FROM SASS AFRICA WITH LOVE PT1: THE ORIGIN OF THE SASS

Sassquatch - The Origin of the Sass
So here, the day before my "From Sass Africa with Love" exhibition, is the last part of the audio side of the project.

This mix revolves around the music that inspired me to start DJing in the first place. These bands from early this decade from New York (!!!, The Rapture) as well as ones from Washington DC (Q and not U, Black Eyes) as well as older acts I discovered (The Slits, ESG) first got it into my head that it might be awesome to mix songs together for people to dance to. There are a few exceptions (Sticky Antlers, History Invades) that came along once I'd started DJing, but for the most part this mix is a compilation of much of what inspired me to become the Sassquatch.

Well I hope some people enjoy this mix, given the chaotic style of most of the songs, and the fact that none of them are really dance music, the mixing is pretty shambolic. Still, I'm happy with how this mix turned out, and I'm happy to have it as a document of the catalysts that got me DJing.

FROM SASS AFRICA WITH LOVE PT 2: THE CRITICAL HITS

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SASSQUATCH:

THE CRITICAL HITS

This mix is made up entirely of songs released by acts from around my extended hometown of Gauteng, South Africa. Recorded between 2005 and 2008, these songs are parts of the soundtrack for one of the happiest periods of my life. A period where, quite unexpectedly, small pockets of friends strewn between Pretoria and Johannesburg started writing music that was unlike anything that had come out of South Africa before.
Dancing to these songs, DJing them out and spending dozens of nights seeing them performed live, these songs have been the catalysts for almost all the moments I've found myself most proud to be a boy, born in Preotria in 1983.

FROM SASS AFRICA WITH LOVE PT3: SELECTED SOUNDS OF THE SOVEREIGN ACADEMY

Sassquatch - Selected sounds of the Sovereign Academy

The title of this mix is possibly misleading:

Some of these songs were part of amazing moments for me at the Sovereign Academy at some point. Destroying with NYPC's "Decend" after playing my first entirely beat-mixed set at Sovereign 3 in early 2006. Then at Sovereign 10 in mid 2007, being in the middle of the Capitol Theatre dancefloor the first time King of Town dropped his remix of The Tutus' Gauteng-dance-anthem "She Hangs". These songs and these moments are etched into my brain as some of the most special memories of what went down over the course of the Sovereign Academy's 15 party run.

At the same time there are songs on this mix that were never played at the Sovereign Academy. Some of them I came across after Graduation (Isochronous), some of them would only have gone down at Sovereign in my dreams (These New Puritans).
But in spite of some of these songs never been played at the parties, this, the 3rd mix in "From Sass Africa with Love", is called "Selected Sounds of the Sovereign Academy". Unlike the 4th mix, this collection is formed from older songs I love.

Sense Summer Art Fair Trailer

So remember how is was talking about how I'm gonna be doing the exhibition in London? Well I made a kind of trailer for the piece "From Sass Africa with Love" which I'll be exhibiting there. Here it is:

Sense Summer Sass: Exhibition Trailer from Ben Rausch on Vimeo.

Click here for info on the Sense Summer Art Fair.
Click here for the first released mix from the project.

FROM SASS AFRICA WITH LOVE PT4: THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL WAS A SOUL TRAIN

Sassquatch - From Sass Africa with Love 4

"From Sass Africa With Love" is a project I'll be working on for the next two months. It's difficult to explain what it will be, but it'll all be going up here as each phase is completed, so I suppose in the long run I won't need to explain what it is, it will just be.

For now, it's 4 CDs. Compilations of music that I'll mix together to try give international audiences an idea of what I'm about. Originally I sat through my entire bag of CDs and picked out the 55 songs that I thought best represented what the Sass was all about. This too long list was made up of Dischord post-hardcore, 70ies disco, Valerie dance music and a whole bunch of songs by South African friends. Here's what it looked like:

So I set myself the very ambitious task of trying to combine all these songs into a single mix of ultimate Sassness. After spending far too long trying to combine these disparate sounds I was sitting with an hour and a half of undefined, noisy, disco-sludge. Which was pretty depressing and lame...

But then on Saturday morning Oh Crapp! threw three fantastic new songs at me that I just had to incorporate into the mix. At this point I realised I needed to break the mix up and here's how I've decided to do it:

From Sass Africa with Love 1 - Origin of the Sass
* Old stuff that got me wanting to start DJing in the first place
From Sass Africa with Love 2 - The Critical Hits
* All the South African bands that have been making kids dance here over the past few years.
From Sass Africa with Love 3 - Selected Sounds of the Sovereign Academy
* A bunch of my favourite songs from when I started DJing to when we ended Sovereign.
From Sass Africa with Love 4 - The Light at the end of the tunnel was a Soul Train.
* Songs that give me hope for the future of danceable rock and roll.

To say that I was disappointed by the direction "indie dance" chose to follow would be a massive understatement.

I started DJing because of bands Q and not U, The Rapture and Moving Units. Those bands seemed to be doing the most "wrong" thing possible, been rock bands but making dance music. It was awesome. Hearing !!! proclaim "There's No Fucking Rules Dude" for the first time had me so excited about the future of people making rock music hidden in dance music, I wanted to scream.

But unfortunately for me, I landed up hating most of the music that was born out of the 21st century's unprecedented acceptance of the once completely separate dance and rock worlds getting it on. While fantastic bands like Friendly Fires, New Young Pony Club and Delorean brought out wonderful, warm dance songs, these bands were few and far between. Instead, the norm became paint by numbers production of banging electro and krunk, leaving me constantly frustrated at not finding enough good new music to play out.

But things are changing. This mix is about that. It's about a warm shining light at the end of a dark tunnel of in-human soul-less-ness.

It's not like this is a compilation of entirely new songs, but there are some in there (La Roux, Two Door Cinema Club). There's a song by a new incarnation of one of the first bands that got me dancing (Men - who are two thirds of Le Tigre). There are songs (Anoraak, Hot Chip) that first gave me hope for a brighter future. And there's a song by friends from my backyard (The Tutus and King of Town) that makes me incredibly gratefully to be born where I was, when I was.

I hope you enjoy this mix, and I'm looking forward to travelling back in time and putting the rest of the collection together for you!