BC061 - Five Mixes: Silent Servant
What a horrible loss. What an unspeakable tragedy. The worst part of these things—what made Prince and Weatherall and Huck, and now this, all hit like a frying pan to the head—is knowing they weren’t done yet, that they’d been cut off mid-sentence.
I’ve written here before—in my third post, no less—about the amazing performance I saw Silent Servant give in Minneapolis pre-pandemic, at the Loring Bar on August 17, 2018. There wasn’t anything fancy or stylish about it—that was left to some of the other acts at the Novo Festival, which he was headlining. Much of it wasn’t particularly to my taste—fair enough: I knew it going in—but even in more copacetic company I don’t think I’d have been prepared for the sheer fury that awaited me; I have seldom danced that hard.
I never met him, though we had many friends in common, and he lived in Minneapolis for a spell, though it predated my return. (In addition to his design work for his own labels, Silent Servant also designed the first logo for the Minneapolis party Communion.) I’ve kept up fitfully with his NTS Radio show, Optimistic Decay, and wrote about him two Junes ago for Goings On About Town. He’s an easy favorite, alone and with Sandwell District. It is not ideal to get to grips with him here because of an event like this. But he left us a lot.
I won’t mention the many social-media allegations I’m seeing about this tragedy, other than to say: !!!
You can hear the first four sets on this SoundCloud playlist.
Isolation Mix (2009)
I asked for people’s favorite Silent Servant DJ sets on Facebook and this was Piotr Orlov’s nomination, expounding in a Substack Note: “I think [it] is wonderfully indicative of Silent Servant style of classic techno, but also brings an extra layer of dub to the proceedings.” What connects it all, and what connects this to the rest of his work, is its lone-wanderer aspect, the sloping, loping drifter finding his way through the mist—in short, the romanticism.
Promomixes 008A: Tresor, Berlin, 1998 (October 1, 2010) / Optimistic Decay (NTS Radio, January 9, 2024)
This one has some backstory: In 2010, the journalist Todd Burns started a mix series titled Promomixes, asking various DJs for sets that evoked the particular club in the particular era of their choice. The eighth came from Silent Servant, who played two hours of circa-1998 techno as would be heard at the storied Berlin spot Tresor. Then the Promomixes site disappeared and so did the mixes’ context. This has led to mislabeling galore: The Mixcloud user International Artist Support’s upload has it as an actual 1998 set recorded in the actual Tresor, as do numerous SoundCloud and YouTube versions. And then, just the other week, Silent Servant’s NTS Radio show Optimistic Decay, in what is almost certainly its final episode, aired a slightly shortened version (by four minutes) of this mix—sounding better than the re-ups, as you’d expect. It's hardly the first time he used the NTS show for this purpose: in January 2017, he aired “two favorite mixes from the Sandwell District archives.” Now that he’s gone, we can see the Promomixes re-up as tying up a loose historical end, one of those things-to-get-to that happened to be done in the nick of time. The mix is fantastic, of course: These were recordings he’d lived with for a decade at minimum, and he plays them with an easy fluency that makes every transition, every touch of FX, every tonal shift seem preordained.
Fact Mix 349 (October 1, 2012)
A promo for his 2012 album Negative Fascination, this has no techno, just heavy-pulsed darkwave and postpunk, current and vintage alike—a mood board, cunningly blended. The vocals are cloaked in echo, the guitars are like scabs forming, the beats are skinny and sinewy, the rhythms never break or bend. “I used to work with Kit Clayton and Sutekh and these guys would just laugh at us, and say, ‘You guys come from this really sunny place, why do you make this music?’” Mendez told Resident Advisor in 2010. Because, you can hear him answer with this set, it’s so stylish.
Live at Honey Soundsystem (April 21, 2013)
Mike Servito posted this one to his Instagram Stories; bullseye as usual. It’s an idealized rendition of Silent Servant’s patented EBM-techno-house interface, noticeably buoyant rather than just hard. The pacing’s the key: he stays at a steady gallop and lets the tracks’ patient build-ups of synth arpeggiation push the intensity, and then revs up over the last forty-five minutes or so. In a way, it’s both the frenzied disco part of the night and the “sleaze” set (post-peak slow jams intended for dancing bodies to get closer together) wrapped into one. (Incidentally, this performance took place the day before the release of Sandwell District’s fabric 69, which Silent Servant wasn’t involved in making—nor was he with the group’s RA.177, from October 2009.)
Optimistic Decay (NTS Radio, March 9, 2021)
There are a lot of episodes of Silent Servant’s monthly NTS series, which began in 2016, and the ones I have latched onto over the years have been decidedly different even while clearly the same person’s work, in particular the shows from September 2018, with Matt Flores, with the heavy postpunk feel of the Fact Mix above, and August 2022, which I put in my Top 10 for the year; in between came the wholly techno-focused Amplify Series 001 (February 2021). But I went with this one after my friend Ilse, a designer in New Orleans, nominated it thusly: “I would lock myself in my room, dress up/design/perform religiously to this set. Helps me remember my creative sense of self.” No wonder: From spidery twitch to spiky acid to florid melodrama, it hits all the Silent Servant marks with aplomb, something he did again and again. R.I.P.
Special thanks to Jake Alrich and Vicki Siolos.
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