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DJ PUP

Recording a mix is always an iterative process for me that usually involves several takes and just as many weeks. In this case it took almost three full months.

This mix started off to serve also as an audition CD for the chill room DJ slot at the upcoming Real Bad party for Folsom Street Fair, thus it goes into more minimal, and slightly darker, territory than is usual for me. It quickly became apparent, however, that my aesthetic was still too beaty for the deciding jury, and I had a cloud of artistic doubt descend upon me - on the one hand, I had been described as "too cerebral" for dance music, and yet I was too "dancey" for chill music, and during my most recent DJ outings, one at a camp out, the other at a private party, I had made a small child cry with techno, and had been thoroughly upstaged by a tag team consisting of two very popular gay techno DJs. At the same time I was having significant problems with my recording set-up (two 1200s, a DJM-500, and a Sony CD recorder), such that one perfect mix was lost when the CD recorder inexplicably shut down, and the others that did survive had issues with clipping, unbalanced right and left channel levels, and of course the inevitable slip. After five frustrating attempts at recording I decided to give it rest for a week while I went back East to visit my family over the July 4th holiday.

When I returned I was hit with three massive life tremblors - a big shake-up at work, the sudden need to find co-habitation with my boyfriend, and then a case of walking pneumonia that laid me out for a full two weeks. I didn't touch my decks for almost six weeks, and in the meantime I went through a lot of soul-searching about music and DJing - what was the point of any of it, why did I spend money on records that I only played out a few times a year, and wasn't it about time that somebody my age realized that this was all a young (and more popular man's) game? Finally, on a Sunday whim the boyfriend and I went with a friend to Amoeba, and I bought three records "blind," purely on intuition. I came home, listened to them, and decided to give this mix one more go. Instead of laboring and laboring over it, I played one practice set to hear how my new acquisitions sounded with my other records, and then, the next night, I recorded the mix. Those three records are the first three tracks you hear on this mix.

There are things I really like about this mix, and some things that I would like to be different - the transitions at the end are rougher than I would like, for example, and there are still issues with the quality of the audio signal. But getting it done and putting it out there, even with imperfections, was a way for me to mark the end of a particular difficult period, to put some ideas and concerns to rest, at least for a while, and move on to something new. If I learned anything from this process it's that sometimes you have to move beyond the doubt, the performance anxiety, and all the rest, and just play the music that you like, having faith that that alone will be enough to make the connection you sought in the first place.

dj pup - process part 042 by modyfier

01. Dominik Eulberg and Gabriel Ananda - Schieder Kreisl
02. Styro 2000 - cremeschnitte
03. Jason Emsley - P.H.I.A.P.O.S.
04. Yapacc - take this away
05. Lurifax - Lobo Remix
06. Fletcher Mundson Syndrome - Lauter Leute
07. Carsten Jost - divide et impera
08. Serafin - Starship Discotheque
09. Sascha Funke - I love this tent
10. Kontakt - Music Gewinnt Freunde