Mix of The Week 6/2: Clemency
Launched in mid 2018 as a club night for womxn, non binary and lgbtqia+ artists in London, New Scenery has tapped Manchester DJ Clemency to explore dark club sounds for a heavy thirty eight minutes.
The mix begins with a brooding, almost ambient track from ANFS, which layers looped sounds to recall the vast caverns of post-industrial warehouses and concrete bunkers. The mix then transitions into KABLAM’s Arch, which in its stilted ticking, synth percussion and vocal drone brings Clemency’s noise influences to the fore.
These disconcerting, yet not disconnected, samples can serve to highlight the corporeality of listening, in the visceral reaction they provoke in the listener. A deep engagement with politics is present here, both within and outside of the club. While tracks such as Moroccan born, New York based DJ Bergsonist’s Conflict in Yemen remind us of the correlation between centres of global music and the financing of wars, Clemency continues these conversations on Limbo Radio in a monthly talk show covering club constructions and popular culture.
This is not only in some of the more atonal and arrhythmic sections. The mix continues at a high tempo and with a driving bass drum in tracks such as MPIA3 – Acid Badger, there is an almost euphoric moment of anticipation when the drum stops for a beat, before it blends into Paigey Cakey’s Boyfriend, where the vocal line repeats ‘I don’t need a boyfriend’.
How these wider conversations intersect with club culture is one focus of this mix and the work of New Scenery in bringing to light how heteronormative and patriarchal systems determine the music that we listen to. Suffusing the music that she has curated for this mix with these dialogues, Clemency has crafted a mix that is confrontational yet deeply affecting.
