I've done my time taking drugs and going to raves, which to me seems like the primary context that this is for, and even when I was at my most pinging and desperate to dance I know I've walked out of DJ sets when stuff like this was being played because it's just too chaotic to dance to. And while the chaos does remind me of Dillinger-but-electronic, it's lacking the human element that makes that style of incredibly aggressive mathy metalcore work for me. This isn't people playing instruments at impossible speeds in improbably time signatures - it's computer music. And while I love electronic music, I feel like chaos like this benefits from virtuosity that isn't present when there's no actual performance.
Maybe I'm being closed-minded here. Or maybe this just isn't for me. Either way, after an initial positive response this grew old fast, and I ended up turning it off somewhere about 21212.