DHA FM Mix #434 by Ivan Smagghe

Ivan Smagghe belongs to a top table of DJs that journalists like to describe as “The DJ’s DJ”. Along with the likes of occasional partner-in-crime Andrew Weatherall, Ivan has the ability to play music like a raw conduit between his famously obscure records and the dancefloor’s strobe-soaked bodies, injecting something of himself seamlessly into the mix along the way.

His genre-defying/defining production work originally in Black Strobe and now in It’s A Fine Line and Smagghe & Cross has connected him to and garnered the praise of (amongst others) James Murphy, Trevor Jackson, Ata, Optimo, and the aforementioned Weatherall. All fellow crusaders in the fight to prove that electronic music can be so much more than a one-dimensional soundtrack for a night on the lash.

After nearly a decade of putting out numerous remixes (from Superpitcher to the XX, Discodeine to Au Revoir Simone, Fairmont to Tiga) and releases that can’t be boxed in (electro rockabilly on Kompakt to Italo rickety disco, the “nu-Balearic” classic My Kind of Woman on history Clock), his project with Tim Paris, It’s A Fine Line released their long-awaited album in September 2016 on Kill The DJ, a label Ivan has co-run for 15 years with his old Paris Le Pulp crew. The first single, THE DELIVERY, featured Alex Kapranos, the singer from Franz Ferdinand.

Since 2013 Ivan Smagghe has also been running his own imprint, Les Disques de la Mort (LDDLM). The label is very much an outlet for his own unique taste in music: new kids & old friends (Erol Alkan, Zongamin, Manfredas, GoldenBug, Marc Pinol), and reissues (003 is composed of edits of Israeli coldwave). They released the first SAVE! lp (Mutado Pintado & Colder), the DJ OIL LP in 2017 and launch a sub-series of obscure music compilations called MUSIC FROM THE MAINLAND. LLDLM is the, as Ivan calls it, the ‘style of no style’, the refusal to be pigeonholed.