by ·Comments Off on Ay que rico… Mini Mix #5

Given my recent musical troubles, I was pretty much expecting something to happen when I set to record today’s mix.

Lightning, flood, hailstorm, gozilla sequel… anything, really…

Incredibly enough, nothing went wrong, and I’m quite satisfied with the result, except for the fact I had to do it by headphones with the amp nearly turned off, for reasons obvious enough, and mixing quality is thus not at its best and brightest. But nothing to be truly ashamed of, I reckon.

Those who were only mildly thrilled by the musical digressions of the last two mixes can rejoice: the Funk is back.
Mostly Latin House tunes, to be exact: my personal sweet spot…

So put this mix on, crank the volume way up and enjoy!

Dr Dave’s MiniMix #5 (right-click here for download)

PS: If within five minutes, your feet do not start dancing under you, take your own measurements and call your local mortician to make arrangements: you are probably dead.

Keywords: salsa, lupita, latin, miami house, ATFC, MAW, que rico los tambores, una mas tequila por favor…

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In music, major performance bloopers are usually caused by the most mundane details. Like realizing you forgot to plug your keyboard (or guitar, or microphone or any other electric musical appliance), right the second you hit the first key during a live act… Muting/enabling the wrong channel on your board by mistake and failing to realize how bad it sounds to the public because you got your headphones on… All typical stuff. Who never did it, never performed live.

Actually, the best one I have ever seen was not one of mine.

Back in London, some DJ-legend-I-shall-not-name-here was scheduled for a major 5-hour set at the club. Things were not looking pretty when he showed up 30 minutes late in a more than advanced state of chemically-induced mental regression.

When their headliner DJs are too wasted to perform, I’ve seen promoters use all kind of tricks to keep the show going… most often putting on a mix CD and regularly slapping the passed-out artiste out of his daze so he can wave at the crowd like he means it. Depending on where you are and who the DJ is, that usually works. But in this case, the club owner (a DJ himself) was quite adamant about having Mr. Drooling Superstar play his own set. Essentially basing his decision on the quite valid idea that such caliber of a DJ could play a set in his sleep… and that most of the assistance would be at least equally wasted anyway.

This, as it turned out, was not the best decision of the night…

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by ·Comments Off on Letters to a Young Hip-and-Coming Writer

The French tend to consider that, in order to become a talented writer, one has to spend their days in smoke-filled cafés, possibly while drinking oneself blind on exotic liquors.
Americans think the secret to becoming a good author lies in bullet lists of writing techniques and prestigious writing classes.

I am no writer (understatement if there ever was one), but something tells me they are both dead wrong.

Then again, I do not think Dan Brown is much of an author, to say nothing of the hordes of navel-gazing, bored & boring, Parisian writers who persists in trying to give their worst second-class Bret Easton Ellis rendition every single year… So what do I know…

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In 1982, Tadao Kikumoto invented a little box supposed to emulate a bass player and thus help bands rehearse without one if need be. Unfortunately for him, that box didn’t sound anything like a real bass, got dissed by every self-respecting garage rock bands and was removed from production less than two years later.
In 1987, Nathaniel Pierre Jones (just Pierre, to his friends) wondered what would happen if you were to tweak the knobs on this funny little box in ways that had probably not been intended by its creator, while playing it really really loud.
Seven years later, Joshua Winkleman (Josh to his friends, Wink to his fans) wondered what would happen if you were to tweak the knobs even more while playing with it.

Much tweaking and bleeping ensued.

Good part about dragging an eye more bloodshot than a flock of Transylvanian bats is that I can’t do much, except stay in the dark and make noise. Which in turn means I’m holding pretty good with my average two-three-mix-a-week production plan.

This mix is also kind of old school. Wait. Come back: there’s no Prince this time. I’m talking about the other Old School.
If you’ve ever gone dancing in the outdoors sometime during the past fifteen years, chances are you know most of these tracks. If you’ve not, then here is your chance to see why you missed out. Suffice it to say that one of my favorite instrument of all times is heavily represented (and I’m probably going straight to Musician Hell for even calling that an instrument).
So this is yet another nostalgia mix, I know, but for aforementioned strained-eye reasons, I really cannot stare much at a computer screen these days, and that reduce by as much my options in terms of making bleeping sounds of my own to go on a mix. Good part about this old school is that I got it all down there on lovely vinyl.
As a result, no prod on this mix, save maybe for some liberal use of sampling trickery, but that doesn’t really qualify…

And before you go and enjoy, I should probably add a fair warning: some of the music on this mix probably could be considered… huh…
“agressive” is not quite the word, but…
OK, let me put it this way: there are basically two type of reactions to it… Some people will shake their head rhythmically while making weird little snake movements with their hands, while others will repress tears of pain and clench their teeth to make sure their fillings do not come out while addressing a quick eulogy to their late eardrums.
Rule of thumb is that people past their thirties tend to belong to the latter category, but go ahead, make the stats lie!

