Friendly Potential, Wellington - May 2021

I once wrote that conjuring a list of the best Ben UFO sets would be a relative snap. In fact he’s helped—the London DJ’s pro pages feature all his streams, including years’ worth of near-weekly Rinse FM sets, but his own uploads are rarer and therefore special. On Mixcloud, there are a grand total of eight; SoundCloud features a dozen. I’ve only begun to dive into this slice of his massive mixography, but this is the find so far: His set from a New Zealand trip, as he wrote, yielded “three hours of garage, dubstep, grime, hardcore, jungle and techno recorded on a Sunday evening at 121 in Wellington for the Friendly Potential crew. At their request I tried to play with the energy of the old Sunday night sessions at FWD>>, and it was so fun. Old and new music side by side. Spinbacks at 2008 levels.” He’s right.

Michaelangelo Matos