.
.
NOAH GIBSON
I thought starting off this mix with a track that sounds as if it's been made out of pure sorrow would begin to descriibe how my December of 2008 felt.
Reaching through different areas of inspiration within myself, I chose to mix together a few tracks that were really present for me - the way this mix progressed was the way I felt right then in that moment.
As I am always trying to refine my style of DJing, I wanted to show that it doesn't matter what tempo you start off with as long as you capture the things going through your head (your own concentration and the people on the imaginary or real dance floor). I tried being intentionally consistent in a structural way, but the product of that effort turned out to be entirely the opposite.
If I were to put words to the outset of this mix, bringing clarity into the "structure" that I have for this mix, it must be a quote from Marcel Dettmann, "People who live their lives rationally, do not understand life".
01. STP - The Fall [Subsolo]
02. T++ - Audio1995#8_2 [Apple Pips]
03. Niteworks - Unreleased Poland Sessions [Synewave]
04. Kenny Larkin - You Are... Light [Planet E]
05. Shackleton - You Bring Me Down - Peverelist Remix [~scape]
06. Scuba - Ruptured - Surgeon Remix [Hotflush]
07. Unknown - Seldom Felt 1 B [Seldom Felt]
08. Marcel Dettmann - Plain [Beatstreet]
09. Kalon - Haiku - Female Edit [Sandwell District]
10. Unknown - Seldom Felt 1 A [Seldom Felt]
11. Gowentgone - Ibex - Marcel Fengler Remix [Vidab]
12. Kevin Gorman - SevenEightNine - Marcel Dettmann Remix [Mikrowave]
13. Quadrant - Infinition [Planet E]
14. EQD - Equalized #002 A [Equalized]
15. Kenny Larkin - Wake Outro [Planet E]
.
.
REYNOLD
I made this track thinking I would write a song and I ended up with a 4/4 beat and a dance track totally inadequate for clubbing. I like that! I grew up on soul music and jazz. When I make techno, I think I am definitely searching for some sort of deepness that is rooted there. Abstract to me doesn’t necessarily mean noise or no melodies. To me, harmony is the basics, it’s the ground, and melodies are the passions. Rhythm is just there to drive us to it. The trigger.
Of course, all these things need to coexist and the right chemistry is important, too. Dancing is the leitmotiv, but it would be so cool if we could manage to get people horny without having to wait until 5am and a few drinks gone by just playing super sexy beautiful techno. Real techno. Techno with soul.
Maybe the scene is lacking a social background to relate to? It had it when it began in Chicago, Detroit or even later, in Manchester. Obviously, techno became more than just a new Music's Club movement. The technology, the computers and other software are part of our life entirely now and so is the music.
But couldn't it be just a bit smarter for once to not to become just another way to consummate and couldn't we avoid the standardization of the movement and actually use this huge advantage that the internet can provide when it comes to building communities and sharing ideas??? Our generation and society could use a bit more of "reality ass kicking" instead of fighting against spams!!!
I consider myself a defender a mellowness when it comes to music. I like when art gives me a reason to look at what 's inside of me and my fellow humans. Stewart Walker once said to me that I was a populist and I think I can agree with that... :-)
.
.
CHEVEL
I’m sitting in my flat listening to some John Coltrane tunes, trying to chill my mind, wondering how to write a proper text for this process. The first thing I did when Rayna and I got in touch was to focus on the deep meaning of the word process. I've tried to transpose this meaning onto my personal experience. Actually, I’m living a deep process in my life and my teenage years will be gone in 2009.
Walking back in the years, I remember the day (I was eleven) when I decided to make music with my first computer. I was a bit confused about how to do it but I was also curious at the same time. I gave up going out everyday with my friends and I started spending whole afternoons in my room, trying to find how to make cool sounds. Unfortunately, this passion has stolen from me some good friendships in the past. I like so much to be closed in a room with a pc and some analog studio gear, just making music.
In the beginning, this situation was a bit frustrating. However, I soon realized this feeling of being unfulfilled was the key to finding a way of making music and art. Now, I suppose, I have found my meaning of the word process: a never-ending rush with no aim, no destination. It’s the flow in life, the mind in motion, the perfection you’ll never get, a perpetual state of crisis. That's why I mixed some tracks which really changed my point of view and gave me a good vibration to go on and never turn back during this endless life research.
With Love.
