A mixtape can be many things, but one thing is for sure, a mixtape is more than just random songs put in a particular order. It’s about recontextualizing sounds, giving them a new meaning (sometimes very different from the original) by setting them side by side, or juxtaposed in ingenious ways with others. Best thing about mixtapes, most of them are FREE (!), and they’re a great way to discover new music. In this column, Juan Data gives you a worthy one every week.
DJ: Scratchface DJ
MIXTAPE: Club Sessions
We sometimes make the mistake of assuming that just because the DJ is Latino, he’ll be spinning Latin music, or add a Latin twist to it. This is definitely not the case for Scratchface who started spinning electro and techno at the early age of 15 back in Mexico City. After moving to the Bay Area, California, a couple years later, he started building a name for himself in the local electro scene and almost now he has quite a following amongst the younger crowd, composed mostly of Mexican and Latino immigrants who rather jump to some hard thumping 130BPM beats than dancing cumbia.
This one is a brand new mixtape he just uploaded to the net that resembles very much his energetic club sets and is presented in a radio/podcast format with a spoken intro and outro by the DJ himself. There’s some Latin house there in the middle, but other than that and his accent, there’s almost no other explicit sign of him being Mexican in his selection.
CLUB SESSIONS by Scratchface_dj