as far as new mixes floating about, by now everyone should have been destroyed by the RA sandwell district mix. quality, quality stuff. if you like it, make sure to check function's sandwell mix available through beatport. it is of a similar standard. these guys know what they are doing. much respect. anyway, a few other mixes i thought people might like:
forward strategy group @ detatched: i was hoping to make it to this party. the flu got the better of me and i missed it. listening to this, i have the feeling i missed a special night. this is some seriously heavy gear. almost as rough as the ancient methods stuff. quality, tough techno. further proof of the techno renaissance presently taking place in the UK. get on it.
silent servant @ interface: over at oursoundtracks there are two live recordings from mr mendez in full flight. i am incredibly disappointed i missed him play recently in leeds and then berlin. as far as i am concerned, he is one of the most distinctive, powerful and worthwhile voices in techno right now. respect.
samuli kemppi @ valtimo: a monster 5 hour set. i'm only half way through it, but so far the BPMs have been pitched perfectly, deep and low. nice. plenty of prologue sounds and a lot of the big techno records (horizontal ground, silent servant, blueprint etc.). to be honest, i've felt a bit like samuli's sounds haven't progressed as much as i would have liked, but this mix feels like it has a bit more going on.
dj pete @ plex: ahead of their birthday party next weekend, plex have just released this 3 hour live recording of pete doing his thing. for some unknown reason, some times pete manages to trainwreck the hell out of mixes, and other times he is spot on. i dont get it. but. but the guy knows music. and you can always guarantee he'll play bomb records.
finn johannsen - process part 168: the latest in the never ending modyfier series. i am a long term supporter of what rayna has been doing, but i do worry that modyfier has lost its way a bit. the mixes are coming way too often, and gems like this don't get the attention they deserve. anyway, my advice would be to download it first, then check the tracklisting later - on paper it looks a bit odd, but listening to it, the mix just works. lovely stuff.
that's about all i've had time to listen to this week. enjoy and if you've got any recommendations, make sure to add them in the comments. have a good weekend people.
Nice morning suprise. It will definitely help me get through the working day. Keep it up!
ReplyDeleteWhoa... Forward strategy group = NASTY!!!
ReplyDeleteI've been doing cardio at triple the Vigor than usual!
Whilst I did enjoy the Sandwell mix, I think it suffered from what was alluded to in the write up. Essentially they were condensing a 3 to 5 hour concept into one hour, consequently I found in some perverse way it dragged, too much of a good thing perhaps. I have to say as well, Ableton, it too makes things drag, and also removes unpredictability from the mix.
ReplyDeletedamn, that silent servant set is gone from there... totally checkin out that samuli kemppi set though, probably just what i need for getting through a huge amount of work. thanks yet again chris!
ReplyDelete@NateYork ....
ReplyDeletehttp://oursoundtracks.com/
just scroll down a bit. it's still there.
@nateyork
ReplyDeleteif it not on soundtracks you can
go to the droid behavior podcast
can find it via itunes here
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=158771646
you will be able to get silent servant and a bunch of other podcasts from there parties.
(santiago salazer set etc.)
question:
ReplyDeleteis the sandwell district ra mix the same one for sale on beatport?
and love your blog...so much great music..thank u!
@last anon
ReplyDeleteBeatport Sandwell mix is totally different from the RA mix. Beatport one is even better!! Function is the man!!
Chris - spot on about DJ Pete haha. His first Wax Treatment podcast also great.
ReplyDelete@ Oliver: for what it's worth I agree on the S District one, and the 'deadness' that can creep in with very polished Ableton mixes... the contrary distinction for me has been Mike Huckaby's Bunker set and the amazing set falko B did for us a couple of months ago...
ReplyDelete...tight and loose, high and low, contrast and touch, and the occasional risky swerve... all very important to me...
i've only just lightly skimmed the samuli kemppi set, but in brief listening, i'm confronted with precisely the bpm's and sounds i want to hear, play, and produce all the time.
ReplyDeletei think this set is going to rocket to the top of my playlist right away just from the few minutes i've spent with its random surfing.
if there's a tracklist for it... ;)
Been Playing that Forward Strategy mix, loving it to bits.
ReplyDeleteIs "EARTHQUAKE TECHNO" even a genre yet??
@ PC - interesting what you say about the 'deadness' that can be apparent on some Ableton mixes. One of my fave pastimes is doing the ol' mixtape, on CD, though these are compiled & edited maybe, not mixed. I just finished a techno one and a mate mixed & added a few edits & I got it back today. I couldn't put my finger on the result, but 'deadness' nails it. They're the same tracks as WAVs, they just seem to have lost some of their ... dynamism
ReplyDelete@ Srdic: hmm.... impossible to say... you mean the sound of the entire recording has the deadness, or the overall effect of the edits was deadening?
ReplyDelete...actually, this reminds me, I'm going to upload a compilation I made in 2001 that I believe still works... also contains some tracks from albums in my top list for the 00s.... yes, I did one... kinda with and against the whole idea... succumbing and therefore embracing?
