modyfier

2009-11-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

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NICOLA RATTI

If I were to answer, "Why do you do what you do?" I would say, "It is because of how I imagine the future."

For me, it’s all about that. I moved into art so that I could build a place where all my thoughts projected forward and split into something real -- music, soundart, pictures and so on. It is a feeling, maybe a hidden one, that grows from the inside and tries to step out. Art is the place where thoughts grow into shapes. So the point is, how do I find a way to let them live outside that place, without me?

I’m really interested in the ways that music lives without the musician. A lot of musicians, including me, use loops during their live sets and recording takes. Some live sets are mostly based on layering loops upon loops. Sometimes I like to imagine that I could leave the stage and that my instruments would go on without me. I shift positions from the composer to the audience. That’s incredible. It is an exciting example of a separation process.

I’m getting more and more into soundart projects as “places” where things I say can be tried. I’m really convinced art should live without the artist. The music that I -- and a lot of others -- am doing lately is a beautiful occasion to test this theory, and not just through recording (on cd, lp, mc, digitally, etc.).

The track below is taken from my last album “Ode” on the Sydney based label Preservation. It’s called “Tropical Malady” as the title of the Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s movie. The music here moves from the clash of light and dark in the movie (its atmosphere). And here I sit, listening to my music as I would listen to the leaves in the dark night of a tropical forest.

nicola ratti - process part 174 (tropical malady) by modyfier

2009-11-16T11:51:00.000-08:00

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ERNESTO FERREYRA

It was a bit more than a year ago when, through my friend Mossa, Rayna contacted me to do a mix or a track for Modyfier.

Initially, I thought making a track and simultaneously writing down the process of composition was a great idea. I thought it could it be a good way for me to remember how I do things, since every time I finish a a track I can't remember how I got there or how I made a particular sound. I guess that is because I don't follow the same path from one track to another.

Anyway, lots of things happened in the middle. I was traveling a lot. I also moved to a different country and didn't have a studio to sit down and work in and so it was hard for me to find the time to do the exercise. Fortunately, in the meantime, I found this mix that I made in Mexico in early 2003. It's one of those mixes that you never show to anybody, a personal one that captures a special moment in your life. So recently, when I was going through special moments one more time, I listened to it again and it felt right for me to finally share.

It is an atemporal mix, even if you can place the sounds of a particular time. It doesn't contain the kind of music I usually play on a Saturday night or the top ten of the hour. It is just one of those mixes that keeps popping up every now and then, that I keep re-listening to and enjoying once more.

I'm very glad to be a part of this amazing project. I hope you enjoy it.

ernesto ferreyra - process part 173 (bajo cero) by modyfier

2009-11-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

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CASPER C

For some time, I've harbored hopes of putting together a feel-good mix of records that have really stood the test of time, and harbor genuine emotion and meaning to me. And what better time than the beginning of another UK summer that arrived with such high hopes (Don't they always?). And right now, in November, as the nights draw in, and the air begins to bite, what better time to remind ourselves that it's always Summer, somewhere...

The beginning of 2009 was a time of cross-genre musical celebration, with the warm, organic feeling of 'real' house, disco and techno with a non-minimal studio approach enjoying a resurgence, which continues today. Studio-tanned die-hards, such as Aeroplane, Todd Terje, Omar S and DJ Koze were crossing over all over the place, and becoming bonafide members of the pantheon of dance.

This mix is my attempt at telling a story which, such is life, has a bittersweet overtone... Reading between the lines, the second half of the mix is more autobiographical than I feel its necessary to reveal in public. Like the best stories, and the best summers, I hope this mix leaves you with unanswered questions, unrequited emotions but the reassurance that, at the end of it all, everything really is going to be alright, and it will always be summer somewhere.

casper c - process part 172 (its always summer somewhere) by modyfier

01. Aeroplane - Aeroplane
02. Tommy Seebach - Bubble Sex
03. Low Motion Disco - People Come In Slowly
04. Skatebard - Marimba
05. Woolfy vs Projections - Abysnth (Marcos Worgull Remix)
06. Blackbelt Anderson - Sandoz
07. Studio - Life's A Beach (Todd Terje Remix)
08. Justus Kohncke - It's Gonna Be Alright
09. James Chance - One More Regret
10. Omar S - Psychotic Photosynthesis
11. Addled - I'm Sorry
12. John Tejada - The End Of It All
13. DJ Koze - Mariposa
14. Tommy James & The Shondells - Crimson & Clover

2009-11-04T11:47:00.000-08:00

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MACKAVELI

I was extremely pleased when Modyfier asked me to contribute to the Process Series, so I spent an extra special amount of time preparing and creating this mix. I think it’s fair to say that this is an exact representation of what’s floating my boat at the moment and what I’m constantly playing out and at home. I’ve tried to encompass a nice broad style of House and Garage in the mix and hopefully representing the UK to the max (all of the artists featured on the mix are from the UK, barring Claude Von Stroke, and well the Brackle’s remix is of John Legend but I’m going to let that one swerve). Starting with some really nice trippy 2 step from Pariah released on R & S Records and then moving through the mix we hit man of the moment, Joy Orbison. A couple of tracks from Hot City are in the mix. This is an artist I’m particularly into at the mo. This boy’s harking back to the days of 90’s rave and UK Garage (peak time around the late 90’s, early 00’s) and using this to make fresher than fresh House. A little bit of nice Old Skool UK Garage is flexed, too, from Scott Garcia ("A London Thing" never leaves my box) and finishing up with some recent Claude Von Stroke. Hope you enjoy.

mackaveli - process part 171 by modyfier

01. Pariah – Orpheous
02. Synkro – Just Say
03. Joy Orbison – J Doe
04. Zomby – Digital Flora
05. Joy Orbison – Brklyn Clln
06. John Legend – Heatbreaker (Brackles Remix)
07. Hot City – Head Work
08. Scott Garcia feat MC Styles – A London Thing
09. Roska – Hey Cutie
10. D-Malice – Keep On
11. Hot City – What Am I Doin’
12. Claude Von Stroke – Storm On Lake Saint Claire

2009-10-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

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REAGENZ (text by Jonah Sharp)

This is most of the Reagenz live show we did at 222 Club in San Francisco on 1-October 2009. Reagenz is a collaborative project that I do with Move D, aka David Moufang, that we started in 1994. This show has a few tracks from our upcoming album “Playtime” which comes out 1-November on Germany’s Workshop records, as well as a bunch of new tracks we’ve been trying out live over the last few months.

Gear we use includes a Nord Modular 1, a Roland TR808 (which handles most of the drums), a virtual Korg MS20, an analog delay and Ableton Live (which acts as the clock (it’s still unstable, please take note, anyone from Ableton)). There is also a lot of Oberheim OB8 that I just picked up a couple of weeks ago (the lushest 80’s polysynth ever). We trigger a few Ableton parts that are from our recording sessions and mix it up with the live hardware as well as some inspired guitar from David. The idea is to get the machines to do as much cool stuff as possible, in real time, and to keep it as interesting for ourselves and the audience. The first track ‘Shibuya’ is actually edited in from our Decibel Festival show a few days earlier – I didn’t press record in time in SF! To hear the complete Decibel gig, click here.

The 222 show was a really fun gig for us because there was lots of improvisation going on and unexpected things coming in and out of the mix - and it was a great crowd. So here it is, warts and all.

reagenz - process part 170 (live at 222 club sf 091001) by modyfier

01. Shibuya Night
02. Untitled
03. Last Acid In Tense
04. Untitled
05. Dinner With Q
06. DJ Friendly
07. Untitled
08. Keep Building featuring Fred P.

2009-10-23T09:36:00.000-07:00

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DUALTON

We were really flattered when we got the invite to do something for Modyfier, alongside all these other great artists who have contributed. At first, we thought about painting a picture or cooking one of our wicked toast/egg creations. But, after a while of thinking, we decided to do the thing we can do best: doin' music. To be exact, doin' a proper dj mix for all the Modyfiers out there. We're always on a mission to guarantee a good party, so the aim of this dj mix is to make you dance...when you're at home, at your moms house, on the streets and so on. So you won't hear a Chill out, 80ies-Classics or eclectic Rock-meets-house-meets-rap-meets-everything mixtape, as this ain't Dualton. But you will hear a groovy uplifting set of finest house music, like the ones we are doin' in the clubs right now.

To describe the mix: At the moment we're really into deep groovy house music, often garnished with analog instruments and vocals (without being cheesy). So we go on with new tracks of masterminds like Luciano, Mendo, Damian Schwartz alongisde newcomers like Roger Gerressen, Yvan & Tristan and ourselves. The mix starts off very energetic and uplifting, goes deep in the middle to collect some new energy, and comes back like a hurricane with joints of Radio Slave and Steve Lawler. At the end, it features one of our new releases on VIVa MUSiC which is called "Shanti". What else to say?…uhh…the mix is quite an hour long and we hope you enjoy listening as much we enjoyed doin' it.

If you want to check out what we have produced in the past, just check our releases on imprints like Steve Lawler's VIVa MUSiC, Vivid Recordings from Berlin and of course our older stuff on Rompecabeza and Bedrock. We always appreciate feedback dealin' with our work, so if you like our stuff and if you like this mix here, just drop us a line.

