8 Tracks: Of Tangent

Music

Tangent, one of London’s most loved parties turns five this September. Residents Nick the Record and John Gómez started the party at a time when London was seeing many of its small clubs closing. To remedy this, Tangent’s aim was to create a space in which the two residents could share their favourite records in an intimate setting and on a top-class sound system. From day one they have maintained a strict no guest policy: as London’s clubs have become more and more reliant on international guests, they emphasized the importance of a club night growing through its residents.

Tangent started out in Troyganic, a small basement underneath a Turkish café on Kingsland Road in which they installed a D&B Audiotechnik sound system with the help of Darren Morgan. With an erratic manager and virtually no passing trade, they never knew what to expect on arrival. Nick recalls how “sometimes the basement needed clearing, sometimes the manager had forgotten to hire security, and one time they arrived to find the owner had built an actual wall right through the dancefloor.” Despite all of these misadventures, Tangent grew from a small gathering of friends to a party that eventually outgrew the space (spurred on, no doubt, by the wall in the middle of the dancefloor) and after three years it relocated to The Pickle Factory, the perfect home to continue the party.

Ahead of the fifth anniversary party tomorrow at Pickle Factory, Nick and John select 8 tracks that represent what Tangent is all about…

Buy tickets for the fifth birthday HERE.

LISTEN

Francis The Great - Look Up In The Sky (Négro Nature)

John: This was the first tune that was played at the first Tangent. We had just finished setting up the sound system at the time the party was due to start. We’d spent all day preparing the space and hadn’t had time to eat anything, so Nick put on this amazing and extremely rare record while we had a quick bite in the makeshift booth. As the record played I thought to myself: bloody hell what have I got myself into… If Nick’s first record in an empty room is this, how the heck am I going to keep up? I think we’ve pretty much been reliving that dynamic with every record we’ve played since.

Nick: I haven’t thought about that since then. I’m sure my reason for putting that on was that it’s long and gave us time to eat. I didn’t mean to intimidate my young apprentice…. or did I???

Francis The Great - Look Up In The Sky (Négro Nature)

John: This was the first tune that was played at the first Tangent. We had just finished setting up the sound system at the time the party was due to start. We’d spent all day preparing the space and hadn’t had time to eat anything, so Nick put on this amazing and extremely rare record while we had a quick bite in the makeshift booth. As the record played I thought to myself: bloody hell what have I got myself into… If Nick’s first record in an empty room is this, how the heck am I going to keep up? I think we’ve pretty much been reliving that dynamic with every record we’ve played since.

Nick: I haven’t thought about that since then. I’m sure my reason for putting that on was that it’s long and gave us time to eat. I didn’t mean to intimidate my young apprentice…. or did I???
Esa - A Muto

Nick: Some tunes take a few listens to grow on you when you listen at home.
The same tune, when played at just the right moment on the dancefloor can grow on you as the tune develops and you feel the full impact of it in the moment. In some ways that’s the job of the DJ and when John played this at one of the first parties in the basement of Troyganic I knew that my young Jedi was up to the task and that we had something special happening.
Angélique Kidjo - Wé-Wé (Tribe Mix)

John: Nick and I are such record hounds that even the tunes that we think we have played the most at Tangent might only have been played a handful of times, as we are always incorporating new tunes to keep it fresh and dynamic. However, this song by Angélique Kidjo was a firm fixture in our early parties and will forever be remembered as the Tangent anthem. This was a classic at Shelter in NYC and it works perfectly for us. We always joke that the main genre we play at Tangent is “foreign muck” and this straddles the world-y and house-y border like no other.
Mildlife - The Gloves Don't Bite (Mount Liberation Unlimted's Re-Edit For The Dance Floor)

John: Over the past few years we have developed a strong relationship with our Stockholm bröder Mount Liberation Unlimited and feel very close to their music. Their quirky and joyful trips into outer space have joined us in the twilight of many Tangents. Their magnificent rework of Australian jazz-prog outfit Mildlife is the kind of song that only comes across every so often, it’s deep and powerful and guides the dance into a really special and unique place.
Cotonete, Dimitri From Paris - The Hustle Parisian

Nick: This one has been played quite a bit by both of us. Even on the same night once.
We do 1 hour sets for most of the night so we hear most of what each other plays but occasionally each of us pops out for a breather. I remember one night John came and took over from me and played this as maybe his second tune. I recognized it instantly and quickly went over to tell John that I had just played it. To be fair he made a great save (he used to be a goalkeeper, despite his height) by locating and playing the other version within 90 seconds.

John: The first time I heard this I was like, wow, that’s a Tangent tune. I was pretty excited about playing it to Nick but, as usual, he’d got there first…
Nu Guinea - Je Vulesse

Nick: Obviously everyone plays this, but it ticks a few boxes of what we play in that it straddles that space between disco and house, on one level, and it has lyrics in a language we don’t understand, on another. London’s dancefloors are very international so whatever languages we move through the songs always seems to resonate with someone in the room.
Eddy Louiss - Les Elephants

John: This is one of my favourite records of all time, so it has naturally made a few appearances at Tangent. For me it’s a perfect record: an oddball private press by a French jazz musician experimenting with drum machines that resulted, unpredictably, in a kind of proto-broken beat anthem. It’s a great song with which to change the dynamic of the night and take the dance into deeper and more abstract places.
Nick The Record, Dan And The No Commercial Value Band ?- Give Me More

Nick: Around the same time that we started Tangent I also started my edit label Record Mission with Dan Tyler (of the Idjut Boys). Tangent was not only the place for us to play the music we love the most, it also became the testing ground for our edits. It was really helpful being able to see the effect each of these had on a dancefloor before the records were released and many of them also became firm Tangent classics. They say a lot about the general aesthetic of Tangent: playful, wonky, and drawn out to the point beyond boredom where euphoria lies!