Marco Shuttle Rhythm Büro Podcast

East­ern Europe likes its dance music fast, and in his clos­ing set at Kyiv’s Natu­ra fes­ti­val in August, Ital­ian-born, Berlin-based DJ Mar­co Shut­tle came pre­pared. Over the sec­ond half of a four-hour set — record­ed at the tail-end of a 24-hour par­ty held at a secret for­est loca­tion 30 min­utes out­side the city — the tem­po stays between 140 and 150 BPM, tak­ing in heart-rac­ing tech­no, glis­ten­ing acid, old-school hard­core, and oth­er styles that throw sparks as they scrape against the guardrails. Despite the ele­vat­ed ener­gy lev­els, Shut­tle rarely blud­geons lis­ten­ers over the head: His rich­ly tex­tured breaks throw off pow­dery plumes, and he fre­quent­ly grav­i­tates toward tracks with a thick, vel­vety melod­ic midrange. Those lis­ten­ing close­ly enough will catch some real gems sprin­kled through­out, like an obscure cut from Aphex Twin’s Bradley’s Robot EP or a mind-bend­ing fusion of psy­che­del­ic drums and jazz trum­pet from a 1996 EP by exper­i­men­tal musi­cian David Shea. Best of all is the way Shuttle’s fre­quent rhyth­mic and styl­is­tic shifts keep the flow of the set dynam­ic: For all its white-knuck­le inten­si­ty, there are plen­ty of chances to catch your breath and take in the grandeur of the panora­ma he lays out.