Nuff talkin', enjoy!

dualton - process part 169 by modyfier

01. Luciano - Los Ninos De Fuera
02. Yvel & Tristan - Candela
03. Mendo - Everybody I Got Him (2009 Mix)
04. Roger Gerressen - No School Like The Old School
05. Frankie Flowerz - It's Funk, It's House (Damian Schwartz Remix)
06. Leon - Puertorican Etno
07. Seth Troxler - Panic, Stop … Repeat! (Paco Osuna Remix)
08. Radio Slave - Koma Koma (Steve Lawler Remix)
09. Dualton - Shanti (Dub)
10. River Ocean feat. India - Love & Happiness (Michel Cleis Remix)

2009-10-19T13:21:00.000-07:00

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FINN JOHANNSEN

For me, there are two approaches to recording a mix. The first is to take a lot of time in thinking of a smart and coherent concept, to then carefully select the according music and plan its transitions, and later, record the whole thing and make it public. There are plenty of my sets on the internet where I have done exactly that, with quite some variety of styles and ideas, and for a variety of reasons and purposes, too. These mixes are often schooled by the mixtapes I compiled for as long as I can remember (for girlfriends, friends and maybe some yet invisible target audience). My mixes of that kind have gotten more refined over the years. At some point, I started to mix music, and the amount of people such a set finally reaches has grown considerably. But the method, more or less, has stayed the same.

The second approach is to record a set while you're playing in the club. Of course, the selection and execution in that context is different. I usually bring as many records as possible that I would like to dance to if I would be attending the club that very night, and then I combine them as it makes most sense to me in the given situation of the party. I try to avoid repeating combinations with each gig. For me, the fun part of mixing is to try and test new sequences. This can run the risk of a hit-and-miss in outcome (often depending on how inspired or concentrated I am), but in my mind, the possibility of failure is far less uncomfortable than relying on playlists of which I have already explored or experienced the success or functionality of. In short, I try to stay open to the surprises the music has on offer, and I try to pass that on to the crowd.

As Modifyer asked me for a guest mix, I quickly thought of doing something I had never done before: a combination of the two approaches mentioned above. At the time, there were no concepts left in my mind waiting to be released in a set (and admittedly, I also had so many other things to take care of that I found it difficult to come up with another or a better idea). If such ideas don't strike you right away, they are mostly not worth being carried out anyway. What I did spend some thought on, however, was the music I wanted to play at Macro's imminent label residency at Panorama Bar on the 10th of October 2009. I decided to leave the records in my box in the exact order I would play them at the gig, and re-record the set as soon as possible, with the memory of the proceedings still vivid. And thus I did, a day later. Naturally, the way the set now sounds is different to the live situation of the club; the mixing is tighter in parts, probably less frantic, and I could already tell where to mix in from what I could still remember of playing the music as it happened. Still, it was very interesting to repeat the experience, and it was also very interesting to take a second look at the choices I made in the intensity and immediacy of the night.

The night itself was a wonderful experience. We had just released the album "Catholic" by Patrick Cowley & Jorge Socarras and its accompanying singles. For the occasion, my label partner, Stefan Goldmann, and I invited Serge Verschuur from Clone Records and our friend Hunee to play. We knew that both would deliver the dynamic diversity we had in mind to celebrate what we had worked on for so long. I was due to play the last set, from 8 a.m. to 10.30 a.m. Unfortunately, I had a severe cold resurfacing, so I took some hours rest before arriving at the club at around 4 a.m. I could tell right away that the vibe of the club was a bit different to other nights there. Dubfire was on for Berghain, and judging from the queue I passed on my way to the entrance, the people interested in hearing him play seemed other than the regular crowd. I didn't mind that at all, but as I made my way through Berghain, I kept running into friends who were telling me that there was more trouble at the door than usual. The music was different, too. I paused to listen to Dubfire's set. While the monolithic pulse of the techno sound associated with Berghain was there, it somehow lacked the tension and groove that I need to lock me. I went upstairs to Panorama Bar to check what was going on there instead.

Serge was in the midst of a blinding set of classic and contemporary house and techno. The crowd was well into it. Hunee followed suit marvelously, steering the proceedings to more cheerful shores, and adding some classic disco and anthemic vocal moments. There were smiling faces enough, familiar and unfamiliar, to convince me that the night turned out to be what we hoped for, and then some. As I took over, I had the feeling that I should take another direction musically. I felt very tired and numbed by the fever the flu brought along. To start, I thought that I should kick myself into action with the music, hoping that the dancers would follow my way. Picking Heaven 17 to follow up Hunee's last record, Code 718's blissful "Equinox", was admittedly a bit bold and therefore received some confused looks, but then in the course of the set, things quickly fell into line. Flicking through my box, every next record seemed to be waiting in place, already offering its services to make the night one to remember. When I left the club, near Sunday noon, into the same mean cold drizzle I entered from several hours before, the music continued to thump in my head and there were indeed a lot of wonderful memories to keep. On Monday, I refreshed myself, had a good breakfast and then recorded this set right away in one take, in order to not let any of those memories slip away.

finn johannsen - process part 168 by modyfier

01. Heaven 17 - Let's All Make A Bomb
02. Santiago Salazar - Arcade
03. The Children - Freedom
04. Nitzer Ebb - Join In The Chant
05. Reese & Santonio - Bounce Your Body To The Box
06. The House Factors - Play It Loud
07. Static - The Native Dance
08. Dope Wax All Stars - Angelo's Groove
09. Foremost Poets - Reasons To Be Dismal?
10. Exposure - Love Quest
11. Seven Grand Housing Authority - Love's Got Me High
12. Callisto - Ambent II
13. Caucasian Boy - Northern Lights
14. DJ Pierre - Muzik
15. Loftis # V - Dreamin'
16. M.A.D.A. - The Good Stuff
17. Pet Shop Boys - Can You Forgive Her?
18. Junior Rafael - 4 All Da Men In My Life
19. DJ Sneak - Fear The World
20. Transcendence - Magique Noir
21. Tears Of Velva - The Way I Feel
22. Cheek - Venus
23. DJ Pierre - Box Energy
24. Dntel - (This Is) The Dream Of Evan And Chan
25. Mina Jackson And The Children - Pray
26. Bam Bam - Where's Your Child?
27. Yello - You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess
28. DJ Bone - We Control The Beat
29. Raz - Baila
30. Air Frog - Bon Voyage
31. The S-Man feat. Orchestra 7 - Rhumba
32. Lime - On The Grid
33. Paper Clip People - Oscillator
34. Aaron Carl & Benjamin Hayes - The Struggle
35. Rhythm Invention - Chronoclasm
36. Audiotech - Techno City
37. John Beltran - Going Home

2009-10-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

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MAX COOPER

Depending on what sort of track I want to write, I will apply a different approach. The sorts of tracks I am most into making, and which are probably my most original, are my emotive, melodic works. So I will talk a little about how my creative/production process works in these cases, using the end of reason as a reference. This track was released on Traum Schallplatten as part of my Symphonica EP. I will not however, refer to this released version, but instead, to the unreleased ambient rework, which forms the intro of my live mix - Lipse, included here. I think this ambient rework of the original track strips down to what the track is really all about, acting as a better reference for the purpose of this commentary.

First off, if I’m trying to write an emotive track, I need some sort of emotional message to try and communicate. The clearer and stronger the message, the more chance there is that it can be faithfully translated into a piece of music, and evoke a similar response in a listener. There is a lot of noise (by which I mean randomness and imprecision) in this translation of an emotional message from me, to a track, to a listener’s response. This noise in the delivery of a message from person to person via music is an inevitable consequence of the fact that everyone has a differing response to music, based on their own experiences - there are no magical chords which make all people feel exactly the same way for example. Luckily, there is enough of an agreement, at least in the westernized culture which I am primarily writing music for, to allow for some level of fidelity in the message conveyed by particular pieces of music. Therefore it is possible to convey some sort of message, in spite of the noise in the transfer process. The relevance of this issue to my process of writing music is that I need to be as clear as possible about what emotion I am trying to convey when writing the track; the clearer the original emotion, the greater the chance of a successful transfer. This means that if I get a feeling about a track, I drop everything and get straight to the studio, often meaning starting something new at 3am on a Tuesday morning. I find that if I reflect back to the feeling of an idea the next day, it is diluted, at the expense of the resulting track.

In terms of what triggers an idea like this, it can be anything - a film, light reflecting off a window, anything really. It’s hard to say where creative ideas come from, but I would say it’s all about bringing together influences and experiences which are individual to you, in order to generate output original to you - I don’t believe in the magical creation of ideas out of nothing, and I find that if I spend all my time writing music and not enough time outside the studio, my creativity drops.

When it comes down to actually translating an emotion into music, I find it best to use sampled strings to create a basic chord progression capturing the feeling I want. The rich overtones of orchestral strings makes it easier to judge the properties of chords and their progression (as opposed to using synths), aiding the translation from mind to machine. I will usually then convert this basic chord progression into electronic elements, or as in the case of the end of reason, I sometimes use the strings in the track. I will generally then expand on this idea by adding melodies guided by the basic chord progression.