And now that you’ve all been warned:

Dr Dave’s MiniMix #4 (right-click here for download)

Don’t cry Sunshine, next week will be back to good ole’ Funky House. Promise.

Keywords: techno, electronic, psychedelic house, 303, more 303, noisy, tweety-tweety-tit, Underworld, Rollo, Josh Wink, Arrigo Boito, Grayhound, Mefistofele, rez, no sleep, people, consciousness many levels higher…

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As part of our ongoing series (yea, I know, there are so many series going on around here, it’s starting to look like NBC) on Artsy French Movies, let me present the movie of the night. I mean, not exactly the only movie of the night, but I don’t think Candy Bottoms: Nuns in Heat III really deserves a review of its own (my roommate gives it two thumbs up. well at least one, right this moment).

The movie is Band of Outsiders… Bande à part in French, notable in that it also happens to be Tarentino’s production company’s name: what a freaking nerd.
I know, it’s quite surprising I had never seen that movie given that 1) I spent a small but crucial share of my formative years studying in Paris and 2) I have seen most French classics of that time. especially Nouvelle Vague ones (and no, it was not to try and impress some cute bookish girl with an infatuation for old movies. actually, maybe it was. never mind).

There is a reasonable explanation for that: I really cannot stand Jean-Luc Godard. Not the work, the man. See: I was apparently born a couple decades too late. I would have probably liked him ok back then. What makes me dislike him is not even the way he very efficiently shot his own career in the foot, back in the sixties, by abandoning art production in favor of political involvement with a few fringe ideologies. Granted, he did not make the best choice in his fringe ideology affiliations (Mao anyone?), but still, that’s the kind of thing I could actually like him for. No: the problem is that he has now become an insufferable old snob, more full of himself than ever. Whining, staring at his navel, fustigating the youth of today and overall assuming his position as compulsory authority of modern cinema. Always that same old pattern: people overturned by their ambition into the very people they were setting themselves against, rebellious kids turning bourgeois, punk joining the establishment, burning man selling t-shirts on the web etc.

Plus, the man is an awful bore, dribbling inane vacuous aphorisms on life and himself whenever he manages to grab a camera.

So, while I absolutely love François Truffaut, and even though they worked together a lot, I had always ignored a few “seminal” French snobby movies, on the sole ground that they wore his signature. Bande à part was one.

Was I missing out?

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by ·Comments Off on Mini Mix Pt. 3: Revenge of the Old School

I just made a very important discovery.

See, on my shared server web control panel, there is this little indicator that changes color to reflect the latest Terror Alert level, courtesy of Donald and his friends at the Homeland Sicherheit office. Or so I thought.
I mean, things had been pretty quiet for the past month: the bar remained a serene green and I had naturally assumed that terrorism had been eradicated from the face of earth, evil vanquished, all that… Except, about a week ago, the indicator suddenly went through yellow, orange, red to finally stop with an even brighter red. Not inching back to safer level thereafter.
I was starting to worry a little bit and considered contacting the SDF: tell them to get Godzilla ready. just in case, you know…

Well, it turns out my ISP did not put a terror level indicator on my control panel. According to some guy from their support, it is supposed to represent the amount of “free disk space” I got on my share. Free as in “free beer in your fridge”. Red meant, in essence, that I didn’t have any (space, not beer, please follow).

So the good news is that you can put these rolls of saran wrap back in your drawer and take grandma out of the anti-gaz-attack freezer: everybody is safe… for now…
The bad news is that this latest brilliant idea of mine has to be reconsidered, and the frequency of mp3 uploads slowed down a wee bit for now, lest we make that indicator go past its current red level, which can only be a bad thing, I assume.