01. Sun Electric – Toninas (Ricardo Villalobos Remix) [Shitkataput]
02. Ripperton – Leonor’s Lanugo (Anders Ilar Remix) [Perspectiv]
03. Joel Mull – Begun The End Has [Railyard]
04. Petter – Left Turned [Border Community]
05. Lucy – Summery Drumming [Meerestief ltd]
06. Massive Attack – Teardrop (Minilogue Remix) [Not on label]
07. Lucy & Chevel – Secretaries Make Noise [Unreleased]
08. James Holden – A Break In The Clouds [Border Community]
09. Throbbing Gristle – Hot On The Heels Of Love (Ratcliffe Remix) [Novamute]
.
.
SEB STEIMEL
Yannick Schütz and I decided to choose tracks from a time when we didn’t care about releases at all. We collected many of our influences coming from soul, dub, hiphop and electronica. Both tracks accrued in one of the days when we were sitting in my old room – I was sitting in front of the TV, watching science fiction B-movies from the 50s without sound, all the while Yannick was creating this great dub tune which fit perfectly to the pictures. After drifting off to those ascendancies, I started remixing his track all the while still having the pictures of this movie in my head.
Both tracks originated in a time when everyone was talking badly about mp3 sound quality (note that today mp3s are sold - no need for commenting on this fact...). We really liked the artifacts on the high frequencies you would get combined with the typical compression, so we decided to run them thru an mp3 converter before working on the wavefile. This was a major experiment and worked (in our opinion) quite well for these two tracks, especially because of this manufactured “pirated feeling”. However, we discarded this procedure shortly after we got our first outboard equipment and were able to enjoy the fortune of analogue sound processing!
Normally I prefer to work alone with music. Sometimes I need a sample which I like because of the groove or the melody. Then I start to alienate it. The rest creates itself. As I came from the Hiphop scene, I think all my productions are influenced by this fact.
Later on, when I work on the mixdown and mastering of my own tracks or of others, I become more or less conservative and work like the audio tracks are coming from a band. I think I can blame my studies as an audio engineer for this fact and I’m really glad to be able to separate these two aspects in working with music. When I get material for mastering purposes I try to talk to the artists and labels to find out what they're aiming for. I start out working on smaller adjustments, like EQ and compression. On the second day I listen to the unfinished master again and when I’m happy with it, I start to work on the limiting. I'm not a big fan of killing all the dynamics so I just use it slightly to get the track on a proper level.
Making music for me is something like a valve – most of the time i'm working against my feelings which are surrounding me the whole day so I write sunshine tracks in the winter and vice versa.
As both of the tracks are more than six years old now and because of the fact, that we did this mp3 experiment, I don't think that they're a good reference for my mastering works. If you're interested I recommend listening to the digital releases of Produkt Schallplatten.
.
.
PAUL FRICK
I was working on a 2-bar loop without any special aim or concept. Looking for new sounds (especially drum sounds), I had cut samples out of a DJ mix that I had made a few days before, and I used most of those stolen samples for the loop. As I tend to get bored quite fast when I use the same sounds over and over, I thought that this method might give me a surprise or some other type of creative impulse. Indeed it sounded kind of fresh and when I had a first (2-bar) result, my girlfriend (the artist and illustrator Danae Diaz) came home and I played it to her quite enthusiastically, explaining where I took each element from. Spontaneously she told me, I should make the track exactly like that, with a voice explaining the samples. I liked the idea a lot, and I tried to make the track ironically question its own method (and thus the sampling technique in general), yet still work on the dancefloor...
I used samples from Guillaume & The Coutu Dumonts, Soundstream, Antislash, Janis Joplin, Akufen, Curv, Grace (from my former project Konsens) and Matthias Engler (excellent percussionist and long-time interpreter of my pieces).
For the voice we immediately thought of our friend Crawford, who on the one hand has a lovely british accent, and on the other hand has a great sensibility and knowledge of dance music, being a passionate DJ who has introduced me into a lot of music that has become important to me. And the recording was pretty much what I wanted: warm, natural and unpretentious.
Later, when the track was finished, I realized the coincidence that I had not only stolen most of the sounds (-only the stolen ones are mentioned in the track-) but even the idea of my girlfriend...
But it somehow fitted together to transmit a statement for "composition“, in opposition to a merely functional and technical concept of dance music:
In fact, I am not quite ashamed of stealing sounds, as long as I manage to create a new context and "compose“ them in my own way. I am convinced that the difference between sampling and playing the piano (for instance) is merely gradual: The piano player benefits of an instrument developed through centuries, as well as its tuning and its ways of playing and combining pitches and rhythms. It is all about dealing with "foreign“ material that the artist has to transform into his own and play with.
