First of all, I would like to thank Rayna for giving me this great opportunity. This mix is put together from my recent favorite tracks of 12 inch Vinyl with a Urei 1620 music mixer. It represents my recent style - deep, spacy and mystic. Also, I wove in some memories of Cio D'Or.
Thanks, again. I'm really honored to be part of the Process Series.
01. Nuel / Aquapalano Ltd 01 / A2 02. Horizontal Ground 02 03. Donato Dozzy / Time Out The Gap 04. Function vs. Jerome Sydenham 05. Forward Strategy Groupe / Applied Generics 06. Marcel Dettmann / Silex 07. Peter Van Hoesen / Terminal 08. Donor / Truss / Abbott (Mike Parker Remix) 09. Sandwell District Sampler Two / Silent Servant 10. Function / Burn 11. Jeff Mills / Something In The Sky 001 A1 12. Gowentgone / M.A.M. (Marcel Dettmann Remix) 13. Sandwell District Sampler One / AA Function 14. G-man / The Way You Move 15. Cio D'Or / Goldbrokat (Donato Dozzy Remix) 16. Sandwell District / Female Live Extract
So, I received a forwarded email from Rayna through my partner in War Vs. Sleep (Brian aka C.L.A.W.S.). It was an unexpected, but very welcome email. I have been a fan of Modyfier for a while now and have always wanted to participate in the Process Series. Unfortunately, that made it kind of difficult for me to decide what to do. I wanted it to be unique; to fit with the concept, but to stick out. I had thought about what I would do for Modyfier before, and had usually decided on a new song. Then I had this idea of doing 45rpm records slowed down to 33rpm as a set. House music that sounded sadder than the sad house music that I already DJ. I don't have turntables at home, but I wanted to start immediately. So I decided I'd do a liveset. But not live. I decided I wanted to do one hour of 100% new music, at 100bpm. Music that came to me stream of consciousness and focused on extended repetition, molasses beats, and subtlety. (I actually originally wanted it to feel like one song, but that didn't work out). And I would give myself a maximum time-frame of one week. I like flawed perfection better than perfection. I hope I've done that, but I have a myopic vision of my own work.
I worked for 3-1/2 days (not straight) on this, piece by piece, never closing the Ableton project window except when the amount of tracks/samples made it crash. I used some samples and instruments that I have played, some heavily effected and some not so heavily effected drums, some found vocal snippets which I always love and a lot of arpeggios. Each "song" or section naturally grew out of the one before it, which is why it isn't structured the way I would structure a live set, DJ set, or album. A few parts ended up wherever they ended up that could have worked better closer to the end or middle or something. I didn't want to edit to make it "better", but less natural. I hope people like it. And remember: Oh honey, please don’t give your heart to a world system based on exploitation of the luckless, give your heart to us.
Our concept behind this piece is that no matter what you do, people will always have different opinions and different ideas behind what is right or wrong. We have been working as a duo now for 3 years. Many times we will get to the point in our creative process, where a track can go in one of two directions. Generally it'll be that one of us feels the sound should be developed in one way and the other feels that it should go in the opposite direction. When working as a duo you need to make a decision that first of all makes both of you happy and second of all it should be a compromise often involving variations from both of our original goals and ideas.
The way we set about working towards a final piece here was that we decided to contribute a track, rather than a dj or live set. After deciding on this, we went to work on a set of loops for the track. We had a nice set of loops built that we bothliked and felt would be suitable for the project, it wasn't until that point, that we realised we could give the project a twist. We thought rather than build one piece of music, why don't we make two tracks based around the same collection of sounds.
So, instead of one track, we decided to give away two tracks built from the exact same sounds. The arrangement of the loops and tracks are completely different to one another,and we feel they represent two sides to the same story. As they have been built with the same sound sources there is a definite connection between the two pieces of music, but at the same time, the two results couldn't be more different from one another. Again,this is comes down to how decisions were made on one track and not the other in both situations.
Creatively we tend to work quite intuitively, allowing us both to put ideas forward for discussion. Sometimes these ideas will stay exactly the same from the start of the creative process to the end, and other times, the first idea may morph several times to the end result. This doesn't mean that the original idea was wrong, it may just mean that it didn't fit what we were wanting to create at that moment in time. Music can be based around how you feel at the time that you make it, your mood can really affect how your end result sounds.
The place where we live also has a lot to do with how we design our sounds. Living in an industrial city like Manchester has really influenced both of us, from the soundtrack in the clubs to the busy city life with millions of natural and manmade sounds around all the time definitely has affected our mindset. This is quite different from living in the countryside where maybe 90% of the sounds are natural and generally more peaceful.
So, one story can have two completely different versions, depending on who tells it, what they perceive to be the right or wrong way of doing something, the situation, the location and of course the people involved.
Many Thanks to Rayna for asking us to contribute to Modyfier, we have both really enjoyed the whole process. It certainly made us sit back and actually think about some of the reasons, why we make music and what contributes towards our everyday surroundings and influences.
This mix was quickly cobbled together in Ableton without a controller. It's a mixture of old favourites of mine as well as recently discovered things. It has it's imperfections and the track choice is stylistically 'diverse', to say the least. This was due to a concerted effort to have a rather stunted flow in order to present the pieces of music in unfamiliar contexts, and create shifts in mood and texture that otherwise cannot occur in regular DJ sets.
This is material I normally wouldn't get a chance to play in a club, but is hopefully a good representation of the spirit and thirst for new sounds that I aspire towards as a producer. Thanks goes out to Rayna for the chance to contribute to the Process Series.
01. He Said Omala - Sea Horse Trading 02. Brian Eno - Draw One Animal 03. Lil Louis - God Is Watching 04. Ike Yard - NCR 05. Max 404 - Lost 06. Notek - Country Break 07. Bruce Gilbert - You Might Be Called 08. Kareem - Ciclop 09. Chris & Cosey - This Is Me 10. Der Zyklus - Cherenkov Radiation 11. Farah - Law Of Life 12. Vromb - Animation 13. Andrea Parker - Empty Words 14. Squadra Blanco - The City Shall Burn
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