UK house and breakbeat veteran Paul Woolford connects the dots between club-music styles from across the decades, finding a through line in lush, transporting melodies.
The history of electronic music, particularly in the UK, has been one of fractures and splits, as ever more specific styles and subgenres spin off into their own orbits. Special Request (aka Leeds’ Paul Woolford) is one of the enlightened few moving the other way, with his diverse catalogue including everything from chart-house bangers (“Looking for Me,” with Diplo and Kareen Lomax) to pungent nu-jungle (Special Request’s 2019 album Zero Fucks).
Woolford is better known as a producer than a DJ. But his entry into the venerable DJ-Kicks series offers him a chance to showcase his turntable chops as he weaves a captivating musical thread across historical and generic boundaries. Songs on this mix date from 1962 (Sun Ra & Solar Arkestra’s “Cluster of Galaxies”) right up to the present day, while the styles glide from proto house to techno and IDM to jungle, passing through ambient, disco, electro, and breakbeat.
Eclectic selections can make for bumpy musical rides. But Woolford has based his song choices around his love for “lush melodics,” a decision that adroitly transcends genre. In Virgo’s 1986 house jam “R U Hot Enough?,” this translates into undulating piano chords and ethereal synth strings; in the Special Request mix of FC Kahuna’s “Hayling,” it means bleeps, breaks, and satiny vocal; and in Tim Reaper’s VIP mix of Special Request’s “Pull Up,” melodics come in the form of a pumped-up and billowing bassline that is vicious in its volume and strangely tender in its melodic caress.
As a DJ, Woolford favours layering and smooth transitions over flashy tricks. DJ-Kicks doesn’t so much jump from track to track as ooze ever onwards, the boundaries between songs often impossible to locate. Some of the transitions are particularly graceful, such as the passage from “R U Hot Enough?” to Speedy J’s 1991 IDM classic “De-Orbit” via Krystal Klear’s 2014 techno tool “Tun Valve,” the four decades between the tracks falling effortlessly off the bone. Woolford has the DJ’s gift of taking exactly what he needs from a record, whether that’s 39 seconds of atmospheric noise from “Cluster of Galaxies” or five minutes of song structure from John Morales’ remix of Alicia Myers’ disco anthem “Right Here Right Now”; a given song’s individual merits are secondary to the mix’s common good.
Where the requisite jigsaw piece isn’t at hand, Woolford has the production skills to create it. Previously unreleased Special Request tracks “KissFM NY87 Mastermix” and “Vellichor” help guide the mix from the dreamy, trumpet-led disco of Morgan Geist’s “Lullaby” into AS ONE’s galactic IDM, while new Special Request remixes of “Hayling” and μ-Ziq’s “Twangle Frent” tilt the mood towards the biting nu-jungle of the mix’s closing stretch. Woolford had a hand in 11 of the 25 tracks here, but DJ-Kicks never feels overwhelmed with his work; it’s a compelling example of the way that talented producers can make captivating DJs.
With global nightlife still largely shuttered, it makes little sense to talk of a 2021 club record. But DJ-Kicks presents a powerful case for Woolford’s cosmopolitan dance Arcadia as the unifying sound that could—and perhaps should—accompany the ribbon-cutting when dance floors welcome us back with a spring in our step and a thirst for adventure.
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