- Knowingly sleazy, sweaty ambient music.
- Jake Muir's cult-favorite Bathhouse Blues mixes celebrate the seedy side of queerness. The two existing installments of the series have found the America-born, Berlin-based DJ and experimentalist pairing bleary samples taken from vintage gay pornography with humid illbient and jazz selections. The sessions are sensual and hypnotic, and have racked up tens of thousands of plays on Soundcloud.
Muir has now pivoted the Bathhouse Blues concept into a full release, which arrives via his usual home label, sferic. The music here came to life in tandem with a performance at INA GRM in Paris. Muir delivers two sprawling compositions that clock in around 40 minutes total. A-side, "Cruisin’ 87," opens with chintzy yet cinematic keys that call to mind the score to an '80s film noir. It slowly disintegrates into lo-fi musique concréte underlined by synthesized drones.
The back half, "Pipe Dream," is even more cavernous, built on restless synth flourishes that give way to a tapestry of weightless field recordings. Muir highlights his range, pushing his typically grainy sound to new heights of psychedelia. Lust cast a long shadow over the original Bathhouse Blues mixes. On this record, the essence of flirtation is more subtle, like a tendril of steam wafting over warm water.
Tracklist01. Cruisin '87
02. Pipe Dream