#001 — Plight Jada
From the artist, Plight Jada: This mix was really inspired by the human need to negate almost all emotional restraint. I recently went on my first trip to NYC, sadly, after I just turned 30. Birthday present to myself. I was with my two best friends in the world, seeing some of my most influential & obsessively favorite musicians live for Unsound, buying designer pants, hallucinating off perfumes. It made me think more about what music can be as individual works & how impossible it is so predict the end of art collectively. It throws your skull into the blender really. In a good way.
It’s really difficult for me to articulate the headspace I fall into when I write a mix or a track. I’m not entirely sure there’s a word for this little place I go to. It almost feels like a haunting, but it’s nothing totally malevolent actually…I have these screens in front of me, I have these noises in my ears, & all I picture in my immediate peripheral is some form of natural scene. Frozen waterfall. Black sand beaches with dead mandarin fish lodged inside driftwood. Soybean fields wind dancing at dawn. Alot of these are visions from my childhood in Indiana & my recent travels to places I never thought I would make it to, woven with fantasy scenario. I think if I have a familiar place always with me in my forethought, I’m able to relax & filter a solid beam light of authenticity & aura into something palatable for everyone else, for the most part. Basically, picture the most distressing track playing on a CDJ, with crashing waves of Hilo, Hawaii as almost like a desktop background…in your head…contorting your own world with it…taking you there & anywhere else. That’s what it’s like for me most of the time. Trance-like meditation. It’s why I almost never get a chance to look at the crowds I perform for.
Same approach applies with producing music. I have not released any personal work thus far for public consumption, but I have a couple goals for 2025 that include launching my solo work under a new name, possibly making it onto a collab album with other chicago talent, hopefully an exhibition show DJing my own tracks to some performance art I have been conceptualizing for a decade.
My personal favorite stretch of the mix is the fucked up gorgeous/unprofessionally placed Godflesh track, into the audio track taken from the Indianapolis 500, into a track from the Blade movie OST, into this really beautiful track by Richie Culver that I’ve been obsessed with lately. From there to another audio sample of waves crashing on a pier, into the most beautiful track by Abdullah Miniawy. Abdullah’s voice brings me to tears every time. I don’t speak Arabic but the track title insinuates that he’s singing to/about his father. Whether it’s happy or sad I’m not sure.
I think the best way to go into this mix is with your emotions scattered in any way you need them to be healthily or spiraled(your choice!). Wearing headphones with the bass maxed out all the way, a very carbonated drink, wearing your favorite hoodie with the hood pulled up…Sitting in a house that’s not yours(but might as well be yours).
Thanks to Kay for letting me be a weirdo & letting me ruin their mix series from the immediate start.
Follow @plightjada on Instagram.
Tracklist:
PO - Wind
Valentina Magaleti - The Unity of the Mind
Lara Sarkissian - Flow Serene
Hesaitix - Noctian Airgap
Bryan Senti, Dom Bouffard - The Ground
Kurama - Ani lerya
Aho Ssan, Amelie Nilles - eRer
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton - Daughter
Flora Yin Wong - Of the Ferns
KABLAM - Remembrance
xato - Melusine
Godflesh - Locust Furnace
Mark Isham - Blood Club Voices
Richie Culver - Restraining Order
danieloakshotFR - South Parade Pier A_B Waves from Leg of Pier
Abdullah Miniawy - Awrah (Epitaph for my father)
Rachel Lyn - Make Me Feel Inside La La
Pygmies MBENZE-LE - Likembe and men's chant II
The mix was mastered by Kailyn. Trystine is a mix series based in Chicago.
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