Dekmantel’s Selectors series is an unusual proposition. Though a DJ helms each installment, they are compilations, not mixes. The theme varies according to the selector. Germany’s Motor City Drum Ensemble summed up his soulful predilections by licensing a bunch of decades-old, out-of-print house music; the Berghain resident Marcel Dettmann highlighted his industrial roots with tracks from Front 242, Ministry, and Clan of Xymox. The franchise is a bit like Back to Mine or Late Night Tales, just for people that drop their monthly grocery budget on rare 12"s on Discogs.
The concept is an outgrowth of the recent trend for “selector”-style DJs, said to dig deeper than their merely crowd-pleasing peers. (Dekmantel, a Dutch label and events outfit, also has a spin-off festival, Selectors, dedicated to the same.) On its face, unearthing seldom-heard records might seem to be a basic part of the DJ’s job; that it has been deemed worthy of notice says something about the state of dance music, where the quality of surprise has been downgraded to a nice-to-have rather than an essential component.
But if anyone deserves the tag, the German DJ Lena Willikens does. Her style of playing—slow and ominous, given to grinding machine grooves and clammy atmospheres—is unusually distinctive. She honed her chops as a resident at Düsseldorf’s famously eclectic Salon des Amateurs, a club known for its wide-open musical policy, and her sets are full of curveballs and head-scratchers, the sorts of tracks Shazam can’t begin to puzzle out.
That Willikens has released very little original music under her name makes Selectors 005 feel even more worthwhile as a rare opportunity to hear the world through her ears. At Barcelona’s Sónar last year, she turned a daytime, outdoor slot usually reserved for feel-good grooves into a dungeon acid séance, meting out bone-chilling EBM that stubbornly refused to break a sweat. Here, too, the tempos tend toward cryogenic. Minor keys predominate, and textures are resolutely analog, favoring unvarnished drum machines, gravelly synths, and an omnipresent lo-fi sheen.
Willikens’ repertoire is heavy on material given to her by friends and peers, and that’s largely what she’s chosen to run with here, filling half of Selectors 005 with exclusive tracks. The grimly droning “Sepses” is by a German duo, Garland, so unknown that as of this writing, they don’t even have their own Discogs entry. Willikens first encountered the Romanian producer Borusiade, whose paranoid coldwave fugue “Night Drive (An Exercise in Indulgence)” is a standout, through one of her DJ sets on SoundCloud. It’s striking how many tracks come with a personal story attached—a chance encounter and a shared musical affinity that led to a friendship. You get the sense that Willikens’ sets aren’t just a representation of her own tastes. They are a manifestation of a shared aesthetic, a map of a community.
When it comes to the previously released music here, none of her rarities are all that rare; many of them could be had for a few dollars, assuming you knew to look for them in the first place. “Morning Star (Dubmix)” is a 1996 track by Sandoz, a dubby alter ego of Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk, sourced from a dime-a-dozen electronic comp from the period. Vromb’s “Amalgame” is a sepulchral, slow-motion techno cut from 2001 that she discovered lurking in the Cologne record shop A-Musik’s dusty CD racks. Sysex’s excellent “Deep Space” has been hiding in plain sight for the past 24 years, tucked away on a long-forgotten CD anthology on Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 label. What’s so gratifying about all these is the way that, in context, they begin to flesh out the outlines of an idea. Heard on its own, “Amalgame” might not sound like much, just a minimalist variant on the kind of thing Pan Sonic did better. But here, it becomes part of a dialogue.
That idea is best illustrated by Varoshi Fame’s “Voice of Command (Chekov Re-Edit),” the compilation’s absolute highlight. The song originally comes from a 1987 cassette on a Toronto industrial label; the pounding, hypnotic remix comes from Leeds’ Chekov, a rising producer who introduced himself to Willikens at one of her gigs and asked if he could send her his music. His instincts were on point: Piercing and percussive, laced with laser zaps and sinister shouts, his edit navigates past and present in a way that’s perfectly in keeping with Willikens’ tarnished psychedelia. And without her curatorial hand, we might never have heard it at all.
