Friday Tune-Up: Josie’s Fard As Huck CJNK Radio Show Playlist!
It’s time for another Friday tune-up post! This time we’ll be taking a listen to what CJNK DJ Josie Lang spins on her late-night electronic music show, Fard as Huck (a name inspired by late-90s standards and practices at campus radio stations across the country). It’s two solid hours of Dance, Euro, Techno, Big Beat, and Hardcore sourced from 1990 to 1997, mixed together in a big, sloppy round-up that would have jumped right off of the airwaves of any small-town broadcaster like Dead Air’s CJNK.
Check it out by clicking here, or play it right here, right now!
I was deep into electronic music as a teenager, and then into my 20s when I became a rave promoter and performer. A lot of that period of my life served as the inspiration for our previous graphic novel, Code 45, but the time leading up to my discovery of the rave scene involved piecing together bits of dance music culture from whatever bits managed to make it through the airwaves to the small town in Quebec where I grew up.
There were two key entry points to electronic music for me. The first was Musiqueplus, the French-language music television channel that not only played a ton of Euro in regular rotation, but also had a weekly show called “Bouge de la” that took a deeper dive into DJ culture by way of its in-studio dance party. It’s likely from here that Josie picked up on artists like Reel 2 Real (I Like To Move It), DJ Supreme (Tha Wildstyle), Armand Van Helden (Witch Doktor), and Modo (Ein Zwei Polizei), tracks that very important to shaping my own musical tastes in the mid-1990s.
Musiqueplus was also at the forefront of pushing Big Beat into the pop culture zeitgeist. Tracks from The Crystal Method (whose Keep Hope Alive was also beamed into my consciousness from the soundtrack to “The Replacement Killers”), Chemical Brothers (Electrobank, Block Rockin’ Beats), and of course The Prodigy (the entire Fat of the Land album) were major touchstones. The channel even played videos for decidedly non-mainstream Techno tracks from groups like Empirion (Narcotic Influence), which in retrospect is truly amazing. Josie’s playlist reflects some of the deeper cuts from each of these artists that she, being a little older and cooler than I was at that time, had probably heard way before I ever did.
Next up were a set of compilation CDs that a close friend brought back across the Atlantic when returning from a high school trip to Switzerland. With names like “Rave Base 7,” these double-disc sets were my very first exposure to things like Breakbeat, Hardcore, and Happy Hardcore. It’s hard to overstate how life-changing it was to experience CJ Bolland (Sugar is Sweeter) and Dune (Million Miles From Home), which lead me to artists like Blumchen (Verruckte Jungs) that had a huge influence on the kind of music I would eventually produce and promote once I discovered raves.
Of course, when I began working as a DJ at a college radio station I didn’t know anything about ‘scenes’ or ‘genres.’ I synthesized all of these different sounds into one cohesive category—dance music—painting it all with roughly the same brush. MC Mario and Future Sound of London were one and the same inside my head. This speaks to my cultural isolation at the time and having no one but my friends and fellow station DJs, who were often discovering the music at the same time I was, to travel with on these audio journeys. I tried to reflect that “mash it all together” esthetic in Josie’s Fard as Huck playlist and show what an open-minded electronic music fan with a love for the harder stuff would have broadcast to the unsuspecting ears of her rural audience.
As a bonus—if you want to hear how this playlist would have sounded on an actual radio station, CKCU DJ Mimsey Daemon sent it out over the Ottawa airwaves last night as part of his Interzone show. Check it out here!
