Delayed with... Øbsidiaän
Our March guest mixes are about storytelling. The word gets overused, but there's a reason it keeps coming back. When a DJ is actually given the time and latitude to take a room somewhere, when the night has a real arc to it, nothing else comes close. The catch is that it requires hours. Proper hours. And those, in the past few years, are roughly as rare as a club with no Instagram presence and a no-phones policy that people actually respect.
A handful of promoters and clubs still hand artists the keys. Laut is one of them.
The Barcelona club holds around 200 people, sits in the middle of the city, and has quietly been one of the more important small rooms in Europe for anyone paying attention to the space where deep shades of techno and drum & bass stop being separate things. Having spent time on both sides of the booth there, what strikes you is how the room itself seems to encourage that dissolution of genre, of the hour, of whatever you walked in carrying. The bookings reflect that. The crowd knows it. It's a rare alignment.
For their "All Night Long" series, Laut hands the floor to a single act from open to close. Tonight's recording comes from one of those nights, featuring Øbsidiaän, a duo who've been working together for over a decade, originally from Mexico City, now based in Barcelona. Their releases on Feinkost Records map a particular corner of the grey zone between techno and drum & bass: hypnotic, groovy, occasionally strange in ways that take a few listens to fully locate. Five hours suits them.
It's always worth hearing from the artists before a journey this long. What they were thinking, what they were after. It lands differently once you're an hour deep and the room starts making sense.
Then clear some time. This one's worth it.
"We met each other back in 2015 at Barcelona, and even though we both come from DJ backgrounds, there was a long period of time in which we decided to put aside mixing and focus 100% on producing and performing live, which is our passion, and we think this pause was really necessary for the quest to find and polish our sound. Years later, we had this itch again of playing music by other fellow artists we admire, so we slowly started mixing again and we felt as connected as when we play live.
After this long “mixing hiatus”, we had the chance to showcase an extended set at our favorite club in Barcelona, LAUT at one of their “All Night Long” nights. What we love the most about long sets is that you have enough room to take the dancefloor to many different places, and tell a longer story, and this one was very special. Something crucial for us was dedicating quite a bit of time to slowly building our own ideal warmup, which is the foundation for a proper musical journey. So we started with some slow and deep techno, organically evolving towards a more hypnotic/mental sound as people were drawn to dance and the club got crowdier. Somewhere around the middle of the night, we switched towards the experimental Drum & Bass, Grey Area and Halfstep zone, which are sounds we feel very much connected with.
Finally we started blending it back with faster Techno to round up the journey late in the night, having passed through many of the genres we love and have been digging these past couple of years."