Musically, not too much happens in December and early January. Too many compilations, too much pressure, far too much crap. Imagine hotpress’ delight when, one cold and wet Tuesday in December, a DJ mix like very little else landed in our postbox. A mix that favoured passion over fashion. Seventy minutes where The Cramps and Ricardo Villalobos rub shoulders, Os Mutantes and CLS get down and Loose Joints and Basic Channel cut a rug. It’s like Radio Soulwax for your cooler older brother.

But first, let’s examine how this mix came into being. It is – curiously enough – the tale of a techno and house pioneer who decided he’d had enough. Enter JD Twitch from Optimo, aka Twitch from Twitch and Brainstorm fame, aka Glaswegian techno refugee Keith McIvor.
“When I first got into techno and house in the late 80s and early 90s, it was exciting, it was underground and it was… sexy,”?McIvor reflects.
T&B started what became a legendary techno club in Scotland, Pure, which ran for a decade and epitomised all that was right about 4/4 music. But as the years passed, all was not right on the good ship Pure.
“By the mid-90s, it all started getting so boring – and I blame Jeff Mills for this.”
Really?
“Well, it’s not just him, but he started off a trend for hard, boring, looped techno and pretty soon, that’s really all there was… just people punching the air all night long – it was so unsexy. And there were no girls!
“Pure ran up to 2000 – and once a year we still get back together to do a night – but I think by 1997 or 1998, it became a drag, we really didn’t know why we were still doing it. So we stopped in 2000 – 10 years after we started.”
But while one way of life was drawing to a close, another was beginning.
“Optimo started as a Sunday night thing in 1997 where we could go to play records that we liked that weren’t techno, stuff that we loved. It wasn’t meant to be a huge success, but it just grew from there.”
Now a weekly, trendy magazine-endorsed club night, the pair have just released their first compilation on hip French label Tigersushi. As outlined above, How To Kill The DJ (Part Two) is a blast, 42 tracks in 74 re-edited future/retro minutes. How long did it take?
“About 18 months – and if we had known it was going to take so long, I think we would just have released a 15-track mix and left it at that. We really had no idea how difficult it was going to be to licence tracks. And then there was the re-editing – I had to put so many tracks on to the computer and chop up beats so they could be mixed in time.”
What does Keith think of what the ‘house’ scene – the sound and lifestyle that inspired so many to look at things differently - has become today?
“It’s so, so different. For me, it’s just not relevant anymore. There’s no mystery to it – it’s on when you walk into a café, a bar, a clothes shop… it’s too fucking easy.”

Optimo’s How To Kill The DJ (Part Two) is out now on Tigersushi. It’s brilliant!