Slaying Dancefloors at Will .Count Zer0.

quentin harris feat. jason walker - can’t stop - strictly rhythm
fertile ground - light shed’n (count zero shed a little more edit) - unreleased
house music united - yes we can - reinvent music
amampondo - i exist because of you (henrik schwarz version) - innervisions
milton jackson - andorms - tronicsole
rpo/david weed - aztek - garbage records
stefano valentini - nutella & ketchup - rejoy records
peret mako - scenic route/air a dime - future classic
layo & bushwacka - things change (deep mix) - olmeto records
unphixt - siva (killer k mix) - k alexi digital
karizma - it’s what i am (simbad remix)/groove a “k” ordingly - r2 records
chaircrusher - legs benedict - unreleased
marco zenker - fountion - ilian tape
samklang - chip - snork enterprises
edwin starr - contact (hypno edit by dj hypnotyza) - unreleased

Well this is pretty exciting news for any of my readers who were at the Juno Reactor show (pictured above) at Laga in Pittsburgh on December 1st, 2000. You’ll remember, because nobody could forget one of the most amazing dance vibes ever to hit the ‘burgh, that Ben Watkins had brought along on tour with him a South African percussion ensemble called Amampondo. Well, they’re back and doing the techno collaboration thang again, this time with Henrik Schwarz and Dixon of all people. This release is a dual version 12″ of a cut off an apparently forthcoming Amampondo album titled “Vibrations From the Motherland.” Liner notes:

“Ubuntu (I Exist Because Of You)

‘A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others,
does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.’ (Desmond Tutu).”

I’ll certainly be rocking the Schwarz version.

(photo of very goofy vj baby grand courtesy Gardner Post Baby Grand Master)

In case anybody is interested, this right here is the DIY setup I installed for using virtual vinyl with MP3s. Total cost was around $150 including two time code records, the maya card, and all necessary cables. I decided to take this insanely belated initial step into the world of digital deejaying after reflecting on the history of the DJ as recorded in one of my favorite books on the subject Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. After all, it’s just technology, and at this rate I’ll be adopting pacemaker by like 2013. What if Frankie Knuckles had never decided to rock 909 beats over his sets at The Warehouse because he was hesitant to embrace anything but reel-to-reel or vinyl? House music may have never evolved the way it did. The medium is not the message. Will I encode all my vinyl to MP3 and sell off my collection? HELL NO. Will I stop buying vinyl, again, no freakin’ way. Vinyl is my passion. Virtual DJ is something I’m trying out while I’m relatively non-liquid to keep up with music on the cheap, and to be able to share unreleased music from friends with more people. It’s all about supporting the little guy.  The way I figure, I could either not buy ANY music, and support nobody, or buy only very inexpensive used older records, and again support nobody but the record nerd who collected them, or just not feed my fiendish music habit.  For now, while my income is negligible, buying a few mp3s here and there on legit sites is what I can feasibly contribute to the artists I love.

So, especially in light of Record Store Day tomorrow, Saturday April 19th, why are you so fond of digital DJing, or so adamantly resistant to it?

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Could somebody please tell me what this goofy hipster blog, called discodust, has to do with disco? It was recommended to me by Google Reader. I’m going to follow these jokers for a few weeks and see if I’m right, that they have about as much to do with disco as this movie did:

that is, nothing!

New jam from Iowa City’s resident elder techno-dork, Chaircrusher!

Kent had this to say:

“…tonight I found a sound I liked and vowed to finish a track without thinking too hard about it.

[“Legs Benedict” was] sequenced in Ableton Live with a passel of samples including some conga loops, the Tape909, an electric piano patch in Kontakt, and the mighty Vaz Modular…

The name is something Jon Stewart imagined George W. Bush nicknaming Pope Benedict.”

Nice one man. Diggin’ it like dirt.

Check out the other Cornwarning releases on discogs.

Here’s a cute and funny little tidbit for all you closet pop-music lovers: the perfect song length is, apparently, 2:42!

So, here are two brilliant pop songs that follow the 242 rule:

Foster Sylvers - Misdemeanor

(yes, I realize that the video above is only 2:29, but iTunes lists my copy of misdemeanor as 2:42)

and Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” (embedding disabled):

Go sort your iTunes library via song length and tell me, what’s your favorite track whose length is 2min 42sec?

