Over on the r/Despacio subreddit (reddit.com/r/despacio), who-took-the-bomp asked, “You want to show Despacio to someone and you’re putting a 10-track playlist together – how would it look?”
There are already some great playlists provided in the thread, but I had to take a shot at this question because I have some opinions held deep in my bones. So here (with purely subjective rationale) are the tracks that define Despacio for me, in rough order of how they might be heard during a full Despacio set. To be fair, a full Despacio set includes some 70-90 songs, so making me choose just 10 was like asking me which five of my fingers and toes I want to keep. That said, here’s my list:
Art of Noise – Moments in Love (Beaten) … Often the first song of the day on one of Despacio’s multi-day weekend shows, this song ushers dancers into Despacio’s liminal space, like a ride across the Styx in Charon’s Ferry of the Dead — it ushers one into the spirit realm. At the start of one of Despacio’s 6- or 7-hour sets, we’re not yet a congealed group — we’re just a loose bunch of individuals milling about at the start of a journey to happiness. Imagine a few hundred people staring about the dark room with mouths agape, with the only thing visible being the seven magnificent, 11-foot tall monolithic speaker stacks that are lit up just enough to be visible. As our eyes adjust to the darkness we’re bumping into and saying hi to friends who were there in the queue with us, while the bongos of this track begin to tug us into cohesion with each other — wiring my hips up to the hips of every other human there. It’s like the marionette gently putting tension on all the strings of his puppet troupe. The track’s contrasting highs and lows feel like a demo for the dynamic range and headroom of the ultra high-fidelity system fueled by McIntosh audio equipment. Bottom line — If you’re going to raw dog (i.e., listen without earplugs) to just one song at Despacio this is the one for your naked ears.
Madonna – Justify My Love … You might think you’ve heard this song before. There’s a good chance you even believe you’ve heard it dozens of times. I myself had the CD it was originally published on, and had listened to it dozens of times. But until you’ve felt its heavy bass massage your sacral chakra to life in that region between your belly button and your perineum, you haven’t really heard it in the way that this sexy song was designed to be heard. I’ve heard this song twice at Despacio, and when it’s played, the room is always dark out of respect for the PDA that’s certain to spontaneously erupt when dancers writhe to it. John Klett, the audio genius most responsible for Despacio’s sexily sumptous sound, wrote in a blog post, “We are pretty sure there was a child conceived right on the dance floor at a 2015 event.” He didn’t specify the tryst’s soundtrack, but if it wasn’t Madonna’s “spoken-word ode to releasing your inner freak,” I’d be surprised.
Black Meteoric Star – Freaks Only … Despacio is full of “weird” tracks that have an otherworldly quality, and this is a prime example of that style of music. Likely a James Murphy addition (because it was released via his label, DFA Records), I first heard “Freaks Only” at This Ain’t No Picnic (Despacio #15, 2022). It grabbed me right away, not just because of how it sounded, but because there were people scattered throughout the the dance floor chanting “woo woo” and growling “rowr rowr” along with the music, making me feel like I’d somehow ended up shipwrecked on the island where the Wild Things are. It felt like people were ascending to a new level of freakiness and it was a moment.
Permit me to get heavy for a minute. Per the official description of the record on the DFA page, “this record lays out a broad slab of practice-based research into the ghosts we connect with on the dance floor. Whether it be through partying in former industrial buildings, contested spaces of labor built on lands violently appropriated from indigenous people, uncomfortably inhabiting vacuums in queerness left by the AIDS epidemic, lifting lineages through sampling, or the relentless cycle of whitening that accompanies dance music’s march into the market, our experiences in the Disco have been permeated by the spectral and the haunted. Through rhythm and frequency, organized over time, this music blurs the veil between the living and the dead inviting those who move to it to connect with experiences beyond that false binary.”
I’d read none of that high-concept stuff when I heard the song for the second time ever in my life at Coachella ’23 (Despacio #17a), so I promise it wasn’t the power of suggestion when the following happened. I heard Freaks Only on the dance floor and felt the very real presence of my mother’s spirit (RIP) inside my body, compelling me to give her the joy of dance and to dance with her. Now you might say it was the psychedelic mushrooms that had me hallucinating my dead momma’s dancey spirit, and you may have a point there, but I also know that this song had something to do with my brief experience of being haunted (in a good way) and that it did indeed “blur the veil between the living and the dead.” So yeah, this song is fantastic.
Adriano Celentano – Prisencolinensinainciusol … The first time I heard this tune, at Despacio’s showing at the This Ain’t No Picnic festival (Despacio #15), the 1972 song had just turned 50 years old and it fucked with my head because I could not tell what it was saying, but I felt that I should be able to understand it given the obvious American accent and the recognizable “alright” at the end of many lines. I seriously questioned my sobriety as a result of this struggle, but about halfway through the song I think I got it — and I developed a deeper understanding of Despacio’s playful attitude; it’s not all serious all the time. There’s more than one trickster working the decks and they play songs like this. That said, the song’s a certified chart-topper: according to the extensive wiki article on the song, it peaked at #2 on Belgium’s pop charts in 1973, suggesting that it’s a tune brought to Despacio by the Dewaele brothers (Stephen, the eldest, would’ve been 3 years old at the time it peaked).
Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On Unknown Re-Edit … Click to give this one a listen and let us know if you can ID the track. Ever since it was played at Coachella (Despacio #17a) the community’s best song sleuths haven’t been able to ID it. It’s a great example of the sort of unidentifiable re-edit that you’ll probably only ever hear once in your life and then spend the rest of your days searching for. The spacey satellite bleeps, jungle bongos, and staccato clacks add an electronic underlayer to Gaye’s silky vocals — like cashmere on a robotic panther — not in a hurry to get there, but arriving step by step with a stealthy sure-footedness that indicates a master’s hand at work.