The actual conversion from idea to reality (how I actually write the chord progression) is done on a very intuitive basis. I try things out, and compare how a chord or chord progression makes me feel in comparison to the emotion I am trying to convey. All I have to do then is match the two emotions up. It’s a bit like multi-dimensional beat matching! Multi-dimensional because I would say emotions are defined by several scales, rather than standard, two-dimensional (time and amplitude) beat matching. And it’s not beats being matched, it’s emotions. Haha, if that makes sense! I don’t have any formal music theory training, although I did have my mum’s piano lessons as a regular background noise when growing up, so maybe that had some effect. In some ways I think it could be useful not to be trained in music theory, as it means there are no pre-conceptions about how to construct a chord progression, and it may be easier to focus on matching those internal (in the head) and external (out of the monitors) emotions. That said, a solid grounding in music theory would no doubt speed the process up.

max cooper - process part 167 (live - lipse) by modyfier

01. Max Cooper - The end of reason [Traum] - Ambient Rework
02. Extrawelt - Mit Liese - Max Cooper Remix [Traum]
03. Granlab - Industrial Romance - Max Cooper Remix [Broque]
04. Max Cooper - Wasp [Traum]
05. Dominik Eulberg - Sansula - Max Cooper Remix [Traum]
06. Max Cooper - Mnemonic [Traum]
07. Max Cooper - i - Max Cooper's Apocalypse Remix [Traum]
08. Cirkus - Simplicit [Trapez]
09. Marco Dassi - Narcotraffic - Max Cooper Remix [MCGroove Black]
10. Max Cooper - Stochastisch Serie [Traum]
11. Dan Cat - Winterslow - Max Cooper Remix [Playtime]
12. Cirkus - Hyperventilation [Unsigned]
13. Tim Sheridan - Villian - Max Cooper Remix [Veryverywrongindeed]
14. Max Cooper - Symphonica [Traum]
15. Pollyy - Pins and Needles - Max Cooper's Purple Haze Remix [Shrink Records]
16. Bigger Than Jesus - Check Point Charlie - Max Cooper Remix [54 Music]
17. Max Cooper - Harmonisch Serie [Traum]

2009-10-12T10:11:00.000-07:00

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PROFESSOR SMITH

The idea for this mix came about during a car ride around San Francisco, with none other than humble London producer, author and university professor Steve Goodman. Known as Kode9 by many, Mr. Goodman is the proprietor of Hyperdub, a label known in part for leading the charge into the now-established world of dubstep.

As we drove around town looking for a location to shoot this episode of XLR8R TV, the conversation turned to Hyperdub artist Cooly G, and the mutation of UK garage into what has come to be known as "UK funky", or simply "funky". Cooly G's brand of funky seems to break the rules, veering away from 4/4 kicks and predictable structures, and according to Kode9, she herself didn't feel like any sort of label really fit what she was doing.

Looking into the matter more closely, it became apparent that there are a host of musicians from the UK and the US that are considered dancefloor producers, but their tunes push the boundaries of what most club-minded individuals would consider danceable. Back in the day, we'd call this style of music or DJing "leftfield." Mixing influences and ideas with minimal regard for the rigid constructs of mainstream genre definitions, leftfield DJ sets would often be danceable, just not predictable.

So enter The New Leftfield, a collection of producers that pull inspiration from dubstep, funky (or even funkstep?), wonky, techno, garage, you name it. Here's my selection of these outlier tracks and producers that challenge me to follow the rhythm and move me towards the dancefloor.

professor smith - process part 166 (the new leftfield) by modyfier

01. Dorian Concept "When Planets Explode" Nod Navigators
02. Kode9 "2 Far Gone" Hyperdub
03. Floating Points "J & W Beat" Planet Mu
04. Hot City "Head Work (Eats Tapes Mix)" Highpoint Lowlife
05. Cooly G "Dis Boy Pt. 4" Dub Organizer
06. Fuzzy Logik "Twiss" HP
07. Dark Knight "Broken Beats" Urban Ridims
08. King Midas Sound "Lost (Flying Lotus Remix)" Hyperdub
09. FaltyDL "Tronman" Planet Mu
10. Joy Orbison "Wet Look" Hotflush
11. Mount Kimbie "Sketch On Glass (Original Mix)" Hotflush
12. Hudson Mohawke "Overnight" Warp
13. Boxcutter "A Familiar Sound" Planet Mu
14. Pangaea "Mosaix" Hotflush
15. Ike Release "Jenova" Infrasonics
16. Barry Lynn "Hayfever Dub" Planet Mu

download m4a itunes/ipod enhanced.

2009-10-08T09:51:00.000-07:00

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EVAD

It took me some time to come up with a decent mix. I started from the simple idea to build it up, track by track and plan it so it would be perfect. I quickly left this idea, because that's not what I stand for. I mix to express myself, to translate the feeling I have when in a certain place.

The first mix I made when I was in a difficult period. I didn't feel alright. I had negative thoughts, a lack of confidence, etc. At the time I thought it was good. It was pure. But then again, I found that the mix didn't have the finesse and feeling of the ones I normally do, probably due to the mood I was in.

Now - while writing this little text - I feel at ease. I just came from finishing a new mix. This mix. I have my thoughts in order, I feel balanced, comfortable and am looking ahead to the future. In other words, this mix is 100% Evad. Enjoy.

evad - process part 165 by modyfier

01. surrounded - cosmic cowboys
02. synthetic nature - nax acid
03. variance - function reduced edit - function
04. through the lights - claudio prc
05. the real ludronighter - carlo passamonti
06. reduktion - edit select
07. herbie - rossella
08. droning - samuli kemppi
09. fuel - obtane's minimal dub - mike absolom
10. oruga - diego cid
11. cactus fatale - rasmus hedlund
12. one sided - damolh33
13. 11000a - jorg henze
14. nosonido - mirko aurich
15. fictional environment - conforce
16. pailletten - cio d'or

2009-10-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

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NITZAN

I am a self-confessed retired DJ. Even though I just came back from a gig at Tape(de), I think that over the last couple of years there has been a real shift in the way I consume and transmit music. The extent of dance-floor effectiveness I am looking for in records I buy (and release - on the label) has completely declined. The records I played in this mix have all been pivotal to my personal development much more than in my musical one. I contemplated (and attempted) to write down a quick run down of where and when each of these tracks touched me, but decided to leave the personal meta-data out. There is something translucent about these records when played in private.

nitzan - process part 164 by modyfier

01. Love & Rockets - Ball of Confusion - BNE
02. Kelley Polar - Vocalize (From Here to Polarity) - Environ
03. The Neon Judgement - The Fashion Party - BNE
04. Lawrence - Swap - Dial
05. Takamou - Takamous - 311
06. Krust - Excuses - Talking Loud
07. Sonja Moonear - 99 Erika - Katapult
08. Akufen - Deck The House - Force Tracks

I have put together this mix to mark MVSICA, for a new 100 copies cd release (special art by SawDust). A compilation that is mostly about where I am coming from personally and where I'm going to, musically. Please send an email to info@fineartrecordings.co.uk with "I am interested in mvsica CD" in the subject line if you would like to receive one.

2009-09-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

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PHILIP SHERBURNE

I love me a traditional DJ set, beatmatched and played in real time -- hand-mixed, as it were. But for a while now I've had a hankering to try something different, utilizing software (Ableton, in my case) to create something that's more like a collage, layering multiple pieces, pitch-shifting, reversing, cutting and editing, and generally exploring ideas that aren't possible using just the 1s and 2s. As much remix as mix. When Mat Schulz and Michal Brzozowski (aka Warsaw's DJ bshosa) invited me to submit a podcast highlighting the lineup of this year's Unsound Festival, I figured this was as good a time as any to test out the strategy, given that the roster is all over the place, in the best way: evenly distributed between ambient and contemporary classical, house and techno, dubstep, metal, and folk.

To help focus the project, I set myself a couple of rules. I was determined to use as many artists from the lineup as I possibly could. There's only one -- Pavel Ambiont -- from whom I couldn't find music that would sit neatly in the set, but that's in part because I only started looking into his music late in the process, and by that time, switching up the tracklisting was all but impossible. Pavel (who has various MP3s downloadable for free from his website): I'm sorry for excluding you! The DJs Eltron John and Spinoza also went unrepresented. And in just one case, I used an alias different from the artist's Unsound billing: Sebastian Meissner appears as Klimek.

Though I felt free to edit at my heart's content -- and indeed, I include only brief, one- or two- or three-minute portions of some songs -- I was determined to use only one track from each artist, and only original tracks. (I cheated there, using a 2562 remix of a Marco Bernardi track off Clone, which simply worked better than the other 2562 material I had to work with.) Believe me, it would have been much easier to include multiples from certain artists: slotting in more Marcel Dettmann would have let me extend the techno portion, and I agonized over whether to use Shed in the techno or dubstep section (in the end, I stuck to an ambient cut of his that I simply couldn't leave out). Having to settle upon just one Omar-S tune was probably the most fraught decision of the whole mix. "Always There," "Day," "Child Run Away," "Morning Drive," "Motor City Jackpot" and especially "J-A-i-P-U-R" -- I wanted to use it all, especially the latter song. I feel a little bad, actually, about having resorted to what's probably his best-known track, "Psychotic Photosynthesis," but in the end it played a critical role in getting out of the Mountain People. (Mountain People being by far the housiest act of the whole festival, slotting them in convincingly amidst so much murkier, darker material damn near did my head in.)

Despite the fact that I wanted to work in a more collage-oriented style, in Ableton, I was determined to hand-mix the beatmatched portions. That was partially out of laziness: warping all the techno and dubstep tracks in Ableton seemed like a chore. More importantly, I was also leery of having everything locked into a digitally clocked tempo. Maybe it's my imagination, 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. Mixing by hand, even the tightest mixes are bound to have a little flux in them. (Mine generally have more than I'd like.) I'm convinced that even if you can't hear it, you can feel it: the subliminal friction of two tunes cycling each other ever so slightly out of time. It's that differential that makes your stomach woozy, makes the hairs on your neck stand up. That's my theory, anyway. But it was very important to me that the tempos flow -- I didn't want to just bring in a 4/4 track with a crescendo out of something ambient, and then switch back to beatlessness again. The shape of the whole thing had to make sense, even though the pacing would ultimately be a result of composition rather than spontaneity.

