When he was a kid, Jarred Beeler would drum his hands on tables, trying to play along with the Lebanese music he grew up hearing. Later, he would try to approximate those same rhythms using MIDI. It was a long, frustrating process, but eventually Beeler, better known as DJ Plead, landed on a sound unlike much other contemporary dance music at that time, adopting Arabic maqam modes to make melodies and rhythms that seemed to spiral out in every direction.
DJ Plead’s earliest releases meshed post-dubstep and dancehall with dabke, the sound of folk dances and wedding celebrations across the Arab world. But unlike producers in, say, Cairo, who were adapting regional sounds like mahraganat around the same time, Beeler grew up in Australia. His music existed at a remove from his inspirations, cobbled together from secondhand memories and his own Western childhood. His approach eventually crystallized into something called hard drum, a genre tag that now mostly lives on Rateyourmusic and Bandcamp, but it made Beeler into one of the most distinctive producers of the late 2010s.
Beeler’s music is percussive and often frenetic, but in 2020, as part of Boomkat’s Documenting Sound series, he put out a debut album that stripped his sound down to a ghostly mirage of microtonal melodies and more patient rhythms. It was a creative breakthrough, leading to records like the Going for It EP and dreamy tunes including this year’s “Wisco,” with Piezo and DJ Python. His second LP, Please, is a clear sequel to Relentless Trills. Assembled by Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound from over 100 demos, the tender, intimate album reveals the melodic heart and plaintive spirit of Beeler’s music, which sounds fetching, and occasionally unsettling, in this sparser form.
Most DJ Plead tracks that have come out since Going for It have been collaborative, and working with artists like TSVI, rRoxymore, and DJ Python seems to have rubbed off on him. The music is loose and spacious, billowing like fabric that flaps at the slightest breeze. Beeler moves at an easygoing pace, and even harder tracks, like “Stucco,” tend to pull their punches. With its lonely mijwiz woodwind synths—plotted out on a computer keyboard—and seductive, dubstep swing, “Stucco” sounds like “South London Boroughs” updated for 2026, reflecting a dance-music scene much more multicultural and polyglot than it was 20 years ago.
As with “Stucco,” much of Please is wistful, even the drums, which are tuned and matched to basslines that plot out forlorn melodies to ground the zigzagging woodwinds. On songs like “Seven Eight, Too Late,” the rhythm section appropriates the emotional tug of Afro house and amapiano, each bass note hitting like a pang of sadness. The sounds are chintzy and soaked in reverb, like a mawkish ’80s ballad rewritten from memory, and the whole thing slowly falls apart and fades out like an old track by the Field.
Not that Please doesn’t get down. “Ride TV” is sexy and strident, with a heart-in-mouth breakdown before the track snaps back into place—it captures the wily energy of old DJ Plead but holds it carefully in suspension—and “pa700” is heavier and a little humorous, with Casio-style strings that call back to the purple dubstep era of Guido, Gemmy, and Joker. Still, there’s something different happening here. Take “Shush,” which is tough but dainty, luxuriating in silence that sounds lonesome no matter how hard the groove goes. That feeling lingers into “Right on Time,” with swooping melodies that seem to bend the spacetime-continuum, moving forward and backward at the same time, before the album closes beautifully with the plaintive nylon strings of “Traffic,” which might convince you that that Beeler was a talented fingerpicker in a past life.
Full of warm but emotionally ambiguous tones, Please is a comforting record, like listening to an old relative’s stories that are tinged with sorrow but still lovely all the same. Beeler has said that he’s troubled by the geographic and linguistic distance he feels from his heritage, which might account for some of the album’s melancholy. But Please’s bittersweet air feels easy enough for anyone to understand—except, perhaps, on opener “Return to Deuce,” where he uses Auto-Tune to turn a cheering crowd into an inhuman, pixelated blur that sounds alternately anguished and joyful. Both human and artificial, and tantalizingly difficult to parse, the screams puncture the track’s otherwise steamy atmosphere, like a reminder of reality in the middle of a dreamy reverie. Please is so engrossing because it’s surprising and often raw, repurposing a language designed for dancing to say something more private and vulnerable, yet no less physically powerful.
