When I contact potential curators for the Friday Night Series, I always stress that it does not need to be a dance mix. Friday Night can be game night in with intimate friends, background music while you apply make-up, dinner music, or music for an impromptu, scandalous rendezvous. Upon listening to Kid Smpl's mix, I felt as though the loners and night owls were spoken for. Kid Smpl's music is often associated with airy futurism and glitchy transmissions, but his Friday Night mix feels claustrophobic.
I took the liberty of dubbing it “Music at 2 a.m.”, but had I not been concerned with brevity, I would have thrown in “for loners”. This is a mix for people who've decided they don't need company to be at peace on the weekend's opening scene. Kid Smpl keeps things slow, dropping the bpms on DJ Sliiink, Burial, Cassie, and Kay Drizz. What I found most enjoyable in Kid Smpl's playlist was that if it were for loners, it would never give them pause to linger on the solitude. It drifts into very isolated terrains and then, transforms into head nod edits of trap beats that alter the mood entirely without disrupting the integrity of the mix.
Kid Smpl, “Friday Night Series: Music at 2 a.m.”
Kid Smpl's Skylight is out now on Hush Hush Records.