In the end, I probably put about 30 or 40 hours into it. The toughest thing was figuring out the tracklisting and sequencing. I began in iTunes, gathering tracks from all the artists I wanted to include and creating playlists according to style and tempo. I listened while I worked on other things, whittled down, added more. The bulk of the music I already had on my hard drive or my record shelves; the rest I got off Beatport and eMusic. (Normally, I wouldn't play out an MP3 under 320kbps, but I figured I could get away with it on a podcast.) By the end I had six or seven playlists in iTunes going, multiple Word documents, several perpetually shuffled stacks of records. In Ableton, I began dragging and dropping the tunes that wouldn't be played off Traktor and turntables -- testing out overlaps, fades and harmonic combinations, whittling down cuts that had a passage perfect for the mood I had in mind, but that veered too far afield as they developed. (Nico Muhly, I'm looking at you.) As the sequence began coming together, I started making practice mixes of the beatmatched portions, recording into a basic audio editor, Amadeus Pro. I don't know how many gigabytes of test runs I have. Too many. Getting those parts right almost killed me -- the run from Kadebostan through Next Life, Robert Henke (the crazy, plinkety piano track that enters around 30:00) and Marcel Dettmann (the thundering steelworks) seriously tested my dexterity. I owe my girlfriend a huge debt of gratitude for dragging me out of the house on a Sunday afternoon, on what I had hoped would be my last day of work on this, to eat a Greek salad and drink retsina at a café near our house. If I hadn't taken a break then, my laptop and this session both might be lying at the bottom of the canal. (I finished the next day.)

Most of my own favorite moments in the mix are pure chance, really. Of course, my whole point was to make things flow, but there were plenty of things I didn't fully grasp until the pieces were more or less in place -- like the heartbreaking collision of the Sunn 0))) and Stars of the Lid tracks, for instance, or the uncanny way the Next Life track seems to unfold out of the close of the Kadebostan. (Not to gush, but I fucking love that passage.) There was plenty of finessing involved there, of course: I edited the Kadebostan in Ableton in order to add an ambient outro after its 4/4 section. And the Next Life tune is actually sped up to 45 and then pitch-shifted down to the same key as the Kadebostan. You can hear a little telltale warble from the pitch-shifting, unfortunately, but I doubt anyone who doesn't know the original would suspect that the track -- the very Baroque-sounding synthesizer fugue -- is playing 33% faster than it was intended to; it sounds incredibly natural to my ears, with some really lovely bass tones that don't come out at all the same in the original. And despite a teensy discrepancy in pitch that I couldn't correct for, the Next Life perfectly set up the Henke track, which works like player-piano Scriabin compared to Next Life's synthesized Bach. Likewise, I got lucky that the Zomby tune (which I actually forgot to include in the dubstep portion, necessitating a last-minute cut-and-paste job) was harmonically similar to the Omar-S, and I got lucky with Soap&Skin, James Blackshaw and Samamidon, all of whom were artists I began really exploring only in the last days of the project. (There were a dozen Klimek tracks I wanted to use, but "Ruined in a Day" turned out to be an indispensable segue into the final, guitar-led passage.)

More luck: early in the process, I simply laid the Jacaszek and Johan Johannssen tracks in parallel in Ableton and played them simultaneously, and damned if their bell tones didn't sound like a single piece of music. (Granted, it took a little finessing to get it right, editing the Johannssen down to just one short passage, and then sequencing the bells to strike in time with Jacaszek's.) The Vladimir Sigurðsson fell into place with something like inevitability, and the Nico Muhly, literally the last piece I placed, seemed almost uncanny, once a bit of pitch-shifting set it in the proper key. The introduction is one of the only places in the mix, in fact, where three tracks play simultaneously.

My only gripe: I wish the transition from 2562 into Eagle Twin, the metal band that initiates the final section, weren't quite so jarring. (I actually tried any number of editing tricks to make the segue smoother, but in the end I went with a basic old fade, plus some backmasked guitars and a little bit of reverb on the final notes of the 2562.) But I finally decided to approach the project less as a "DJ mix" than like some left-of-the-dial radio broadcast you might stumble upon late at night while driving, far from any city you've ever visited, in that peculiar groggywired state where the more jarring a transition is, the more sense it makes. I decided to roll with it. Besides, slotting Eagle Twin alongside Sunn 0))), the other metal band, would have been too predictable.

I can't count the number of possible mixes that never happened, over the course of putting this together. There are some (to me) stunning segues that had to be left on the cutting room floor, when I opted to use different tracks from certain artists, or shift around the pacing. But DJing is always about making choices. If it weren't, it'd be too easy. In the end, this was the mix that presented itself.

I don't want to sound too mystical or misty-eyed, but in some sense I believe that this is basically the mix that was out there, waiting to be made whole. I didn't do nearly the amount of editing and rearranging that I had intended to, but that was because any further intervention seemed like overkill. The music suggested its own form. It's a cliché, but I felt like just a conduit on this one. (Nevertheless, I'll take full responsibility for any leaky pipes.)

By now you may well have had the opportunity to hear the whole thing in its entirety. It wasn't my intention to go on at such length, and I'm leery of coming across as tooting my own horn. Still, it was important for me to document the process, if for no other reason than that it presented such a curious tension between subjective intent and something far more… is "passive" the word? In a garden of forking paths, I took one that, in retrospect, was the only possible one. Or rather, it took me. And that, I think, is the dream of any DJ, any musician: to tap into something bigger than your consciousness or your ego, to assist -- dare I say it? -- in a kind of revelation, a laying bare. Of what, I can't really say. But it's been a pleasure to serve.

Many, many thanks to Mat Schulz, Michal Brzozowski and Rayna deNiord. And especially to Lucia, for bearing with me through the whole process.

philip sherburne - process part 163 (unsound podcast 03) by modyfier

01. Nico Muhly, Mothertongue Pt. 1: Archive
02. Valgeir Sigurðsson, Equilibrium Is Restored
03. Jacaszek, IV
04. Johan Johannssen, Part II
05. Grouper, Disengaged
06. Sunn 0))), Alice
07. Stars of the Lid, The Evil That Never Arrived
08. Biosphere, Trasparenza
09. Shed, Ostrich-Mountain-Square
10. Ben Frost, Carpathians
11. Kadebostan, Endroduncing Kadebostan
12. Next Life, Underwater
13. Robert Henke, [shift_register]
14. Marcel Dettmann, Lattice
15. The Mountain People, Mountain008.1
16. Omar-S, Psychotic Photosynthesis
17. Zomby, Expert Tuition
18. Kode9 and the Spaceape, Sine
19. Martyn, Mega Drive Generation
20. Untold, I Can't Stop this Feeling
21. konika, Please
22. Marco Bernardi, Mystery of Nazarus (2562 Remix)
23. Eagle Twin, Murder Of…
24. Soap&Skin, Spiracle
25. Klimek, Ruined in a Day – Buenos Aires
26. James Blackshaw, Bled
27. Samamidon, Wild Bill Jones

2009-09-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

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STEVE MIZEK (editor of lwe)

I was incredibly honored when Modyfier asked for a second contribution to it's truly excellent Process series. In kind, I wanted to deliver something a cut above a haphazard DJ mix and set about looking for a concept to give my piece a special cohesion.

When I first received the invitation the world's economy was still in free fall. Jobs were being sloughed off as easily as a stray hair or dry skin cells, fear of being fired next was palpable. My first attempt at a mix was to underscore that dread in tone and lyrical content. Yet after few attempts the idea felt too depressing and focused on the wrong angle.

Cut to summertime. Things are stabilizing, but just. One of LWE's readers in Chicago asks me to be the headlining DJ at his birthday party -- on a roof. I had two goals for the summer: 1. Wear my lone sleeveless shirt in public at least once 2. DJ a rooftop party. Gripped with excitement at having the goalposts in view, I started in on a mix that began around 130 bpm and worked my way down to a leisurely 123 bpm. Yet in practice, starting with that much energy and working backwards was not very satisfying; I found myself limited to a short stack of tracks that couldn't fit together in a compelling way without reaching for filler. Frustrated, I abandoned the concept. (And yes, I wore the sleeveless shirt, just not at that party. Chicago had a strangely cool summer.)

While talking with one of my closest friends, Tyler Grisham, earlier in August, we discussed how LWE's podcast series was a great platform for artists. But we also recognized the site's talent, my excellent group of writers, had not been able to tap into the platform beyond their reviews. With that, I decided LWE would have a new series of podcasts helmed by its staff. We would record mixes and explanations of our choices. It would be called Curator's Cuts. I believe in leading by example, and I wanted my mix to be debuted on Modyfier so I could explain the process and share its almost year-long gestation period.

Making Curator's Cuts 01 wasn't easy either. I wanted the series to be focused more on the dance music climate we're living in as opposed to the one we wished our crate digging and Discog-ing would bring about. So I collected relatively recent favorites and created a mix roughly 80 minutes in length. I found natural stops and starts and recorded the mix in two sections. Between the sections I sandwiched a recording of myself going track by track, explaining my choices and providing some relevant information (the same follows the second mixed section). It's actually a lot more difficult recording a voiceover than I thought, and what you hear has been chopped and fitted by my talented and generous boyfriend, Mark Hofmann. The song playing under my explanations is "Clairvoyance" by Jon Hassell from his latest album, the astounding Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In the Street.

