There are some samples that you’re proud to pinpoint, and some that kinda make you hate yourself. Grab the first Sublime album and you could make a pretty good drinking game out of it. Do it with Girl Talk and you’re likely to die of alcohol poisoning. Six minutes into Dark Matter, the new mixtape from Midnight Conspiracy, I’m pretty sure I tuned into the maniacal cackle of one of the creepers from [the porn website] Bangbus and the girl he’s fucking. Not that I can make any judgment calls. I couldn’t recognize the voice if I hadn’t seen more than a couple Bangbus videos.

A couple weeks ago, a fight broke out on Twitter between the dudes from Hot Biscuits and the dudes from Midnight Conspiracy, over an opening set Midnight Conspiracy was spinning at the Abbey Pub. Hot Biscuit’s argument was pretty much, “Dude, why are you playing all the hardass dubstep bangers when there’s only ten people here?”, to which Midnight Conspiracy retorted, “Dude, there are only ten people here. We want to see them dance!”

Okay, maybe that’s not verbatim what went down; I don’t think either party talks (or tweets) like that, but Twitter fights all seem kind of dumb and dude-ular to me.

Both arguments have merit, and I’m not sure who was right in this case. The abbey pub is far away from where I live and they expect me to pay upwards of TEN DOLLARS to see shows so I was far, far away at the time, but I think that might just be Midnight Conspiracy’s style, take it or leave it, no matter where they end up in a set. On their new mixtape, they start right off cranked to 11.

It starts out ravey-as-fuck, with The Disco Villains’ “We Came to Get This Party Started” and stays that way for an hour, occasionally hitting upon a remix of a 90s nostalgia banger like Le Castle Vania’s take on Smashing Pumpkin’s “Zero” or Designer Drugs’ remix of The Prodigy’s classic “Smack My Bitch Up”. A bunch of cats who’ve shown up on the Members Only AV blog (which features all of the guys from Midnight Conspiracy, as well as…sometimes…me) make appearances, including Dragonette and Juiceboxxx, as well as Deadmau5, Sebastian Tellier, Digitalism and The Bloody Beetroots.

A lot of the time I agree that sets should build, and nights should build, but this mix makes as good a case as any for starting with everything cranked all the way up.

Midnight Conspiracy – Dark Matter

Check out Dark Matter at Midnight Conspiracy’s myspace

Check out some of the parties we’ve done with Midnight Conspiracy and Members Only AV

For everything this city does have, it’s certainly lacking in Deadmau5/Bloody Beetroots/MSTRKRFT/Daft Punk style costumed, spectacle DJs. For a while we had 0+1=Everything doing the giant mask thing and J+J+J with their full-on LED light show, but even though they operated in the same scenes, they’ve always been more about performing original electronic compositions than DJing, in a traditional sense of the word. There’s always someone or other in the breakcore scene but the scene is pretty insular, and nobody has really been rising out of it and onto my radar lately.

For now, all we’ve got is LA Jesus, who hits the decks in snow-white robes, a blinking laser crown-of-thorns, and his lustrous, flowing, long blonde hair. DJ LA Jesus came onto the scene after spending some time touring with The Flaming Lips, where you may have seen him dancing alongside giant panda bears and any number of things that may or may not have been hallucinations. At the time, he was getting a lot of props for his mash-up work, but lately his sets have been more of a celebration of disco and nu disco. His new mix DJ LA JESUS SAVES THE DANCEFLOOR is no exception. It’s an upscale lounge mix of disco-by-way-of-electro-and-hip hop, featuring remixes of Santigold, De La Soul, Codebreaker, Robin S, and Kid Sister.

DJ LA Jesus – Saves the Dance Floor Vol. 4

You can check it out for free over at www.djlajesus.com and check out some of the parties we’ve done with him here at GlitterGuts