An audio mind wash for January

Mixed by the gargantuan flippers of SKIZZWANG
- aka - Spuddbot V3.3

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A selection of delightful, highly melodic tunes to tap away to en route to work or wherever. A crisp assortment of tunes that conjures the meloncholic trauma of January as it keeps a keen eye on the distant summer. For your ear tubes and brain pipes.

The mechanoid has a soul.

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What's all the hoo haa here then?

Around this time last year I recorded a mix (NOW is that WHAT I call MUSICK vol 08) off the cuff and posted it upon the old interwebnet. It was my intention to produce a new mix every month.

HA.

No such a thing happened.

Now, the only reason I'm bothering to put this whole escaped out here is that getting the mix together was so so much more trouble that it usually ever is and during the recording something happened that inspired me to make a blog and dance about it and get my oar in and about the blogospheric realm.

At the tail end of last year I was messing about with a few records, running through a possible set for the New Year party. It was all quite melodic-funky-synthtastic-house/technoid rhythms with a heavy element of tunefulness. I thought it would be good to get it down on a recording, so I kept them in order and wrote it down on a scrap of paper after I'd ran it for a while. It can sometimes take me an age to put together a mix.
After a massive overhall of my disordered studio and a whole rebuild of my room I felt able to set about the task.

The preparation for the mix was in the usual spirit. After about 8 successive buckets to calm the strange recording phobia I encounter at these times I began an unrecorded pre run of the mix just to check everything was in order. After a couple of tunes I thought "what's the point in this, eH!" and decided that I may as well just get battered in. This was my first encounter with folly and error.

After only one failed attempt at the intro I got off to a promising start. Around 5 tunes in I noticed something was amiss. It was very very wrong infact. The Urban Tribe tune soundly badly misplaced and messed up everything afterwards. So I started again, realising that I had written it down wrong and the new revised order worked far better. Take no. 2.

It was in this take THE THING happened that made me wish I had gone for a dry run to time and check every tune. It was avery upsetting thing that happened, very unpleasant indeed. I got to my copy of AFX's Caustic Window compliation to play the tune Cordialatron (thank you discogs) only to find it, to my horror and disgust, with a sizable chunk out of the very tune I was intending to play.



OUCH

I then remembered that as I was putting away a record in the same section that came from something that I did originally think was a slice of quick flying vinyl flew out of the shelf. I checked the record I'd just put in and the record next to it and they were both fine. This kind of threw me and I had to think quickly so I altered course but it all sounded pretty rank and I stopped at 36 minutes to begin yet again. And so I pressed record for the 3rd time.

About 45 minutes in I got as far as I had planned and was winging it until about 70 mins. During this period of unplannedness a couple of silly little errors were made and a tune that should have been used was left out. At this point I thought it was likely that I would have to go and do it all again and after listening back to the disaster that I had just recorded I decided I would have to do another take for sure.
There were quite a few grave mixes amongst them and strangely enough I had managed to totally miss out a track, that very same Urban Tribe track infact.

So here we are 4 takes later. I've got a recording that is bearable to a point. It's no faultless, flawless seamless path of perfection but it holds together well enough to allow for it's rough patches whilst totally ignoring the occasional glitch in the droidbot and the grand mistimed misfortune of the very last mix. It won't win any medals for bravery, it's hardly an up to the minute bang to the second take on contemporary electronic dancing musick but it's got a tasty rhythm and 'nuff bass for your booty bagg.
I could go back and do it again. There are a few things I would change. I probably should, it would even be fun, but then where would that end. I'd spend days just picking away instead of moving on to the next. I think it's good to have the roughness left on, as a reminder of the subhuman aspect of it's creation.

To add some extra effects to the mix I was plugged into channels 3 and 4 of a Yamaha Stagepass 300 giving me the possibility of some really cheap tinny reverb. Quite fun really.




To create feedback and echo I ran a microphone though an Electribe ES-1 (with the pitch adjuster on) into channel 7/8 of the mixer. A shit load of fun but with the potential to damage ears and speakers simultaniously, as may be noted during the stated recording.



Let the funky droid burn, burn motherfucker burn

The idea behind this is to kick start myself back into doing regular mixes, for fun, and post them up here for, anyone that cares to, download. To stick to a monthly regime of at least one planned and pre worked mix with the possibility of one off the cuff freestyle freeranger to accompany the more tamed and mildly polished manner of the former.
Parts 1 to 8 of this long and painfully sparse set of mixes dating from 2002 to present can be found, alongside some of my own productions at myspaz. Just click on the links above the CD sleeve designs on right of the page for mixes.


This is a really rather lazily stitched panorama of my floor once it was all over. Of skewed angles and vinyl on vinyl crime.