I hope you enjoy LWE's first Curator's Cuts podcast and check in to see what our writers offer as selectors.

steve mizek (editor of lwe) - process part 162 (curator's cuts part 01) by modyfier

2009-09-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

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EAVESDROPPER (yves de mey)

My initial idea for this mix was to go back into a personal history of music that encouraged me to do what I do now (music that makes me envious in a positive way, music I wish had been composed by me). After a while, I thought this approach was too narrow and, after all, all the beautiful music I'm surrounded by is inspiring and motivating.

While selecting and deselecting tracks for this mix two things really struck me. First, the majority of the featured artists are people I've met, adding extra value to the perception and appreciation of their music.

The other thing that popped up was the spectral leitmotiv of the selection. All tracks are compatible (at least to my ears), frequencies seamlessly interweave or make room for one another. One piece allows the next one to be there.

It's unavoidable then to arrive at an emotional level when listening to that music. Or stronger yet: living that music, inhaling it.

Every single track in this mix is, in one way or another, linked to an event I simply can't and don't want to forget. Lost love, company and friendship, spine tingling nights out, laughter, birth and death, moments of inspiration and desperation, simple melancholy and complicated visions of what's next.

I guess without this music (or music in general), things wouldn't be the same. I hope I never have to find out how different that would be.

eavesdropper (yves de mey) - process part 161 by modyfier

01. Spectral: Joyce Hinterding
02. Sunrise In The Turbine Hall: Peter Wright
03. Frenzy of the absolute: Fear Falls Burning
04. Vogler: Oren Ambarchi
05. Visible: Kangding Ray
06. 2: SND
07. Over And Under: Ellen Fullman
08. Vor: Andrew Pekler
09. 1978 Roland 100M: Benge
10. My Love I Love: Bogdan Raczynski
11. Omajosafir: Pierre Bastien
12. Winter Couplet: Steve Roden
13. Until we meet again - track 2: Tetuzi Akiyama & Jason Kahn
14. Sand Dunes: Tape
15. Universaali totuus: ES
16. Loomer: My Bloody Valentine
17. Zauberberg V: Gas
18. Smile: Rhythm & Sound w/ Savage
19. See You Around: Margaret Dygas
20. Concret PH: Iannis Xenakis
21. Headphonics 1/0: Ryoji Ikeda
22. 34:35:00: Lokai
23. Kilvo: Radian
24. TAZMX: Autechre
25. Moottori: Pan Sonic
26. Light-Pipe: Signal
27. Specification.Fifteen: Richard Chartier + Taylor Deupree

2009-09-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

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LUSINE

This is one of those tracks that has gone through a million stages and about a year later, I finally figured out how to make it work. I worked with my friend, Caitlin, on this track and wanted to make a sort of driving, almost disco sounding track, but with very flat, layered vocals. I had her write some lyrics and sing in the style I was looking for in several keys so I could layer them together. I tried to figure out how to make it work, and had a finished product that I was never happy with. When I was pretty much done with the album, I came back to it and decided to deconstruct the whole thing and start again. This time, I cut up the finished vocal track into pieces and re-sequenced the fragments. I made it more airy and completely changed the instrumentation. There are still hints of some of the original lyrics, but it’s now part of the fabric of the song, and less up front. And now, I’m happy with the result. It wasn’t her vocals that were the problem, but it was how they worked with the rest of the instrumentation. Everything was too dense. Some tracks are easy, because they just form themselves as you’re going along, but often I end up with one of these tracks that just doesn’t work, and it takes me months to figure out what’s going on with it. But, sometimes it’s more rewarding this way because deconstructing an entire track can be a nice way of finding out ways to accentuate what you like about it.

lusine - process part 160 (gravity) by modyfier

gravity is released today, september 8, on ghostly international. it is included as part of lusine's new album, "a certain distance".

2009-09-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

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DENIS BOBBIT

With sunshine finally coming to France at the beginning of the summer, I tried to join feelings that take me far from reality with this mix (as the sun always does for me). I like to think that this mix is brimming with warmth and sweetness, and that it can be heard by any kind of music lover. I really had a great time recording this session where almost all of my preferred artists feature in. I think you can listen to it either comfortably in your living room or on a dancefloor, depending on the volume, which is absolutely not what my neighbors think.

I recorded this session thinking about you, from the heart of Paris. This is where my flat is and music takes up most of the space. It is mainly always a particular tune or an image that structures the curve of my mixes. For this one, deep is the main element. I focused on the joy and pleasure that the tracks provide me with. I started with a large selection and whittled them down to ten tracks that are arranged in a precise order. Finally, randomness and improvisation sand it smooth! Hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it.

denis bobbit - process part 159 by modyfier

01. Knowing innocence - Sei A - Knowing Innocence
02. Armour (Move D remix)- Wireman - M7
03. Snore - Moodymanc - Snore (Vinyl)
04. The Rat - Lovebirds - Freerange Colour Series - White 06
05. Sliding away (johnny D Vocal mix) - 2020 Soundsystem
06. What is the time, Mr Templar ? - Jesper Dahlbäck
07. Rose Moutain - Adam Marshall - North At Night
08. The Kiss (Ripperton remix) - Stim - The Kiss Remixes
09. Pompadour (gorge dub mix) - chelonis r jones - pompadour
10. Shonen Jump - Vincenzo - Freerange Colour Series - White 06
11. T-Raenon (Version) - Photek - Photek - T-Raenon [OP 1]

2009-08-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

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RUTHIT

When I was invited to be featured as part of the Process Series on Modyfier, I was excited and torn between compiling a DJ mix or sending one of my own productions called, “Cameronian,” that I made in memory of my good friend, Cameron, who sadly passed away last year. After a long think about it, I decided to record a DJ mix as I wanted to express myself on the decks instead of through a production.

I knew instantly how I wanted to set the scene on this mix, so I produced a hypnotic tribal track with a cut from one of my heroes, Sir David Attenborough. After much deliberation, I finally found the perfect sample which I feel describes the influence in my music from organic tribal sounds.

Once I had the introduction track sorted I had to decide which direction I wanted to take the mix in. It was always going to be deep, but would I take it moody or keep it nice and warm?

I'll leave it to you to find out what I decided. I will say I'm very pleased with it and would love and appreciate any feedback.

If anyone would like to listen to the track I was going to choose that I made in memory of my friend, the track is released on four:twenty recordings. You can check it out here.

ruthit - process part 158 by modyfier

01. Ruthit - Intro Tool
02. Lauhaus & Sandy Hunter - Well Well Well
03. Sante - You
04. Veitengruber - Bon Melange (Afrilounge remix)
05. Patlac - Cedar
06. Town Crier - Humm
07. Audiofly - Shazam
08. Anthea & Alex Celler - The Playmaker
09. Okain - Where Is Monday
10. Coyu & Edu Imbernon - El Baile Aleman
11. Mark Broom - Jackpot - (Nic Fanciulli remix)
12. Mathias Meyer - Tenor
13. Ruthit - Brown

2009-08-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

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SCOTT

Generally, we just set up our computer in the studio and record loads of different real instruments like Rhodes, drums, synthsizers and percussion. Then we turn the recorded jams into smaller loops and start to build a structure. Most of the time we record about three to four jams in one evening-session and only arrange the tracks very briefly. Then, maybe one week (or up to three months later), we rediscover the recorded jams, make a full arrangement and add some more instruments that we feel are needed.

For Modyfier, we wanted to show what this could be like by using our track, "Black Cartridge", as an example. The first part of this was generally a different track which was recorded on holiday on the beach in 2006. It was a very techy tune and done without any instruments. Just plain drumcomputers and samples. Later we recorded another track in Berlin with double bass player Stefan Schönegg. This was in the beginning of 2007. For this track we also recorded a lot of real drums and had a very jazzy tune in the end. Later, when we got back to our studio, we fused those two tracks together and suddenly had a jazzy track with a more techy style.

But something was still missing. So we didn't listen to the track for a while and after a tour in Japan (where we jammed with the trumpet player Shiba at a spontaneous acoustic Scott gig at Tokyo's Ruby Room) we asked Shiba to record a trumpet solo on this track. He sent us the files after one week and we cut out the parts of the solo which fitted to the track to keep it still simple but more melodic.

So finally, in summer 2008, the track was finished. It was recently released on a Russian compilation called "Salad Moscow" on Algorythmik Records. This example shows a little bit our working attitude (however, sometimes we also finish a track in one week). It always depends on our mood. Sometimes we just can't listen to a tune for a year and then we rediscover it and work on it again and sometimes we just instantly feel it and get it finished very fast.

Our studio consists of (extract):

Fender Rhodes
Sonor Force 3000 Drumset
Pearl Drumset
Korg Poly 800
MOOG Little Phatty
Clavia Nord Wave
Clavia Nord Electro
An old fucked up Piano
MAM TB 303
Loads of percussions
AKG C 414B-XLS
Casio Keyboard
Novation K-Station
Microkorg
Roland V-Drums
Korg Kaossilator
Various Boss Effects
Cry Baby Wah Wah
Motu Ultra Lite

scott - process part 157 (black cartridge) by modyfier

2009-08-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

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MARK TEMPLETON

I began work on “Sleep In Front Of” while living in the most northern major city in all of North America: Edmonton, Alberta, and completed it after moving to Montréal, Québec. Although not intentional, I can hear the effects of my move throughout the song. Halfway through the piece, there is a shift, where the density changes and another emotion is introduced. As often is the case with my work, a finished piece follows a fairly straight trajectory. By straight, I mean that once an idea is introduced I develop it and then move on, rarely returning to the previous direction.