Here is a list of five tracks that I recognize as important, sublime, even groundbreaking classics, but of which I am SO SICK AND TIRED that the next time I hear them played at a club, I’m leaving the room:

Moodymann - Shades of Jae
New Order - Blue Monday
Model 500 - No UFOs
Prince - Erotic City
Recloose - Dust

for balance, here are five tracks by each of the above artists that I much prefer:

Moodymann - Dem Young Sconies
New Order - Your Silent Face
Model 500 - I Wanna Be There
Prince - 7
Recloose - Get There Tonight

and here are five anthems that I should have been over long ago but I still love:

Joey Beltram - Energy Flash
Plastikman - Spastik
Donna Summer - I Feel Love
Tori Amos - Professional Widow (Armand’s Star Trunk Funkin’ mix)
Cutty Ranks - Limb by Limb

I should add that there is really no limit to my loathing of “Blue Monday”. Of the five tired songs above, “Blue Monday” is the one that I really just can’t stand, at all, especially in light of all the New Order tracks that I always want to hear, like: the Peel Sessions version of “5-8-6″, “Age of Consent”, “Perfect Kiss”, “Shellshock”, “The Village”, the aforementioned “Your Silent Face”, “Ceremony”, “Subculture”, “Temptation”, “True Faith”, even “Round & Round”!

(Secretly, there is a version of “Blue Monday” that I love, it’s the Jam & Spoon “Andrea Mix” from the Blue Monday-95 release, which is basically an ambient dub version, and I have it on 12″. I’ve considered selling my copy of the original Blue Monday, but even though I claim to hate it, I can’t part with it. I guess I want to prevent one other person from playing it! ;)

What five “classics” do you think have been rinsed to death? What five joints are you surprised haven’t grown old for you?

Just what in the heck does this track by Minilogue titled “Jamaica” have to do with its namesake island nation? Nothing I’ve ever heard associated with Jamaica moves that fast. I question your judgement, misters logue. Please, step away from the crack pipe. Then again, they’ve never been known for particularly clever track titles, even when they were psy-techno outfit Son Kite. Besides, at first I thought I hated it, especially because of the misnomer, but the more I listen to it the more I think it’s going to be a huge hit in certain circles. Unfortunate for Jah Rastafari, but I guess good on minilogue. I might have to pick it up, those snare rolls are a bit of an earworm. Why’s it gotta be so fast, though? SLOW DOWN minimen!

In more positive news, I just discovered a quite good album by Detroit son turned New Yorker Quentin Harris that’s apparently been out since 2006 with a slightly different tracklisting in Japan. Shouldn’t have slept on that especially considering I put his E.P.O.D. project’s “The Pursuit” on my “Impossible Sunday” mix from a couple years ago. I’m glad “No Politics” is available digitally now and you can bet your butt that Track 6, “Can’t Stop”, (scroll down and click on the track itself to override the strictly rhythm auto play) is definitely going on an upcoming mix. I can’t get enough of that vocal and rimshot!!! The rest of the album sounds pretty great too. Much of it definitely leans heavily towards the Shelter sound he clearly adores, but it’s definitely worth a listen even for those of you who might be tired of the Regisford scene. A lot of the tracks sound like they time-traveled from an era when club music was blacker and more joyful, which I guess is what people love about Shelter anyway, innit?

I’ve been relatively prolific with DJ mixes lately, especially compared to a few years ago when I was barely putting mixes out at all. I expect, too, that I will continue to release mixes more and more often now that I have this blog on which to share them.

This release is something special though. I’ve been hyping it up due largely to the fact that I worked on it in conjunction with DJ Hypnotyza from Pittsburgh. Mark and I have spun out together a couple times, and we’ve been close friends for years, but this is the first joint project we’ve worked on for general release to the public.

Taking cues from our shared affinity for all things falling on the soulful side of house and techno, we’ve assembled two mixes by two djs with a common theme. It’s not a tag team, but we had a lot of input on each other’s track selection (veto power ftw) and even contributed unreleased music and edits for the other to work with. We had one goal, a singular artistic statement: we want you to move to this.

Special thanks go to Shawn Rudiman for contributing an unreleased track to my mix.

Download both mixes as a zip file here

Track lists behind the cut (more…)