The Best Cercle Sets, Ranked
A hot-air balloon over Cappadocia at sunrise. A Roman theatre in Orange, first century, still standing. Hatshepsut's temple in Luxor after dark, an observatory nearly 3,600 metres up in the Bernese Alps, and a granite rock outside Guatapé with a platform on top. Cercle puts one artist somewhere nobody would think to put a sound system, and these are the ten films worth sitting through start to finish.
Ben Böhmer, Solomun, Adriatique, Above & Beyond, Monolink and Argy are all here, and the split is exactly half: five of the ten are live sets on hardware and instruments, five are DJ sets. Six years separate the oldest from the newest. Ranked on the performance, not on the view.
Opening records
THE FIRST RECORD OF EACH OF THESE 10 SETS. CLICK TO LAND ON IT.
▶ WATCH THE FULL SET Ben Bohmer
Sunrise over Cappadocia from a hot-air balloon that is actually moving, and a live set with nowhere to hide in it. All 14 tracks carry his name, originals, collaborations and his own remixes. It is also the most-watched Cercle film in the crate, and not by a little.
-
▶ WATCH Adriatique
Hatshepsut Temple, Luxor, Egypt for Cercle · Luxor, EgyptTwo hours and twenty minutes in front of Hatshepsut's temple in Luxor after dark, the longest set of the ten. The temple is around 3,500 years old and its symmetry reads as almost modern, which is the trick of the whole location. 25 records, more than anyone else here plays.
-
▶ WATCH Solomun
Solomun @ Théâtre Antique d'Orange for Cercle · Orange, FranceThe 2018 broadcast that set the scale for everything after it: a DJ set inside the Roman theatre of Orange, with the first-century stage wall standing behind him for the full two hours. 21 tracks, nearly all of them other people's records, which for Solomun is the point.
-
▶ WATCH Sebastien Leger
Live at the Great Pyramids of Giza · Great Pyramids of Giza, EgyptA live set built almost entirely from his own productions at the Great Pyramids of Giza, played on hardware, with a Nerdseq tracker listed in the tracklist as if it were a record. 9 tracks in 95 minutes, which is how much room each one gets.
-
▶ WATCH ZHU
Blacklizt DJ Set at Hakuba Iwatake, Nagano · Hakuba Iwatake, Nagano, JapanZHU under his Blacklizt alias, the darker of the two, on a snowbound mountainside at Hakuba Iwatake in Nagano. 21 tracks, filmed in March 2020, and the only set here with snow in every shot.
-
▶ WATCH Reinier Zonneveld
Live at the State Aviation Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine for Cercle · Kyiv, UkraineLive hardware techno among the aircraft of the State Aviation Museum in Kyiv, 2019. Zonneveld builds each track in the room as he goes and the cameras spend the set proving it. The hardest set of the ten by a distance, and the one Cercle film here that was never going to be about the view.
-
▶ WATCH Be Svendsen
Live at Mount Nemrut, Turkey for Cercle · Mount Nemrut, TurkeyTwo hours at the summit of Mount Nemrut, among stone heads that have sat on that mountain for two thousand years. Svendsen's slow, swinging electronica gets 18 records to stretch across and uses every minute of it.
-
▶ WATCH Above & Beyond
Above & Beyond for Cercle in Guatape, Colombia · Guatape, ColombiaPiedra del Peñol is a granite monolith outside Guatapé with a platform 220 metres up, and Above & Beyond play the gentler end of Anjunabeats on it for 94 minutes. 15 tracks and no festival pyro, and better for it.
-
▶ WATCH Monolink
Live for Cercle & W Hotels at Gaatafushi Island, Maldives · Gaatafushi Island, MaldivesGuitar, voice and sequencers on Gaatafushi Island at golden hour, 14 tracks in 101 minutes. Monolink alone with the horizon, which is where his songs have always wanted to be.
-
▶ WATCH Argy
Live at Jungfraujoch - Top of Europe, Switzerland for Cercle · Jungfraujoch, SwitzerlandA DJ set at the Sphinx Observatory on the Jungfraujoch, nearly 3,600 metres up, the highest location in the crate. He opens on his own Faust with Son Of Son and runs 22 records to the closing credits. The most recent film here, and the one where the air is thinnest.
The Cercle Sessions collection below holds all 23 of Cercle's films in the crate. Thirteen more than fit here, every one full length with a timestamped tracklist.