SoundCloud and MixCloud have become breeding grounds for increasingly weird and experimental mixes from club producers and electronic musicians alike. Just check out the SoundCloud feeds of Total Freedom, Why Be and Lotic for evidence of this. Given the prominence of these collagic compilations of sounds and songs, it felt necessary to include one of the strangest and most exciting here: Designer Environments, co-produced by Djwwww and Sentinel. While these two producers have both performed in club settings, the style of this piece is indebted to the abstract mixes of both the aforementioned artists Total Freedom, Lotic, etc. and club nights like New York's GHE20G0TH1K and Berlin's Janus. Theirs is a disruptive, avant-garde approach that takes in the information overload culture of the internet's mass archive and spits out the wealth of material available to the creators through discomfortingly shape-shifting bricolages. The ultimate example of this in 2014 was Lotic's ubiquitous Damsel In Distress mix, and this year's most extreme take was this offering from Djwwww and Sentinel. Kanye West, Young Thug, Killer7 and Bioshock are just a handful of the samples drawn on and smashed together in the creepy, complex soup that is Designer Environments. Around every corner the listener is thrown snippets of barely recognisable references, terrifying moulded into an expressionistic image of the hyper-saturated virtual environment. This is like an experimental fusion of noise genres, DJ mixes and the postmodern pastiche of mash-ups, but without any of the comforting structures, cohesiveness or humour that tend to drive those styles. As a piece of conceptual art, Designer Environments (and similar mixes) is incredibly evocative. As a piece of electronic music, it is absolutely astonishing. This is not just the sound of the future - it is the sound of NOW, a period in which everyone maintains a symbiotic relationship with their technological devices and each member of Generation Z is overwhelmed by the ever-increasing mountains of cultural material available online. Terrifying and beautiful.