The main idea behind “Sleep In Front Of” (and most of the tracks on Inland) was to build a song from strands of edited and processed instrumentation. I arranged the piece to embody characteristics of a pop or folk song. These traditional elements – chords, voices, rhythms – can be heard buried under layers of themselves. They have been deconstructed and then reconstituted to form a new composition.

The track began by improvising over some chords on the acoustic guitar and then editing these in the computer using a variety of effects processes. This gave me a basis to work with. Subsequently, I tampered with the voice, which included short, recorded phrases hummed, sung and edited.

A couple of years ago I started to experiment with using the voice as a sound source. I felt very connected to forms of music where the voice is prominent in the mix, as in folk or pop music. As a result I started working with prerecorded vocals, processing, editing and then arranging them with other acoustic instruments that I had recorded. For example, I worked with Kate Bush’s vocals along with acoustic guitar on “I Cut Along Lines” off of the Holden Into Ryley EP. I also used a portion of a vocal line from an old 10” that my parents picked up at a garage sale. Not sure what her name was, but her voice can be heard on “Rest Near Grey,” off of the various artists release called Tracks In The Snow. This was the jumping off point where I then decided to use my own voice as a sound source, first in a live context and then more fully realized on Inland.

I have continued to capture, build and reshape my voice. In both a live and recorded setting, my voice is an immediate expression that is unpolished and improvisational by nature. This improvisation and immediacy is meant to be edited and processed later, rather than to be a “good take” in its own right. This idea is not necessarily specific to “Sleep In Front Of,” or other tracks on Inland, but I am uncertain what role my voice will take on future recorded works.

mark templeton - process part 156 (sleep in front of) by modyfier

2009-08-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

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KID KAMELEON

"Rips, Tears and Jagged Edges"

In a recent conversation with a friend, I remarked that I recently came to the conclusion that I had been feeling a sort of abandonment, that I had wounds that probably hadn’t quite healed from leaving a scene that I loved dearly, and believed in totally. That scene was Jungle/DnB – I was a full on believer in it from maybe ’98 through ’04, and had followed it somewhat since ’96. For a while I had staked my reputation in moving up in the New York Jungle scene, and believed in it so strongly, its manner and method of presentation, its sounds, its people, its heroes, that I spent a good chunk of my paycheck each week on the latest tunes, and did everything I could to invest in it. And eventually, maybe suddenly, maybe gradually, I left it … but, perhaps in classic male behavior, managed to still be aggrieved, as though Jungle had abandoned me by becoming stale (although I maintain that it remained interesting for YEARS after many other critics marked it as dead). I somehow felt ripped, torn away from, and full of jagged edges because of my association with Jungle.

Now, I have no real cause for complaint...I was always an outsider even in that scene, and perhaps that’s why I never attained the heights I wanted to in it. But it didn’t matter...because how could one focus only on Jungle when Portishead, DJ Shadow, Boards of Canada, Jack Dangers, and Deadbeat among many others were all making brilliant creations explicitly or implicitly based on the awesome hip-hop, dancehall and roots music that had come out, continued to come out, and will keep coming out for a long time to come? Jungle I listened to dance too, those guys I listened to to LISTEN to. And I never thought a mix was worth its salt if you couldn’t LISTEN to it, in that way.

2008 and 2009 have brought us musical omnivores an overwhelming wealth of amazing music within the very loose umbrella of a genre that’s still struggling in vain for a name. Wonky has been applied, but wonky doesn’t really exactly cover the glitch/hyphy creations of EPROM, the synth-saturated psychedelics of Nosaj Thing, or the chunky beat creations of Bullion. At the end of the day I kind of just think of it as hip-hop, but what crazy hip-hop this is...Paul White’s arpeggiations that careen off into the stratosphere, LXC’s echoing drum beats that breath and drip with space, or Lazer Sword (and ½ of Lazer Sword Low Limit’s) superb melding of club music with trip-hop and the west-coast sound that’s pervading us here in San Francisco these days.

If there IS one artist on this mix who deserves the title of Wonky, it’s surely Dimlite, the crazy Swiss man who’s “Ravemond’s Young Problems” and “Quiz Tears” appear in the middle of the mix. These must surely be two of the most difficult tracks to mix together I've ever attempted, but in that challenge came the process of this mix...how to convey to the world just how wide and weird beat music is now, and how powerful it must be if it can support an artist like Flying Lotus going from playing small shows in his native LA to headlining festivals all over the world in the breathtakingly short span of two years.

So, for me as a veteran of the DnB scene, which often praises, above all else, flawless, seamless mixing, for this mix I attempted to work against myself by following in the presentational footsteps of Flying Lotus, The Gaslamp Killer, and The Bug, three of our most successful guests at the San Francisco party Surya Dub I help throw. Gaslamp, but all three to a certain extent, present the music that I’ve grown to love over the past couple years like they were smashing the audience over the head with a hammer, which is kind of the only way to do it if you want to mix as fast as they do, layer the way they do, and interact with a music that, let’s face it, doesn’t lend itself to seamless mixing.

Now, ever the outsider, I’ve actually tried to reverse the reversal as I made the mix and meld many of these tracks together as seamlessly as I can, sneaking in Pink Floyd over Teleseen, or layer The Jungle Brothers, The Beatles, and Ghosts on Tape for as long as I can so that it’s difficult to know what’s going on, and what beat comes from where. To me that’s the great thing a DJ can do, and I can’t even recall the number of times when people refer to me as a mashup artists, and I’m like “Dude, I’m just a DJ."

So where am I going with this? Perhaps just to say that, in addition to everything else this mix could be for a listener, to me it was sort of catharsis, coming to terms with the kind of music that I listen to and love now, and kind of have always loved, and the best way, as a DJ, to present it, riding the jagged edge between seemless DJ and selector DJ, in the same way that the beats are full of rips and tears that befit new approaches to playing them.

And as a final note, this will probably be the last mix I do on Serato and using a sequencer (I’ve used Digital Performer for years). As of next week I dive fully into Ableton Live, since I think it’s the application that can let me both have the rips and tears I seem to need in my life, and yet also may be the way to stitch the beats and pieces back together into something seamless and beautiful. Wish me luck...

kid kameleon - process part 155 (rips, tears, and jagged edges) by modyfier

01. DJ Ted Stevens - IP Phone/I'm Bad (Senate Floor Recordings)
02. Disrupt - Hail The Robots (Jahtari)
03. LXC - Men Hiki Men (No Label)
04. Elliot Smith - Because (No Label)
05. Matthew David - DISK Track 6 (Leaving Records)
06. J Todd - Force Type D (Ryzzynyce - Self Release)
07. Low Limit - Turf Day (Rush Hour Forthcoming)
08. Bullion - Don't Talk (Pet Sounds: Songs in the Key of Dee - Self Release)
09. Plaid - Bo Bootch (Warp)
10. Nosaj Thing - Light #2 (Alpha Pup)
11. EPROM & Prof.I.See - Zoning (No Label)
12. B. Bravo - Midnight (SoundPieces/Frite Nite)
13. J Dilla - Make It Fast feat. Diz Gilbran [Unadulterated Mix] (Nature Sounds)
14. Porter Ricks - Polytoxic 2 (Force)
15. Nine Inch Nails - The Warning (Interscope)
16. Melkeveien - Melkeveien (Dodpop)
17. Sprutbass - Ulykke (Dodpop)
18. Hungry Ghost - Lo-Rez (No Label)
19. The Fixxers - Can U Werk Wit Dat (Interscope)
20. Ratatat - Mirando (XL)
21. Beat Konducta - Indian Bells (Stones Throw)
22. SirOJ - Telephone [Inst] (Yes Yes Y'all)
23. Tranqill - Payroll [Paul White's Clean Dub] (One-Handed Music)
24. Ras G - Shinelight (Brainfeeder)
25. Douglas Kahn - Regan Speaks for Himself (No Label)
26. Donovan - Season of the Witch (Epic)
27. Nosaj Thing - Light #1 (Alpha Pup)
28. Sepalot - Measured Amount (Rush Hour)
29. Dimlite - Ravemonds Young Problems (Rush Hour)
30. Dimlite - Quiz Tears (All City)
31. King Midas Sound - I Dub (Hyperdub)
32. Thom Yorke - Black Swan (XL)
33. Teleseen - Xion Gate (Percepts)
34. Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall Pt.1 (Harvest)
35. Low Limit - Out The Club (No Label)
36. Too $hort - Blow the Whistle [Gouseion Rmx] (Self Released)
37. Too $hort vs. Deceptikon - Weird Whistle [Kid Kameleon Edit] (No Label)
38. DJ BC - Lil Jonny Nogood [Lil John vs Terry Riley] (Self Released)
39. Jungle Brothers - Ultimatum Ultra Mix (Jungle Beats/Jungle Bass) (Mo Wax)
40. The Beatles - Hey Bulldog (Apple)
41. Ghosts on Tape - Woofer Cooker (No Label)
42. LL x Fam Lay - Beeper Creeper (Self Released)
43. Disrupt - Jah Red Gold and Green (Werk/Jahtari)
44. DJ Babu - Truth Be Told [Inst.] (Nature Sounds)
45. Tino - D.U.B. Dub (Tino Corp)
46. Wasteland - Wintermission (Tansparent)
47. Filastine - Singularities (Soot)
48. Dissident - Society of Silver Skeletons (Hot Shore)
49. Mono/Poly - MS-14 (No Label)

2009-08-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

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QZEN

"All My Mistakes Are Belong to You"

When I was asked to return as a guest to Killswitch, a local happy hour at a small bar, I agreed, tossing out, "Maybe I'll have my live set done by then." "Shall I put that on the flyer?" "Sure." And so it was done. I had to finish SOMETHING. I had just under two months. This set was played live from 9-10pm on June 26, 2009.