What I try to say is, a composer always works with more or less given material, given by his society, his history, his sensibility and by all the music he has ever heard. Playing a standard chord on the piano or cutting it out of a track is not so far from each other from a creative point of view... Individuality and originality happen only partly through the origin of the material. To me the bigger part of it is the way of composing it, creating relationships and tensions between the elements. Which does not mean that the material should not have an inner logic with the way it is treated!
In case somebody understands my words as a statement for just any kind of sampling, I have to clearify: I am not justifying the stealing of ideas! I can only appreciate intelligent sampling that is not mere copying. A badly sampled track is just as bad as one that is badly invented, it is maybe even worse because the producer has been lazy... And I do not prefer sampling to playing and recording, I simply see it as a gradual difference: Sampling should be as inventive as working with ones own sound material! And it is also an illusion to think that every note one has played on an instrument or made with a synthesizer is purely "ones own“.
A lot of artists (and the critics even more) are obsessed with their uniqueness and individuality, which in most cases is simply ridiculous. This is a long-term consequence of the genius cult that emerged in 19th century and that still holds the strongest cliché of "the artist“ nowadays. I guess that truly original artists do not have to be afraid of explaining all their (conscious) "ingredients“, knowing that the construction and the tension of their work cannot be recreated following technical instructions.
Shakespeare (not quite a techno producer, but you will get what I mean...) based most of his plays on well known tales, and nevertheless few people would say that he lacked originality...That leads us to the saying, "better well stolen than badly invented“, which I kind of agree to. But I still prefer how Picasso put it, "Bad artists borrow, good artists steal.“
Now that I find myself polarizing for the right of sampling, I also think that I maybe would not dare to sample that directly if in contrary i hadn't done tracks that consist entirely of especially recorded instrumental sounds, like the two marimbaphone tracks on the same record (Kalk Pets 15), the saxophone slap track "Got The Blues“ (Kalk Pets 12) or the whole Brandt Brauer Frick acoustic techno project (coming out on Tartelet Records in 2009). Above all I believe in the necessity of a frequent change of methods and perspectives, technically and mentally, to keep the music fresh!
A quotation I once heard is coming to my mind, because it is a good closing for my thoughts. It describes the whole outside world as being "foreign“, something that we constantly have to open ourselves for. It is by Hugh of Saint Victor, a theologian of the 12th century, and, the way I remember it, it says (not literally): Lucky is the one who loves his homeland. Strong is the one who sees foreign land. Invincible is the one who contemplates the whole world as being something foreign.
So don't feel too much at home in what you do!
.
.
CLARA MOTO
There are different ways I make music when I alone in my home studio. Sometimes I record sounds from my hardware and sequence it in ableton live. Other times I sequence everything with my hardware and record it directly. I also like to work solely with software (eg Reaktor, Battery, Absynth, etc.). And then there are the times when I just play around on my piano.
I like to use many different devices (not too many, but still enough to be able to play with variations). I´d love to buy some more hardware. As the acoustics in my room are far from perfect, I use my friends' (Soundsilo) studio to make a final mixdown. I also make complete tracks together with them. I think I learn a lot from them, especially about sound engineering and arrangements. If I make a dj mix at home, I select some tracks I really like and try to put them in a good order. Because a studio mix is not played in a club, I find it to be not as intuitive. Sometimes I like having more time to choose the tracks. Above all, for me, making music is about being in the moment: mindful and airy.
01. Pikaya - Grune Raufase (Cadenza)
02. Ricardo Villalobos & Jay Haze - Sunday Prayer (Contexterrior)
03. Audio Werner - If... (Hartchef Discos)
04. Monolake - Invisible (Monolake)
05. Horror Inc. - The Sentinel (Revolver)
06. Onur Özer - Sahara (Jens Zimmermann Remix) (Vakant)
07. Hakan Lidbo - Overnight (Moon Harbour)
08. Monolake - Plumbicon (Deadbeat Remix) (Monolake)
09. Sistema - Humo (Douglas Greed Remix) (Neu Lärmkassiker)
10. Cabanne - Jesse Garone (Minibar Music)
11. Pole - Pferd (Melchior Productions Remix) (Scape)
.