Miami (Parrot and Cocker Too Remix) – Baxter Dury … The boys have played this gem twice during Despacio’s showing at iiipoints Miami (Despacios #16 and #18). It’s an anthem for a complicated city, a spoken word poem by a fictional sociopath Miami delivered in Baxter Dury’s gravelly London drawl, equal parts malevolent gangster and coked-up trickster. In this remix, the first words (“So fuck ya”) kick off a deep groove that makes you look around the room and wonder if any of this is real. In Miami last year, I danced near a couple of guys who quoted every word of the track at each other with impeccable timing while the room was lanced with alternating slanting columns of blue and white light — it was as close to a true religious experience as Miami gets.
Skatt Bros – Walk the Night … The vibe of this song is otherworldly, and by otherworldly, I mean 70s space opera rave, like when the Death Star’s thousand-person construction crew snuck down to the sub-basement storage cubes on the third weekend of the year. They rubbed droid grease all over their shirtless torsos and inhaled through their amyl nitrate-soaked shirts and danced until the end of the third shift, stomping their boots to this song the DJ played at the height of the all-night bacchanal.
Back in our universe, this 1979 song is experiencing resurgence — having recently been featured in campy robot horror flick M3GAN and being a regular fixture in 2manydjs’s DJ sets, including those at Sound (Miami), Lobos (Los Angeles), and Bill Graham (San Francisco). It’s the sort of late-disco banger that sounds both entirely modern and like a weird throwback to a time when dangerous lyrics in songs were not yet cause for cancellation, and it sounds and feels absolutely magnificent in Despacio.
Manncool & Trol2000 – Capy … This specific version (listen to the original here) demonstrates the way Despacio’s DJs are wont to pitch down songs to create a deeper, more soulful vibe. The original doesn’t lack charm, but at ~137 beats per minute, it’s in a completely different zone from the Manncool & Trol2000 version’s ~125 beats per minute. Neither original nor edit can be found on popular streaming services or on Shazam, evidence of a crate-digging approach to track selection that makes Despacio a treat for open-minded fans of music. I’d never heard this song, and fell in love with it because my personal memories of this track on the Despacio dance floor include linking arms around shoulders with the people I’m dancing near and singing the chorus to each other. It’s a love-bomb in all the best ways.
Ferrara & 2manydjs’ Love Attack / Get Off the Speakers … Imagine you’re dancing to a fine groove (Ferrara’s Love Attack (1979) and the DJ gets on the house mic, ducks the music, and tells people to clear out of his area and stop climbing on the speakers. “Will you people please get off the speakers? Get down off them speakers.” You look around but you can’t see anybody on the speakers.
Another 30 seconds goes by, and the DJ’s back on the mic, frustration in his voice: “Will you people please get offa the speakers? I’m tired of asking you nicely.”
The DJ plays a bit more of the groove, then cuts back in, taking the music way down so that he can be heard loud and clear: “I’m not gonna ask you no goddamned more. I don’t want to see nobody dancin’ on top of my shit unless I say so.”
If you’re me, the first time I heard this track (at Despacio #15 in 2022), I looked around the room wondering what kind of idiot would dare profane the beautiful Despacio speaker stacks by climbing on them. I was inebriated just enough to believe for a minute that the DJs were really asking people to keep off the equipment, an illusion aided by the way they cut everything but the mid-range frequencies so that the DJ’s voice feels like it’s really a live announcement happening right there in the room. It’s a tremendous bit of trickster magic.
I’ve since learned that the Dewaele brothers have been working on this remix for six or more years, according to the healthily obsessed fans on the Soulwax Discord. We might’ve heard the near-final version of it at Coachella ’23. Who knows if we’ll ever see a release of it.
Let It Happen (Soulwax remix) – Tame Impala … I credit this song with helping me make up my mind to embrace the now of my life rather than dwell on regrets around the past. I had entered Despacio with a question buried deep in my subconscious, and this song dredged the question forward onto the dance floor and helped me use my body to answer to it. This song is probably the number one reason why I continue to devote so much of my time and energy to Despacio in an attempt to give back a fraction of what I gained from hearing this tune at the right time in my life.
DJ Falcon & Thomas Bangalter’s Together aka “Together – Together” … Just give it a listen, and imagine this playing after about five and a half hours of dancey, sweaty fun with people who had, like you, been through crucible of Despacio in which a bunch of separate elements are dumped into a container, brought to high heat until boundaries are dissolved, then mixed together to create an entirely new substance called community and togetherness.
At iiipoints Miami 2023, we heard this French House banger when they mixed into it from The League Unlimited Orchestra / Human League – The Things That Dreams Are Made Of, and mixed out of it into the palate-cleansing Atomic Rooster – Play It Again before playing a Despacio-specific edit of Fischerspooner’s Emerge — the finale song of the night.
Stephane Sévérac – Hold On … Despacio’s top slow-dance number — at least according to a Despacio community vote. At 101BPM, it’s on the slower side, and it’s often played in the refractory period after a faster, bigger number. I’m including it as the final track in this list because it’s one of the several songs that haunts people for months or years after they experience it on Despacio’s magical dancefloor. Whether you’re there with friends or a lover, this song is the one for wrap your arms around each other and feeling the imminent loss of this space. Just hold your person or your people and extend the moment a bit longer before time rudely ends the bliss. This isn’t typically the last track of the night — it’s more often played before the final hour as a reminder that the night can’t last forever and that the hour to come is the last we’ll have together for the next several months … until the next Despacio.
If you’re counting, that’s 12 tracks, because Despacio always delivers more than you expect it to.
You’re the best.
Aww, thanks, Adam!