10. Marhaba
Oh, God, I love this! I mean, this is one of those records that you don’t realize how good it is until you play it out. It’s a dancefloor record but it certainly doesn’t sound like it. You know when you listen to this at home, it sounds like Alice Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders.
The last 10 years has seen, I think, some of the most interesting sounds in music. Some of the best techno and electronic dance floor music has been coming out of the UK with the likes of Hessle Audio and Four Tet and Joy Orbison, and Floating Points is one of them. I’m a huge fan of Floating Points, who’s reworked this amazing track. I played in Liverpool at 24 Kitchen Street two months ago and the place erupted. There’s not a big kick drum and it’s not an obvious banger, but it feels like it almost has a ‘Strings Of Life’ moment feel to it. It’s got amazing claps and some percussion and it’s dynamic rhythmically. It just goes crazy.
I think it’s remarkable, it’s gonna go down as one of my favorite ever dance floor records. It’s so nuanced and so off-piste and oddball and unlikely. It shows how exciting things are. People get so down about the transient nature of the TikTok world and people listening to bad fucking Euro trash on ketamine in Berlin. But then you hear records like this, and people are digging it and loving it.
