Friday, April 20, 2007

Mix to Download: DJ Pup Goes TechnoPop

This the first set of music I've recorded in a while, and it feels good to be back in the saddle again even if this isn't quite as crisp and clean as I'd like. It's a short set at 45 minutes, a reflection of the amount of time I had set aside for working on it, a desire to have something that would download quickly, and the feeling that people sitting at their desks or listening on an iPod as they get around probably don't have the attention span for more than 60 minutes of music.

Here's the track list:

* Solvent - Radio GaGa (Schneider TM Mustang Remake)
* Rex the Dog - I Look Into Mid-Air
* Moritz Piske - Ein Kangaruh im Clubraum
* Hot Chip - (Just Like We) Breakdown (Book Shade Vocal Mix)
* Mylo - Muscle Car (Alex Smoke's Rippling Mix)
* Hugo - Phone Call
* Reinhard Voigt - How We Rock (The Modernist Mix)
* Scratch Massive - Girls on Top

The first two are already on my ElectroTechno mix, but I love them so much I wanted to record them again. The rest of the tracks are an attempt at a harder dance mix, but one that I think is both humorous (esp. the Moritz Piske track with its nitrous vocals) and sexy. If I could play for a gay club night, this is what I would try. It's called TechnoPop because I'm interested in the way that techno producers are starting to look at poppier club music and producing these neat hybrids. These are all tracks, though, that I like to dance along with as I play them.

A word on the technical set-up: this was recorded all live, in my bedroom, from vinyl using a Pioneer DJM-500 with the RCA master output going straight into a Sony cd-recorder. You will probably notice a few odd things. First, my turntables aren't balanced in terms of output; one puts out a considerably stronger signal than the other. I also normally use two JBL EON 10s for monitors, but one of them is blown. So, to compensate for my output problems and only having the left channel for the master volume, the mix is in mono. Also, though this helps equalize the output to a large degree, it's still a bit off, so you'll probably notice that the levels vary a bit as I try to compensate with both the Master output and the trim. Finally, since this was recorded in my bedroom, a space on the bottom floor of an old Edwardian, I can't actually turn up the volume as much as I would like to hear what's happening without my annoying (Italian) neighbors thumping on the floor (another reason that this mix is so short is that I wanted to be done by 9PM to avoid incurring their wrath). So, the finer detail stuff like the high-hats tend to be kinda messy as I bring in the next track, mainly because it has to be pretty well in before I can hear it well enough to get it all together.

So here's the mix: DJ Pup, TechnoPop. If anybody wants to send me some cool "album art" to use as an image placeholder here, feel free, I'm not much of a graphic designer.

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