I actually did quite a bit of DJing this year, mostly at UVic and at events around UVic, which gave me a somewhat different take on things. So:
X-Press 2: Lazy ft. David Byrne
Myself, Mike ‘Eclectrix’ Dean and Dan ‘OokPikk’ Godlovitch were doing a lounge thing at UVic for a good piece: I played this track literally every single time, pitched ‘way down from its 2002 speed of 129 or so. Played slowly, it’s a groovy, spacey jam – put it back to flank speed, and it pounds out 100% amazing Balearic vibes.
Azari & III – Manic
‘Hungry For The Power’ didn’t really do it for me: I thought “Oh, cool, New York House is back’ and left it at that. Then this snappy, hi-hat driven monster hit and rapidly became my go-to jam for any time after midnight.
Jacques Greene – (Baby I Don’t Know) What you Want / Another Girl
This is the third time I’ve linked this photo of Mr. Greene this year: he deserves it, as basically everything he’s touched in the past twelve months has been gold.
Honorable mentions to the blazing sci-fi of Actress’ Parallel World, the timeless snap & sleaze of Frankie Knuckles & Jaime Principle’s Baby Wants To Ride, Hrdvsion’s amazing remix of Robin S’s Show me Love…and huge respect to Hannah Read, Julia Easterlin, and Tamsin Wilson for converting me to singer-songwriters during my time in Boston.
An under-rated year: I thought of a few favorites, then looked at my sets folder and said “oh right, all these great jams.” So:
Kenzie Clarke – Look out Your Window
Guys, Kenzie has been on this list for the past three years. Most DJs talk in wishy-washy terms about “taking the audience on a journey”, and similar nonsense. Kenzie says nothing, and keeps making sets that might as well be operas, in terms of dramatic content, narrative thrust, and sheer pathos.
Lee Burridge – All Day I Dream Of Her
Lee is mostly known for dirty late night dance music of the highest quality, and not know for techno love-letters to imaginary women. But hey, turns out he’s really good at that too.
Dave Tompkins – How To Wreck A Nice Beach (Wire Edit)
Dave Tompkins wrote an insane book about the history of the vocoder. And then he made an equally insane mix about it, flying through historical recordings, electro, and hip-hop in the best possible way.
Honorable mentions go out to: Steve Bug’s acid house classics set for Resident Advisor; Chris ‘Monolithium’ Longshank’s MUTEK preview mix; Robag Wrhume’s calm-inducing ambient jam for XLR8R; Africa Hitech’s battlecry of a set for the same; and, plucked from the depths of history, Larry Levan, Sylvester, and Loleatta goddamn Holloway from the Paradise Garage’s second birthday party, in 1979.
Following up summer of 2010 was always going to be difficult. Luckily, there was some great stuff this year.
Jacques Greene @ Sub|Division, Lucky Bar
Oh man. Not only does Mr. Greene have two tunes in my top singles list, he’s an amazing DJ, wheeling through a comprehensive list of everything good in contemporary dance music, at any tempo you care to name. I said at the time that he restored my faith in dance music: that statement still stands.
Soul Clap @ Make It New, Middlesex Lounge
Boston is not a great town for dance music. However, Soul Clap know exactly what they are doing. Middlesex is a terrible venue for dance music…but the serious dance party that happened in a 15 foot radius around the DJ booth was well worth it.
Soulelujah @ Zuzu
When I said that Boston was a bad town for dancing, I obviously was not including the best dance party in town…which is actually the soul/funk 45″ night at ZuZu. Serious DJ wisdom, great tunes, and a crowd that really, really wants to turn it out.
Honorable mentions of the highest sort to James Blake’s amazing live set at Commodore; to Carl Craig playing Strings Of Life at Lotus and lifting me off the floor; to Claude Von Stroke for being almost the sassiest DJ I’ve ever heard; to Appleblim in NYC for stealing the show, again; and to Danny Krivit for playing amazing house music to a half empty Irish bar near Fenway.
Nobuo Uematsu – Final Fantasy VI Definitive Soundtrack
I am profoundly grateful to Dave King for ripping this direct from his SNES. Out of many profound childhood video game experiences, Final Fantasy IV and VI are the most personal: everything I need to know about life I learned from Terra, Locke, and Mog.
Rustie – Glass Swords
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. This album is what, baroque video game dubstep? It’s so rare for a record to be so totally over the top and to stand up so well to repeated listening. And it samples Ocarina of Time. What’s not to love?