@ PC - succumb and embrace. We look forward to your u/l.
ReplyDeleteFor me the mixtape is a marker of a time I guess; Probably the same for everyone really. Especially when we have just so much music at our fingertips or in our collections. The gems that stand out can get lost (forgotten about) over time, hence the mixtape.
The deadness from the Ableton mix was overall, not just the edits. Weird. Almost like a heavy compression. Will stick with my ol' school methods methinks.
i am all about the mixtape. let the tracks breathe, present them on their own merits, tell a story in a different way.
ReplyDelete@PC - I am not really an Ableton hater, and I use it a lot as a production playground, but I am not fully sold of it's mixing benefits.
ReplyDeleteI think it is pretty tempting to artists looking to develop concepts within mixes, and if that is the case I think all who are using it at the moment are not pushing it hard enough creatively. I thought Surgeon's RA mix used the tool pretty well, taking advantage of the excess time afforded to him by Ableton.
In the Sandwell mix he spoke of tension, and the building of it. I feel that's often what's lost with ableton, the tension the DJ feels and therefore projects when blending two records together. Was that not part of being a good DJ? How skillfully and creatively you can get from A to B under the pressure of two relentlessly spinning turntables. And it's that tension I think I miss, and that part of the DJ's expression that evaporates
I am just a sucker for the sound of Hats firing into the mix and spitting all over the old song, tight mixes alive with sound of the DJ's movements and corrections, and that tense feeling that it could all fall apart at any moment. Until they develop an error tension simulator in Ableton, at which point the might as well put a human in front of two decks again.
From your mix series, I still feel the Norman Nodge mix to be my favorite and the one I return to most. That is everything I love about mixing.
@Srdic - Ableton will colour your sound slightly, leaving its fingerprints all over it. That is unavoidable, each company be Logic or Pro Tools will leave it's mark. Ableton's colour is rather sharp and tight (hard to find the words for it), which I rather like. A lot of the producers on Wolf & Lamb use it as their DAW, and I think for the clearest demonstration of it's colour you just have to listen to some of their back catalogue.
ReplyDelete@ Srdic & Oliver: you could always play it into a cassette recorder, then take a WAV of that... bound to get some nice soft hiss... 'easy on the ears', as they say.
ReplyDelete@ Oliver's earlier post: Is this not what was so incredibly exciting about seeing people like Jeff Mills on form? Even the cue buttons on CDJs take away some of the 'liveness'... when all errors can be corrected, nipped, tucked, controlled... too much tightness...
...loose and tight, a very important dialectic with music... as with signal and noise... no noise, signal sounds bad... and hence back to the Ableton comment...
hey everybody. regarding dj pete mix: maybe anybody knows whats the track on 1:47:00 and 1:58:00. cheers:)
ReplyDeleteanyone know if theres a mirror for the silent servant mixes? i can only download about 20% of it before it cuts off.
ReplyDeletefirst-
ReplyDeleteto anyone having trouble downloading @ oursoundtracks, I apologize. I'm working on resolving the issue permanently but in the mean time - some ZIPs:
Silent Servant Interface 26
http://www.sendspace.com/file/hlq8mw
Silent Servant Interface 22
http://www.sendspace.com/file/4wxzpa
second-
Oliver hit the nail on the head. I felt the same way about the Sandwell mix. Glad it is there, but I'd definitely recommend checking out the live set from Interface 26 over at Droid Behavior or the Planet Rose set floating around on the internet.
I really feel the tension lost in a non-live (wait, isn't that dead) mix is huge. I can be quick to get snobby about these issues, but I'm trying to be more open about it and look at it as a "different" art form in a sense. There must be something to be said for a perfectly blended/selected/arranged mix, even if it isn't live. Perhaps it can move us in a different way.
As PC mentioned, and I just brought up in my recap of Deadbeat VS Luke Hess show on OURSOUNDTRACKS - I just can't really get into an all CD set...maybe that's the next eletist hang up I gotta work on getting over...but...you just can't get any better than live vinyl when it comes to mixing. my 2 yen anyways.
miked - http://oursoundtracks.com
@ Mike: When I interviewed Christoph from D&M, he said some interesting things: pitch shift has a different sound 'effect' when done digitally... it's subtle, almost inaudible.... almost... this has pretty profound (if very subtle) consequences, given that almost everything is pitched up or down when played out...
ReplyDelete...this is also the reason I no longer try to be the Optimo boys when I play 80s vinyl... I really feel that dense pop arrangements, especially with a full band and vocals, sound better if played at +/- ) and left to run... the Loft (and Terre Thaemlitz) might be right on that one...
...interestingly though, P Sherburne's mix canvassing and critiquing the sound/scene for Unsound *really* worked, for me, and it was worked over in Ableton...
...maybe it's a matter of having multi media creative responses to multi media situations...
...of course, with vinyl, it's the specifically 'pleasing to the ear' imperfections that we love, no?
There is a really, really, really interesting interview with Sakamoto Ryuichi here
http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic026/pdf/072-085e.pdf
that I recommend anyone interested take a look at... ...also interesting that the Sandwell boys all dig 'distortion' music a la post punk etc...
