- On this second mixtape, five years in the making, Eris Drew mixes vintage house and breakbeat with Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin.
- It takes courage and faith in the craft to kick off a new label with the release of a mixtape. Deciding that it's not just the first, but the right, move. It was right for Eris Drew and Octo Octa, whose T4T LUV NRG label is a trans-centric boutique endeavour that has infused the contemporary electronic musical landscape with an old-school emphasis on heart and craft. Reminiscent of '80s dance music, records and mixes on the label are soaked with emotion and cranked out with feeling vivid colours from luddite-style setups and vinyl records.
The first release was Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1, which channeled terrestrial radio vibes. On that mix, Drew stayed in the classic lane of the nonstop Friday night mix show, which is not as prevalent with today's glut of online mixes and podcasts. She tastefully blended disco house with off-the-rails broken beats, dropping in Miami bass jams with boogie keys, smelting rave tunes with disco vocals over top. Drew performed DJ sleights of hand and turntable techniques, like running doubles, highlighting a hot and fast-paced mixing style. She set off parties—in the kitchen, backyard, the bedroom—like a match on dry kindling with that 2019 mix, and the second mix, five years later, proves that it wasn't a fluke.
Drew's mixes seamlessly flow with a style that shows nary a trace of superficiality or tolerance for pretentious minimalism. Raving Disco Breaks Volume II: Rock The House moves with an advanced calculus, rooted in an understanding of how we got here and who is running things. The first 45 minutes dote on history: breakbeat, acid basslines, punchy melodies, pumping house, party B-boy breaks and big beat are accented by ravey keyboards and vocal triggers, including Flavor Flav and house divas from across from the decades.
These tracks, at least 20 years old, sing, squeal, twist and distort at the whims of Drew's expert hands. Like a true historian of the game, Drew built up her crates for five years—specifically just for this mix—until the cake was ready to be baked. On turntables she bought in '94 (they've only been repaired twice) she infuses house and breakbeat records with air horns, chopped and diced up, intermixed with rock vocal vamps from Janis Joplin, Joe Strummer, Ramones and Led Zeppelin. When you have DJs building mixes, buying, searching and digging for actual vinyl, CDs—even YouTube rips—creating samples, and then scratching them in, it adds to the feeling of motion and expression. The mixing might not always be perfect, but that indicates humanity and serves up joy, the kind of feeling that can send a young person down their own journey of loving records. Perhaps they'll begin to read liner notes, strive to understand different eras of dance music and begin to be their own historian.
Drew maintains that swimming upstream, punky attitude that's quietly lording over this good time, reminding everyone that humans can still be in control and technology can take a backseat—with a classic Janis Joplin diatribe and some melodic jackin' house running underneath.