Zomby – Dedication
Obviously, we’re well into nostalgia territory here: this album is, like Burial’s work, looking back to a scene that doesn’t exist anymore. Burial touched on rave and hardcore: Zomby’s album is, in its own way, pure trance.
Honorable mentions to: Bibio – Mind Bokeh, Roman Flugel – Fatty Folders, Machinedrum – Room(s), Africa HiTech – 93 Million Miles, and Amon Tobin – ISAM.
Some times it really is just all a blur. That blur refined itself into a few noticeable shapes this year.
Boston Symphony Orchestra – Mahler 5
I sometimes think that Mahler wrote his symphonies specifically for winning end of year lists. The BSO, playing at Tanglewood in a summer storm, did justice to the massive expectations that this piece has: a crisp first movement, a mindboggling scherzo, and the obligatorily heartrending Adagietto.
Alex Jang & Nathan Friedman – Graduating Recital
There is a thing that happens to composers from the University of Victoria in their fourth year: they go from producing great work to producing astonishing work. In this case, that astonishing work included post-Webern exactness from Alex Jang and a post-everything jazz apocalypse from Nathan Friedman. Look out for these cats – they are going to do very serious things.
The rest fall into a kind of better than honourable mentions: I can’t call them all out, but they were all jaw-dropping: Nadia Pona’s grad recital, featuring the most triumphant bassoon playing known to man; the String Quartet concert, with the Kovich Quartet’s demolition of Ligeti I; Michael Finnissy’s impossibly lush Gershwin transcriptions; the utter chaos of the MUS 462 concerts, including Iain Gillis catching a piece of bread and Stefan Maier placing a cabbage inside the piano; Romitelli’s technoid Green – Yellow – Blue at Sonic Lab; Tyson Doknjas playing Bach while topless and hooked up to a heartbeat sensor for my final computer music piece, Rob Phillips taking Xenakis apart and the putting him back together; Shima Takeda playing the best Bach ever.
It was a good year.
Ever wondered how to DJ properly? There’s an app for that. And I made it!
On Wednesday at UVic, it’s computer music all day. I’m playing in the 7 PM concert, with visuals & audio by Shawn Trail, and then in the after party at the Grad Lounge. Lots of other stuff happening on the day, too.
Audio of my National Geographic piece is here – 45 minutes or so of exceptional improv by a multitude of talented performers.
I somehow finished two remixes this fall. One for London techno cat Colin John, featuring Sarah Tradewell on viola, and one for local dubstep pusher Eclectrix. Audio is now on my SoundCloud!
I’ve been working on a Ruby on Rails / SoundCloud / Heroku web app, for my SENG 435 course at UVic, and I’ve hit some snags that I want to document, in case anyone ever hits the same thing.
– I’m working in Ubuntu 10.10. SoundCloud & Flash in Ubuntu is a tough thing at the moment. Parker & Omid have answers.
– I’m recording audio using the SoundCloud JavaScript SDK. I needed to permanently authorize a single SoundCloud account for all users to post audio to. That’s possible by passing an OAuth Access token to Recorder.upload:
Recorder.upload({url:”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks.json?oauth_token=” + YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN, …
I ended up hard-coding mine into the javascript file, because I am a terrible person. There might be a real way to do this, but I can’t find it in the docs.
– I’m using Heroku, who are mostly wonderful. I had to use the RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile command, as detailed here.
– I’m also using SoundCloud oEmbed endpoint, and I could not, for the life of me, get a response back when calling it from Heroku…until Johannes Wagenger at SoundCloud pointed me to the following:
Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(“http://soundcloud.com/oembedformat=json&url=YOUR_URL”))
No idea why the code I was using that did almost the same thing didn’t work, but it works now.
I just finished up two remixes: one for London techno gent Colin John, of his track Solstice, and one for local dubstep hero, Eclectrix, of his tune Alkalosis. Clips soon, I promise.
I just got the recording for the final entry into my National Geographic suite of compositions. All four pieces, taken together, are 43 minutes long. Let’s put a bow on it and call it a symphony.
Deep thanks to Cassandra Miller for being the best composition teacher ever, and deeper thanks to my players: Rob Phillips, John Russell, Kira Hall, Kim Shepherd, Kevin Thomson, Connor Ashton, Lea Kirstien, Alex Jang, Sara Page, Nathan Friedman, Stefan Maier, Alexei Paish, Iain Gillis, Mary-Ellen Rayner, Jillian Hanks, and Jamie Hook. Full audio will be up soon.