Of course, most of the work on this was done about a week before the performance — up until about three hours before show time. I hadn't even played the set through once before performing. I need pressure to perform. I've always been this way, up all night before the paper's due, etc. All that lack of preparedness in mind, I think this turned out pretty well! Well enough that I'm sharing it with you. I don't want to be too precious about my mistakes; they don't help anyone if they're kept secret, so now they belong to you, too.

The keys and guitars in the first track (about eight minutes or so) are loops I pulled out of leftover audio from a 40 Thieves session with Jaswho?, a longtime Thieves contributor. I programmed the drum loops out of my sample library, recorded myself singing a little bit over the top, looped and pitched that, and just made up the arrangement as I played.

The next track (comes in around 9:30) is called "Da da da." I made this maybe two and a half years ago with Layne from the 40 Thieves when I first started to work with them. It was the first time I tried to really direct the track-making process with his acting as engineer. The bass is from an SE-1 we no longer have access to, and I think the strings are from our Juno. I was super nervous and couldn't think of lyrics, so that's why you get the silly da-da-da-ness on the vocals. At the time, I called the track "too Get Physical," meaning I wasn't being original enough. Layne had to remind me that making something that automatically brought a label's sound to mind was something many people strive for. Now, I don't know if it reminds me of any sound. I kind of had forgotten about it, but I was lucky to find a CD burned of the files for this a few weeks before show time, so I was able to pull out parts and re-play it live. I still love the weird gun-shot like sounds in this (like at 11:43), though I think I mixed them in a bit too quietly in this set.

The next track was made entirely of pieces I wrote the week leading up to the show, all drums programmed by me, pads played by me, then looped, and triggered live. I like the softly wonky bass in this one; it's just a funny sound to me. Part of the way through, you can hear I mis-triggered a loop, so it's off, and I obviously didn't catch this while playing live, so it's here to haunt me. I think at this point in the show, I started to actually have fun... The audience was full of friends who'd come out to support me, and I love my San Francisco family. There's a lot of talent here, and we're close-knit.

Woah, loud drums at 26:27! At least you can tell I'm mixing live, eh? Ah yes, a note on equipment. I'd borrowed an Evolution EC-33 controller from my good friend Tana, had my duet sound card, a Shure SM-58 mic, and my laptop running Ableton Live 7, plus my trusty Sennheiser headphones. Anyway, that loop and the vocals are sampled from a Human League track I cut up. The bass I played, and I made the knocking sound and played the keys. My microKontrol has been dropping keys, so I borrowed my friend Alona's M-Audio Axiom-49, so I had a keyboard controller to work with while I created the music. I get by with a lot of help from my friends!

At 33:20 starts an edit I made of this old track "IN-TEN-SIT-T" by Mickey Oliver that came out when I was ten years old. I found the record at A1 in New York on a digging spree with Alona a year or so ago. I liked the feeling of the raw '88 house, but the original track (I forget which mix I edited) was a bit much in places, so I created some loops and again, made up the arrangement as I played. I think it's a nice bridge into a little more intense part of the set.

37:51 brings in the hint of one of the biggies, "Sweat (On the Walls)," a track of John Tejada's that I did vocals on ages ago (2005). This track will never die though, and it always gets a great crowd reaction. I've done vocals live for John before, so I had the instrumental ready to go, but I have the delay feedback up too high, and you can hear me trying to figure out why it sounds so weird to me in the booth: "...and now, it's better?" (40:56) Of course, the problem wasn't really solved — I'd never played live never mind trying to mix a mic in, play, and remember lyrics — and so I totally lose my place, and the vocals are not really in the right place in parts. And yes, my mom & dad were there, and when I saw them, the HI-MOM-LOOK-AT-ME reaction just blurted out. Ha! I love that their presence is noted in the mix though, as they've always been supportive of my music obsession, even coming to my parties when I was 17 and throwing them because I wasn't old enough to get in otherwise.

The funny part about this next track (45:27ish) is that I was going to trash the parts completely. It's pretty much entirely made of loops I'd deemed "excess" and failed attempts at writing something useful the night before the show. (I'm kind of hard on myself, I know!) Turns out the bassline's kind of groovy, and the audience really reacted to this track. I'm working on making it a standalone.

The last track is "Don't Turn It Off," a cover the 40 Thieves and I did of this old UK disco band, Hot Chocolate. Our version came out about a year ago on Permanent Vacation, and it's still gaining traction, having shown up on a Ministry of Sound compilation at the start of the summer. Brennan Green did a remix with an nice acid line that came out on his label Chinatown recently, and Greg Wilson made an extended edit with parts we sent him that I'd just gotten. I used Greg's version for this, just made an instrumental edit before the show. I threw a little housey loop over the top to give it a shuffle, since it's a bit fast. The vocals are not my finest, but I was all nervous after not knowing what went wrong during "Sweat." I kind of ducked down behind the booth and cupped the mic in a weird way, trying to shelter it from feedback, and the levels were off, so I couldn't sing as softly as I'd have liked. Anyway, it is what it is! Time to practice singing more!

Ha, the end! "Ta-da!" I'm such a dork. I was really touched by the sincere support and sheer number of people that came out to see what I'd done, and I was so relieved to have DONE IT. I was a bit overwhelmed, and you can hear it in my voice. It's touching to me still!

All in all, making this set was totally nerve-wracking, but playing it was absolutely thrilling, and I am so happy to have made the step in this direction after ten years of DJing and various collaborations. I'm excited to learn from my mistakes, and make my live performance more and more entertaining for you and expressive of the Qzen sound, whatever that turns out to be!

qzen - process part 154 (all my mistakes are belong to you) by modyfier

2009-07-31T12:51:00.000-07:00

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SIMON SCOTT

Human nature is a curious and unpredictable mixed bag of emotional contradictions such as beauty and ugliness, serenity and furious anger, love and hate, ecstatic joy and severe sadness. These all filter into my music through finding the space and time to allow one to give up any resistance to each emotion and allow it to become the music. This begins with a realistic appraisal of whether I have the right mood in my head to approach a piece of work I am developing. If I am in the zone the music comes together almost as if it is an expulsion of all the memories and sound associations I have stored in my mind (consciously or unconsciously) but sometimes it feels forced and will not develop. Often suddenly all the ingredients come out and quickly get baked to perfection together or perhaps emerge almost complete with just a simple need of a sprinkle of sonic seasoning.

"Navigare" was recorded at home between July 2008 and March 2009 and it is an album that seems to have been waiting in the wings to come out of me. All of the experiences I have had in the past thirty years, good and bad, seemed to overwhelmingly pour out of me and find a new place to live on my hard drive. From the days of shredding my eardrums as a drummer in Slowdive, where as teenagers we cared only for the moment of each performance and turning up to eleven, right up to the fairly recent birth of my child are all in there. Some difficult issues were faced such as the death of my uncle who spent his years submerged under water in submarines or otherwise was submerged by the poisons of alcohol which took me back to being a child and seeing him at family parties getting legless. So in my music there are memories of happy times tinged with sadness and then sadness colored by the warmth of childhood associations. Cruelty appears often as I and many others close to me have been on the receiving end of unfair treatment, threats or just bad luck although joy and hope rub shoulders with this negativity and it all filters into each musical idea. Some sound associations drag up long forgotten conversations, people or places that may not be welcome and the themes take on a difficult direction that force you to follow such as "Repulse" on my album.

Many Ideas for my debut solo album grew from the juxtapositional complexities of the now verses the past. Again this goes back to the human condition and our contradicting emotions and the fact that many of us wear many masks in life which usually appear by instinct and happen despite us even being conscious of it. The sound of an acoustic in a nicely reverberated room faces a cold digital glitch that my hard drive spat out one morning seems to fit together. The juxtaposition of these sounds was kept in mind when adding to the two contrasting musical elements and for the rest of the songs. I used loops that were out of time but would eventually meet to create a conclusion of solidarity despite their different textured emotions. I would use reverb soaked vocals to float over a dry snare brush stroke or a voice fragment and burn it with an effect so it would burn and decay to the ear. Degrading the sounds or using dissolving sounds, including tape hiss from an old cassette I had kept from the 1970's and samples that were wrestled by my full hard drive which we almost vomited out of the speakers were techniques and textures that dominate this record.

"Introduction of Cambridge" is a musical reflection of the city where I was born and live today alongside the manicured university lawns and geographical fact that the remarkable academic institutions are based in the city centre that allow you to feel that past in the present along with bright hope for the future. This infuses into my music with the past, the present and the future colliding as they question what it is you are hearing as old tape recordings compliment the digital domain of my recording equipment. They are created in a split second of the present to become an instant thing of the past until it is released or discovered in the future.

The songs flow like water yet have a scorched sound that again creates another juxtaposition, this time of the elements, as both water and fire are sometimes calming yet also treacherously unpredictable with real danger and ferociousness. "Navigare" is full of snippets of digital software taken from my mac and dropped into the pc that I used to create the vast majority of the album on. It is safe to say that this is a guitar album despite flute, cello, sitar, piano and many other instruments featuring and if I admit inspiration to create a guitar album I just go back to the sheer power and sonic assault of "Overkill" by Motorhead, "Isn't Anything" by My Bloody Valentine and "Endless Summer" by Fennesz which changed my musical perspectives forever.

