Young Turks’ increasingly leftfield offshoot Whities has had a stellar 2016. While some experimental electronic music can verge on the inaccessible, label boss Tasker’s keen taste as a DJ has created a space for downright odd music like Avalon Emerson’s psychedelic desert opera ‘2000 Species of Cacti’ and Minor Science’s mid-noughties dubstep throwback ‘Naturally Spineless’ that still finds a natural home on the dance floor. One of the ways Whities keeps the label’s ethos rooted there, is through their intermittent parties in London, where he invites label mates and friends to play some of the music that displays where the label is currently at.
For the final party of the year, label signee Reckonwrong and sultry hip-house auteur Galcher Lustwerk were invited down to play alongside Tasker himself. The label boss began with a typically assured warmup set, including an inspired selection of ‘Mi Cyaan Believe It’ by DJ Koze. After was Galcher with his hypnotic brand of deep house, peppered with intermittent spurts of his enchanting monologues, suggesting we were hearing a slew of unreleased material. Finishing the night was Reckonwrong, who proved just how weird Whities allows people to get on the dance floor when playing the A-side of his recent EP ‘The Passions of Pez’, which joins the dots between electronica and post-punk, and creating a genuine singalong moment on the dance floor.
He closed the night with a selection of oddball dancehall, showing the extents to which Whities are prepared to push the sometimes conservative boundaries of house and techno while still keeping the bodies moving. We can’t even begin to predict where the label will go in 2017, but we know we’ll be on the floor dancing along to it.