Slaying Dancefloors at Will .Count Zer0.

Please enjoy side 2 of DJ Abiel’s “Coffee Breaks”.

(right click above link to save-as and download, left click to stream)

Decided to post another forgotten classic mixtape from my archival rave cassettes. This one comes from DJ Abiel, who I believe lived in Texas or somewhere in the midwest. I think I met him on ne-raves or maybe the ambient list. A downtempo masterpiece from 1996, “Coffee Breaks” spent more time in my tape deck than most other mixes of the time. Here’s part 1 (right click to save-as and download, left click to stream) of the trip-hop delight, I’ll post side 2 tomorrow or the next day.

this won’t embed! ARGH!

This post got me thinking about djing with records vs. djing with mp3s because I too have been augmenting my music collecting this year with a substantial quantity of mp3 purchases.  I chose to use time coded vinyl and continue to beatmatch rather than letting the machine do the work for me, so I haven’t fallen prey to the problems that twentyoner has with mixing.  My beatmatching and programming expertise don’t hurt - remember when I did that one mixtape in 98 called “What I Really Learned in College” cheekily named after all the times I skipped class to play records in my dorm room or the school radio station?  Fifteen thousand (+) hours, baby.  Anyway, I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that vinyl is superior to digital djing. One interesting thing about buying music as mp3 via Beatport or other digital music portals is that I find it harder to recall the music based solely on non-musical cues such as artist/title/etc. When I play records I can generally recollect the tune usually by associating the imagery of the label art itself with the music. Unfortunately my studio computer is an antique that doesn’t have enough processing power nor ram to preview the tracks, so in Virtual DJ (software similar to Serato) I have to wait for the whole cut to load before I can cue it. I’m pretty much opposed to planning sets in advance, too. So, for me, with mp3 there’s no visual cue (no iTunes style cover view either), which makes it a little more difficult to keep track of things. Even if there was some sort of visual cue, it just wouldn’t compare to the tactile joy of flipping through a crate of records. My finances aren’t in line though with the kind of spending that I’d like to be doing on new vinyl despite my recent splurges at Hardwax and Dope Jams. So here’s an mp3 Top Ten for October, mostly, with a few releases from the beginning of this month.  Links are to the myspace profiles.

1 j fine - our music is a secret order pts 1 & 2- kontra music - 10-15-2008

According to J. Fine “our music is a secret order” is an apocryphal phrase attributed to Louis Armstrong via Sun Ra in 1954.  Is it dub techno, is it minimal?  I don’t care, but this double EP trods similar ground as Basic Channel without sounding like all their imitators of late.  A few cuts sound like SAWII-era Aphex Twin on a Dance Mania tip.

2 dave aju - tapatio - circus company - 10-20-2008

This is apparently Dave Aju’s mouth-techno ode to his favorite brand of hot sauce. A lot of huge big deal has been made of dude’s album “Open Wide” allegedly made entirely of mouth sounds. I’m not entirely sure if I buy that bit, but “Tapatio” is kind of the jam, a jerky twitchy jacker with tweaky pitch shifted synth tweets and funky kickdrums. This dude is in the running for artist of the year as far as I’m concerned.

3 speedy j - red shift - electric deluxe - 10-21-2008

Simply put, this is the sound of true minimal techno. It’s amazing he’s still able to pull this off after the career he’s had. I should probably investigate that collaborative project he’s working on, though I think it’s mostly a publicity stunt.

4 brooks - rlf - mantis recordings - 10-23-2008

Ridonk jackin house. Brooks channels the unborn love child of Green Velvet and Black Balls (Adonis/Farley) - syncopation out the wazoo until the whole clappin’ affair goes deliciously off kilter. Totally fracked up.

5 king roc - flow parts 1 and 2 - mutual society - 10-27-2008

Enigmatic atmospheric brain bender with multiple movements, centered around a primally satisfying thump-chuck shuffle.

6 darke - caucciu - resopal schallware - 10-31-2008

I’m such a sucker for the old tablas + ethnic samples formula.

7 didem suzen - something is gone - 3rd wave music - 11-05-2008

Mostly beatless dub-atmospheric intro or outro track.  Mellow, smooth, like a nice old cavendish.