"Navigare" is out on Miasmah recordings in late summer 2009.

simon scott - process part 153 (under crumbling skies) by modyfier

2009-07-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

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TELEPOPMUSIK

The making of a song is mostly mysterious. Ghost Girl, from our new ep (in stores July 12), was written in just four hours. At the time, I was living in New York in a very old building in Soho. Sometimes I would feel spirits around. My mini home studio was in the exact same place where, ten years before, a guy overdosed and died. One afternoon I was playing a guitar arpeggio and my friend, Duke, started to play some chords over it. Two hours later an instrumental demo was ready. We decided to call Kim and after briefing her about the ghost we felt around, she sang a story about a ghost girl. Two takes later, the vocal demo was ready and you can listen to it below.

telepopmusik - process part 152 (ghost girl (demo)) by modyfier

One year later, back in France, I finished the song production with 2 Square, making Ghost Girl a Telepopmusik song.

telepopmusik - process part 152 (ghost girl) by modyfier

We love to be remixed, so some were been done by Jesse Rose, Blatta & Inesha, and Tittsworth. Below, the Jesse Rose remix to download.

telepopmusik - process part 152 (ghost girl (jesse rose remix)) by modyfier

2009-07-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

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JAHCOOZI

We made this song last August. We went to a very underpopulated part of what used to East Germany to make it... Prignitz. Highly exotic, right?!!

It actually felt like a forgotten part of the world. There was a post-communist greyness and austerity about it...maybe this atmosphere actually influenced the song!!

We had no internet connection and there was a long road (which reminded me of that Cormac McCarthy book) with no cars on it, we would actually lie in the road for at least and hour and nothing would come in either direction. Occasionally we'd come across a toothless farmer with a big smile and a German flag on his roof would come our way!!

The woman who we rented the little holiday house/converted barn from looked at us kinda funny when we arrived. We didn't tell her that we were gonna convert her kitchen into a studio, so I assume she assumed that we were there to film low budget pornos. We of course didnt.(!)...but u know...two white boys and a brown girl in that part of the world (and many other parts of the world for that matter!) can have a stigma attatched.

The Song

To me it sounds like wave-step or something...sort of like a mix between dub-step and dark-wave, with these epic, almost emo/gothic cellos going on. We recorded a friend (Sneaky, a Berlin based Ninja Tune artist) playing the cello and double bass. I guess we managed to create a pretty weird atmosphere on this tune! Maybe not what BLN fans were expecting from us, but I think it's great to surprise the listener. Maybe the weirdly dark atmosphere in Prignitz had an influence us!

Having said that, people who have a comprehensive knowledge of the music we've made over the years has seen that side of us with tracks like Fish or Ali Mc Bills on our first album. We've always been somewhat schizophrenic in terms of sound or atmosphere. Even a track like Chill Jill on our second album highlights this schizophrenia within one track.

In the song, I am playing the part of a paranoid and obsessive lover who longs to nurture her loved one until the point of suffocation. It is about the fine line between being the subject of unconditional love and being smothered till the point claustrophobia. Love/nuture/care/protection and how it can be used as a control mechanism or emotional blackmail.

Love can be as freeing as it can imprisoning when it turns into obsessive jealousy. It depends on the individuals involved but in the right combination it can end up like a sick psycho film from the 80s!! Like Fatal Attraction with Glen Close or Misery with Cathy Bates...great characters!!

So just watch out who you take home with you or let into your life!! That hot girl standing at the bar, in the baby-doll dress, just might be someone who would rather hack off your legs than have you ever run away and leave her...!!

I guess the whole concept of the song can also be de-personalized and can also be perceived as the way in which we are constantly under surveillance in modern urban societies (i.e. CCTV, surveillance, control, trust, fear, nanny-state, protection, security issues). Such themes can arise within relationships with a partner or a with the state or with your employer, etc.

jahcoozi - process part 151 (b1 watching you) by modyfier

The Remixes

The remixes of the track are from quite wide-ranging artists, not just from one specific genre. I guess a bit like Jahcoozi itself, as we tend to jump around stylistically.

Two fingers (Amon Tobin & Doubleclick) brought out an amazing album on Big Dada recently. You HAVE to listen to it. It's like post-grime RnB shit meets Blade Runner cyberpunk futurism or something. Robot and I are big fans of Amon Tobin's cinematic production, which is why we decided to ask them to remix our track.

jahcoozi - process part 151 (b2 watching you (two fingers remix)) by modyfier

Oliver $ had done some fat bass-heavy dance remixes of vocal tracks in the past (eg. for RQM on Shir Khan's label, Exploited) which is why we asked him to make a remix for us. Some dance producers shy away from vocals because they don't always like or know how to work with them. This isn't the case with Oliver $, who ended up having so much fun that he did two versions! I also think it's pretty cool to feature other Berlin-based artists, which was also a reason to ask him. I guess it is exactly what the Crookers and all their fans are listening to right now...in fact they've already put it on a load of their mixes, etc. Give the kids what they want!

jahcoozi - process part 151 (a1 watching you (oliver$ bassjunk remix)) by modyfier

jahcoozi - process part 151 (a2 watching you (oliver$ remix)) by modyfier

Plastic Little are a pretty fun neo-hip hop combo from Philadelphia who's last album featured Baltimore's finest Spankrock and Amanda Blank. They are good friends of the Philadelphia-based label Sugarcane Recordings, so it seemed cool to try and showcase some talent from over there, too. The nicest thing about the Plastic Little track is that it's just not what you'd expect from them or us on this EP I guess. It's really downbeat hippy shit, actually! So again, it's cool to surprise the listener...while giving them what they want...even though they don't know it!

jahcoozi - process part 151 (b3 watching you (plastic little remix)) by modyfier

Loose Cannons are also friends of Marcus at Sugarcane Recordings. They are from the UK and have remixed just about everything under the sun...even that pile of 80's vomit (a.k.a. Lady Gaga...ouch!!!) They have a weekly show on KISS FM where they play everything from tropical bass to zulu house.

jahcoozi - process part 151 (watching you (loose canons too early remix) by modyfier

2009-07-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

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DJ FLACK

For my Modyfier track I decided to make an electronic music waltz. Although Waltzes are considered dance music in other genres, cultures and time periods, they are almost never heard on the big sound systems of modern dance clubs - my goal was to make one that could work in such a context. I also wanted the style to reflect the bass heavy music that I have obsessed with lately, especially Dubstep and its more upbeat predecessor 2-step/Garage.

I started out creating a 140bpm beat with the Redrum step-sequencer in Reason. I set it to 48 steps so it would be a longish loop but still dividable by 3 and set the time signature to 3/4. Next, I added some of my favorite drum sounds with lots of short hi-hats to give it that bouncy/skittery feel. Once that felt right it was time to add the bass.

The melody came to me right away but I wasn't sure where it came from. It was a little like the melody from the Police's "Message in a Bottle" which, ironically, is one of my least favorite of their songs (too much rock and not enough reggae) but it also reminded me of something else which I couldn't put my finger on. Eventually, I realized that it was from one of my first audio experiments back when I was using Sound Edit 16 to cut and paste audio waves in the early 90's. I found the cassette tape that had it (a compilation of odds and ends that I had called "Loop Stew") digitized the song and decided to add it to my new piece using Ableton Live. The original was indeed a waltz but having been made before I used any grid based program and full off improvised mouth sounds, its tempo and key were both pretty vague and I had to spend a lot of time futzing with it in Live to make it work with the bassline.

Once I had the basic vibe I created lots of different parts - switching up the basslines, adding fuzzed out synth melodies, adding and subtracting drum hits, changing delay settings etc. Even though each part is fairly distinct, they all relate back to that earlier song in some way - I uploaded the original so that you can compare them.

In hopes that someone would actually want to spin this track in a club, I decided to start off minimally so that a DJ could beat match it before the melodies became dissonant or the beat became too complex (and waltzy). I also wanted to add something that would be familiar to a dance track, so I decided to use some sort of hip-hop vocal sample. I went with a clip from the great song "Stay Tuned" by Gangstarr as a salute to one of the only true hip-hop waltzes that I know of. I mixed out most of the frequencies so you would just hear the words because, as a producer, I feel that its not cool to sample a sample - DJ Premier took time to hunt down, sequence and finesse his sounds and I feel its wrong to use them as if I had discovered them. The vocals, on the other hand, were made for that track alone so my use is only once removed which doesn't bother me as much - besides Guru's voice (aka Keith Elam from my hometown of Boston) sounds just too good to resist. In the sample he says "We come correctly every time" and that is something I at least aspire to do.

Whether a waltz like this would inspire or clear a dance floor is still up in the air but every once in awhile I give it a try (my last record "Strictly Scientifical" has two waltzes.) In the meantime, throw on some headphone and listen in the comfort of your own home or on your iPod commute. I know that Jay-Z has dropped a couple triplet-feeling killers and big props to Australia's Unkle Ho for bringing the true boom bap bap - but please email me (dj_flack - at- yahoo -dot- com) if you know of any other electronic/hip-hop waltzes that I could add to my skimpy waltz crate, as I would love to do a full-on waltz mix sometime in the future.

Waltz on!

dj flack process part 150 (waltzy) by modyfier (2009)

dj flack - process part 150 (loop stew waltz) by modyfier (1994)