Mixtape Mondays: FireFLY, Passport Gang, Splendid Sound

Words by DJ Shirkhan

Greetings from cold, cold Scandinavia. It’s really freezing over here, and most people are enjoying skiing and snowboarding right now. I tried skiing for the first time the other week, and I looked like a drunken giraffe on a slippery hill. So I left that alone and stuck to what I know and love: reggae and dancehall music. Been listening to nuff new music lately, and here are some favourites for this week.

FireFLY, Party Hard And Done: We kick of this week’s Mixtape Mondays with a fresh mix from Europe by FireFLY. These guys are a bass and melodic music production/DJ duo hailing from Lausanne, Switzerland. FireFLY is a fairly new name in the game but they are well experienced, having producing hits for more than 15 years. Both are founding members of MXX Music Empire, one of Switzerland’s leading rap camps. They’ve worked with all the top ballers in Europe and in 2016 they started experimenting with new genres which gave birth to FireFLY. After several EDM and Trap releases over the past year, they now deliver the basshall/dancehall mixtape Party Hard and Done, including a selection of some of the best basshall/future dancehall tracks including several exclusives.

Passport Gang, Dehydration 12 (Remix-Mixtape 2018): I’ve always loved the Dehydration mixtape series from Champion Squad and it’s not the first time they are featured on Mixtape Mondays. DJ Reem keeps dropping them like once a year, and the mixes are always full of surprises. In this edition, some of the DJs from the newly formed collective The Passport Gang are invited and together they deliver an insane mixtape full of remixes and dubplates. Seriously, the amount of 45s can be counted on two hands (maybe three). We hear some of the hottest songs in the dancehall right now, remixed on some of the biggest rap and trap beats. Everything is carefully thought through and artistically made. This is definitely one of those mixes that you’ll play regularly, something highly irregular today as we are fed with new music everyday, sometimes leaving quality projects overshadowed.

Splendid Sound, Drunk Till December: We fly back to Europe — well Eastern Europe to be more exact — and tune in to the most drunken sound in Europe: the ever-frass Splendid from Poland. It’s not an easy task to carry the dancehall torch in Eastern Europe but Splendid has showed us that they’re the right sound to do that. As a crew that keep events, release mixes and participate in soundclashes regularly, they prove that the scene in Eastern Europe is alive and we look forward to see what it bears in the future. Drunk as always, Splendid wrapped up a two-hour (!) long mix with the hottest dancehall tracks of 2017, most of which are still mashing up dances worldwide. Pour up a glass of Zubrowska and enjoy!