...also that Dozzy, Nuel, and most of the so-called headfuck techno focuses very carefully on the background/ambient timbres and very often has a strong droning 'aquatic' vibe, no?
If plugins minimal focusess on FX, then I think the more engaging forms of techno focus on sound 'effects'... if that makes sense...
Some more sets R_co posted on Soundcloud.
ReplyDeleteSleeparchive vs DJ Pete Live @ Club Transmediale, Maria, Berlin (Samurai FM) - 03-02-2007:
http://soundcloud.com/r_co/sleeparchive-vs-dj-pete-live-club-transmediale-maria-berlin-samurai-fm-03-02-2007/download
Scion aka Substance & Vainqueur Live @ Hr-xxl Nightgroove - 2001:
http://soundcloud.com/r_co/scion-aka-substance/download
Not sure if the mixes are accurately named, but so far the DJ Pete/Sleeparchive mix sounds pretty legit.
@PC, I read the interview with Sakamoto Ryuichi, really fascinating stuff. It's going to take me a while to digest all of that, and so many of the topics discussed open up new avenues of thought. Our western desire to strive for single tone perfection is so typical of us. Discovering that singularity, or that one thing the underscores the rest, seems to be be holy grail of western culture. And yet, as he mentions, we don't even like it, and this one 'real' thing we strive for appears to be further away from our 'reality'. Just some initial thoughts, but if noise and imperfection ever needed legitimizing, he does a pretty good job of it there.
ReplyDeleteNot sure if the mixes are accurately named, but so far the DJ Pete/Sleeparchive mix sounds pretty legit.
ReplyDeleteso its a really boring, repetitive set that doesn't go anywhere or do anything followed by a bunch of amazing records that you'll probably never be able to find?
@ Oliver: yup... sawari/javari is important... it's more fun to compute if the computer is droning, I guess...
ReplyDelete"I feel that's often what's lost with ableton, the tension the DJ feels and therefore projects when blending two records together. Was that not part of being a good DJ? How skillfully and creatively you can get from A to B under the pressure of two relentlessly spinning turntables. And it's that tension I think I miss, and that part of the DJ's expression that evaporates
ReplyDeleteI am just a sucker for the sound of Hats firing into the mix and spitting all over the old song, tight mixes alive with sound of the DJ's movements and corrections, and that tense feeling that it could all fall apart at any moment. Until they develop an error tension simulator in Ableton, at which point the might as well put a human in front of two decks again.
From your mix series, I still feel the Norman Nodge mix to be my favorite and the one I return to most. That is everything I love about mixing."
amen oliver, amen.
on ableton mixes: if you guys are saying that the sandwell RA mix suffers from being a bit dead/lifeless, then i cannot agree. like kevin gorman's ssg mix, i think it is another example of how ableton can be used for good rather than evil.
ReplyDeletewith ableton, it has the perverse result of making it *harder to DJ (well). mixing becomes so easy it becomes polished and dull. *but* i do think it is possible for there to be great digital mixes. you can do amazing and shit stuff on all formats.
that samuli kemppi mix is fantastic. 5 hours flew by!
ReplyDeleteThis links in to a degree with the discussions on this page. Interesting.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bodytonicmusic.com/words/2009/oct/28/column-donnacha-costello-1/
interesting discussion here, sorry i'm coming late to it. i totally agree with that oliver says here:
ReplyDelete"I am just a sucker for the sound of Hats firing into the mix and spitting all over the old song, tight mixes alive with sound of the DJ's movements and corrections, and that tense feeling that it could all fall apart at any moment."
my complaint with ableton mixes doesn't have to do with audio quality -- i don't find ableton has much obvious fingerprint unless loops are warped to the warbling point, which a good producer/DJ will know how to avoid. my issue is with timekeeping -- once things have been locked into a grid, you lose that subtle slippage, which can be an almost unconscious quality, a kind of friction you can't put your finger on, that you get from turntable-driven (or CDR-driven) DJ mixes.
that's not an issue, of course, with ableton mixsets (or mixtapes) that aren't beatmatching, and merely mixing tonally. in that kind of collage construction, ableton arguably allows more possibilities than simply mixing with two (or even more) turntables; by taking out real time from the equation, you can focus on variables you might not be able to otherwise.
(and for the record, while my unsound mix was finally put together in ableton, the beatmatched portions were done by hand, precisely because i wanted to avoid the stale rhythmic qualities of auto beatmatching. whether that hodge-podge works for the listener, of course, is up to him/her.)
@ Philip - actually I was going to quote you only yesterday in this as I read about your Modyfier mix and what you had to say about Ableton. A really interesting read (and a very much pained over mix for you).
ReplyDelete" .... but I've always felt like records mixed in real time have a far more dynamic feel than sets tracked in Ableton. Ableton sets always seem a little leaden to me, even if it's only a subconscious sensation. "
http://modyfier-modifying.blogspot.com/2009/09/blog-post_28.html