_Welcome to Building the Canon, an occasional series collecting perspectives on the electronic records we believe deserve pride of place in any club culture aficionado's collection. Over the next few months, we'll be spanning decades and genres in our search to pin point 25 absolutely essential albums, mixes, and compilations. We start the series by looking at a mix by none other than DJ Harvey._You might have guessed by now that here at THUMP UK, we're a little bit in love with the Fen's finest, Harvey William Bassett. We seem to interview him every other week but, and this is a big but, it's justified. After all, there aren't many people out there who could have created Sarcastic Study Masters Volume 2, a mix so good, so unbelievably perfect that you can't quite believe it was delivered into the world by human hands, let alone initially given away as a freebie by a streetwear company to promote a slew of Japanese gigs.
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Anyone who's been lucky enough to see Harvey thrash it out for a good few hours, which, given his newfound ubiquity, is most of us, you'll know that the former Black Cock maestro doesn't go in for DJing pyrotechnics, rather, he's a selector's selector, a man blessed with a seemingly superhuman ability to find endless obscurities that just work together. You'll also know that seeing Harvey means guessing which Harvey you'll be getting that night. Will it be Techno Harvey down in the belly of the Berghain, or Disco Harvey melting faces at midnight in Marrakech? What you get on Sarcastic Study Masters Volume 2 is Balearic Harvey at his very best.It's an hour or so of the kind of disco-not-disco-except-it-totally-is-disco mingling with the Beach Boys. It's scorched earth desert rock nestling up with elegiac ambient. It's a stunning array of records that you only find after years and years spent loitering around mildewy basements the world around. It's warped, waterlogged, alien and, rather suitably, it sounds like it's been beamed in from another planet. It's perversely languid for a dance mix, happy to moonwalk around the lower BPMs, coming on like the hazy recollection of the weediest night you've ever spent on an Ibizan beach, or in an Italian disco. Everything feels ever so slightly too slow, ever so slightly just not right, and it's that inherent and intentional wonkiness that gives it such charm and staying power. It sounds wrong in the best way possible. Which makes it the perfect antidote to every perfectly blended, seamless, soulless, easily swallowable set of tech-house puked up onto SoundCloud. It's the DJ as a human being, rather than an android. Or something.
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Being a mix by DJ Harvey, it's stuffed to the gills with tracks that immediately became incredibly sought after. The titles— "This Song Changed My Life", "Cafe De Bassett", "What's That One Again, Harv?"— obscure the obscurites on display, which range from Amadeo's insanely OTT "Memories", a record Harvey himself told me he found in a Greek seaside record shop for about 20p, to Ginny's dark and stormy sunset classic "Serious", via cuts from the likes of Claudja Barry, Holger Czukay, and Bryan Ferry.Sarcastic Masters Volume 2 didn't exactly make DJ Harvey's name—the nearly twenty years of pretty high profile DJing, remixing and editing prior to it's release and resurfacing online can't go unignored— but it did, in a way, serve as a rebirth. With this mix Harvey, a bloke who looks a little like Jesus, and quite possibly has a touch of the messianic about him, took his rightful place as the best fucking DJ around. A legend was was born again.No serious record collection would be without it. Turn on, tune in, wig out.Follow Josh on Twitter