Since running a public web server off my laptop at home is probably not a good idea (trust me, the poor thing already has quite a hard time coping with the heat and the crazy things I ask it to do), I am currently doing the round of all my lucky friends with nigh-unlimited disk space on their box to see if somebody can spare a few megs for the sake of this artistic endeavour.

In the meantime, I erased a few porn movies from my server and was able to make enough space for a new mix:

Dr Dave’s MiniMix #3 (right-click here for download)

Keywords: hip house, old school, Miss Kittin, Prince, sniffing in the VIP area, I like the way your booty shake…
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So the mood is not exactly great these days and I’ve been resuming music therapy, as it usually kinda helps.

Tweakin’, mixin’ and producin’ as usual…

See, in my shoes, Ian Curtis would probably have made something awesome, deep and powerful and then proceeded to slit his wrists open…
Me: I mostly wonder what Django Reinhardt would sound like, remixed on a techno beat…
Maybe that’s why I haven’t reached worldwide fame yet.

talking about, I expect the ghost of Ian Curtis to show up any second now and he’s probably quite pissed for what I’ve done to She’s Lost Control during my last bout of inspiration…

Anyway… on a completely different train of thought, I have been brainstorming on how I could make that blog of mine more interesting, given the ludicrous amount of time I have just spent making it prettier.
Posting naked picture of myself daily was considered. and ruled out.
What I wanted was a good reason for my three faithful readers (that includes you, the guy who got here by typing “soccer milfs” in Google) to check that vacuous page more than once a year or when their mouse trips and activate the link by mistake (a very common problem: that happens to me quite often with porn websites, personally). And we all know these pathetic rants of more than dubious literary value sure aren’t much of a reason.
And that’s were the aforementioned music activities come into the picture: I figured it would be cool to post some here on a regular basis. Problem is, I do not have the time nor the motivation to record full-hour mixes very often, especially given my borderline obsessive compulsive nature (did I say “borderline”, sorry, I meant “full-on, clinically recorded”) that compels me to maniacally do a hundred takes until I am either satisfied or passed out from exhaustion (usually the latter).
On the other hand, all kind of complex legal and moral issues bar me from making single tracks available on this site, whether mine or other’s.

Hence, the Mini-Mix of the Day idea…

The skinny:

  • They mostly contain tracks I like or stuff I made, should cover a very wide range and balance styles as much as possible
  • They are not very worked on, mostly a half-dozen tracks hastily cued together and done in one take (or two, if I really fuck up, cf. OCD issue above)
  • There should be some kind of theme running, though I certainly won’t go into details over each one
  • I’ll try to record and upload a new one at least every other day (well, that’s the theory of it, and we all know how theory goes around here)
  • There is definitely a big tongue-firmly-planted-through-cheek factor (cf this first mix). One more reason to stick with a short format, ’cause I can tell it would become old easily over 90 minutes.

And without further ado, the first Mini-Mix-of-the-Day:

Of course, there’s always the old mixes here too.

Enjoy.

by ·Comments Off on Les Rêveurs

Hey people…

Check out that movie: Les Rêveurs (or ‘the Dreamers’ depending on what side of the pond you rent that movie on)

It’s just perfect… it’s got everything: there’s that Nouvelle Vague feel (“Herald Tribune, Herald Tribune”…), the “Paris feel” (no really, it does feel like Paris: if you’ve ever lived there, you know what I mean) and of course: the ambiguous French softcore stuff (I mean: it’s a French movie, right)…
All in all, it was much more enjoyable than what most of the reviews I had read had led me to think…
The website is completely awesome too (I got the link a week ago and fell in love with the site, but wanted to make sure the movie was up to par before I gave any recommendation for either one): http://www.the-dreamers.com/ (update 2010: oops, it’s been replaced by a spam website).

If French pseudo-intellectual movies are not your cup of tea, my roommate also downloaded purchased: “Hotel Fickmichgut III”, which, I am told is a quality movie, albeit in a slightly different genre.

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Du fühlst es nicht,
wie einsam ich bin…

Warum…

Warum ?!?

Have you ever wondered why there wasn’t more German love songs out there?

Well, wonder no more:

This song has rocked my high-school years, been the staple of many a drunken late night with friends and is overall single-handedly responsible for destroying any illusion in my mind that German could ever be used for anything beyond Kantian philosophy and Organic Chemistry textbooks.

when I think some people expressed indignation at my reserve toward that oxymoron called German poetry…