Conair & Ears

If you've ever wondered what a footwork set would sound like after three cans of Red Bull and a crate of jungle records from 1994, Conair & Ears at Keep Hush is your answer. The room is a pressure cooker of shuffling feet and dropped jaws, as the duo hovers around 158.6 BPM—a tempo that makes our hearts race just typing it—and mostly occupies 7A, a key that feels like the dark alley where breakbeats go to get mugged. The energy is split almost evenly between low and mid, which means the kicks are punishing but the melodic content (such as it is) gets room to breathe.

Opening with Gjiko's 'Maybach me shofer'—a Balkan pop-trap outlier that somehow works at this speed—is a bold move that pays off when it dissolves into The Isley Brothers' 'Between the Sheets,' flipped into a footwork re-edit that makes us want to slow-dance and skank simultaneously. The highlight is DJ Rashad's 'Brighter Dayz' featuring DJ Spinn, a Teklife classic that hits with the emotional weight of a freight train, all pitched-up soul and 808s. Urban Jungle's 'Back in the Days (Sexy Lady's Mix)' is the set's epicentre at nine and a half minutes—a jungle roller that keeps the footwork energy locked in a loop of pure nostalgia.

And then, just when we think we're done, MF DOOM's 'Eucalyptus' closes the set—a hip-hop outro that's almost cruel in its calmness, leaving us gasping. The journey is a brutalist arc: from the Balkan opener through the R&B footwork heart, peaking with Rashad's tear-jerker, and ending in that dusty DOOM sample. We're not okay.