8 dapayk solo - acid pornofski - mo’s ferry productions - 11-07-2008

Future acid. Taking the 303 towards similar places that Move D goes, but faster.  Rave breakdown and a chainsaw acid line.  Like so much of what I’ve been buying these days, this reminds me of what I loved about psy-trance, but slower and more funky.

9 blakkat - day to come - shaboom records - 11-07-2008

Soul house with an inspirational vocal. See also Little Louie Vega and Mr. V.

10 paul hazendonk - sweet torture (bart thissen remix) - stolen moments - 11-10-2008

Covers similar melodic ground as Head Honcho’s classic “Medicine” but more acidic and less progressive. Epic. Tom Cox would hate it with every fiber of his being.

1. kaossilator
2. live sampled beatboxing
3. purchased sample libraries
4. that effect everybody is using in ableton live that makes that rising/falling sound made famous by the also overwhelmingly overrated track “total departure”
5. blogging
6. fake detroit cred
7. mnml backlash
8. electro disco revival (coughcoughherculesandloveaffaircoughcough)
9. unnecessarily eclectic dj mixes
10. reissues

I should probably say some other things about Ce Ce Rogers, the artist featured in my Obama-victory-afterglow post from last week. Dude’s got a myspace, as you can see if you clicked on the above link. It’s unfortunate that he’s all gospel and what not, because god is some nonsense. Still, nuff respect for “Someday”. If he had done nothing else but that track his place in the history of house would have been cemented. Bit of a one-hit-wonder, though, honestly. Not true for his partner on that cut, though, the brilliant Marshall Jefferson who has put out a few other great records over the years. So, don’t just download the song I posted, seek out the rest of the story, eh?

This one goes out to all the heads in Detroit who be hurtin’ from the economy and the failing auto industry.

I once had what basically amounted to a spiritual experience upon hearing Autechre’s cut Second Bad Vilbel at volume completely out of nowhere on a pristine system at Cloudwatch, an old Baltimore ambient/experimental recurring rave type thang. So even though I am not a HUGE Autechre fan (outside of that track at least), I definitely appreciate what they do. Despite that, though, they’ve never really seemed to me to have much connection to dancefloor techno, and when I think of Detroit I think first of dancefloor jams. Anyway, point is, Autechre just wants to tell you techno music cats from the D “how good you are.” Download and sample this (ganked directly from the “Universal Techno” mini-doc) into a track.

As a rule I don’t make posts with full mp3s, but today is as good an exception as any. I woke up this morning and thought “did Santa come?” before I remembered that it’s real. It’s really real. Yesterday by a landslide in the electoral college and a strong 5% majority in the popular vote Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States. That’s great. I’m ecstatic! As Luke Russert, son of late news anchor Tim Russert, said last night “I got a text message from a childhood friend that said ‘It’s our turn now’.” This campaign has reflected fundamental changes that are taking place in the way we do things in America, from the way we view race to the way we communicate and organize. I could be happier, though. We’ve elected yet another man who mistakenly believes in the supernatural. We’ve got a long way to go there. Barack also does not support marriage for same sex couples. That’s almost as misguided as his belief in god. Still, today can be a sort of national holiday, a day when we should all enjoy what we made happen before the hard work starts up again. We’ve got more work to do now than ever before. Right now though, dance to this song from 1987 by two black men from Chicago who dared to dream that someday we will ALL be free. And that’s the refrain we must now sing, the refrain that I call on Obama to change now, to sing out on the mall on Washington in January, in an inauguration at the Lincoln Memorial not the traditional Capitol building. Yes we can? No. YES WE WILL.

(reposted to fix download link)
ETA: I’ve deleted the full mp3 file I had hosted previously due to excessive leeching. If you find this blog entry and want the mp3, please comment and I will see if I can find a way to share it again.

1. january-june 2008 essential mix (54 per month)
2. sechsundsechzigteknomix (44 per month)
3. nearly sixteen feet of soul (36 per month)
4. USB Vol. 1 (34 per month)
(darnit! I just discovered that one of my “secret weapons” from that mix just got a digital re-release. CURSES!)
5. impossible sunday (13 per month)
6. essential mix 08-31-2007 (11 per month)
7. absolute zer0 side a (10 per month)
8. post rock freak beats side a (9 per month)
9. zer0 truth (7 per month)
10. summer 1997 that long lost drum and bass tape side a (6 per month)

and of course these and all my other deejay mixes are available in the mixes section of the main site. Which is your favorite? Thanks for listening.