Month: October 2010

Grange Loan, Edinburgh, January 2010

Cold World has now been recorded (and it’s completely rocking!), but I still need your photos for the accompanying blog post! If you have a favourite winter photograph and would like it featured on this blog, please email a high-resolution copy (if you have one) to pearsall@gmail.com, as well as your name and (optionally) a description and a link to your website (if you have one). Having received it, I’ll be more than happy to include it in the final post.

Yesterday I received a message on BangingTunes.com from a user named Hettoblaster complimenting me on the Heartcore mix, and pointing me towards Mark Reeder’s Myspace page. Mark Reeder, for those who don’t know (a group that included me until yesterday evening!), is an Englishman who moved to Berlin back in the 1970’s and went on to become one of the key figures in the development of trance music, establishing the MFS (“Masterminded For Success”) label back in 1991. Through MFS, Mark launched the careers of people like Cosmic Baby and Paul van Dyk, who was later to become one of the biggest dj’s in the world, as well as putting out releases by producers such as Humate, Marco Zaffarano, and Mijk van Dijk.

Anyways, on his MySpace page, Mark has written a very long and interesting piece about his experiences in the Berlin music scene from the 1970’s through to today, which has a lot of fascinating detail about the latter part of the Cold War. It’s well worth going over there to have a read through the whole thing, but as a teaser I thought that I would excerpt what Mark has to say about the development of trance music and his relationship with Paul van Dyk:

If you’ve enjoyed my recent dubstep tributes, you should definitely check out Laurent Fintoni’s epic DMZ tribute that he did for his Saw You On The Flipside blog back in April. It’s got almost every classic tune that you might want from dubstep overlords Mala, Coki, and Loefah, spliced together with some audio from the YouTube interviews the crew did with Scion Radio. Amazing.

As regular readers of this blog will probably know, I am a big fan of photography. I usually use my own photographs for the mix covers, and I have posted entire galleries of pictures to accompany my mixes Drifter and Summer Snapshot.

One of my other interests is social media, a topic on which I write a blog at RandallHelms.com. In particular, I am very interested in ‘social sourcing’, how people can use the different forms of social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc) to create and share content.

This being the case, I thought that it might be interesting to combine my three passions (music, photography, and social media) into one little project. Among my forthcoming mix projects is a mix entitled Cold World, which, as I described here, will be a selection of some of my favourite tunes from the mid-90’s wave of darkside drum n’ bass. Since that music was so dark and so cold, it seems to me that a great way to accompany the mix would be to post a gallery of winter photographs.

This is where you come in.

Are you an amateur photographer?

If so, I’d like to hear from you!

What I’m looking for is your favourite winter photograph (that you took, of course), as well as some kind of description. This could be anything from just where you took it to a couple of paragraphs telling the story behind the picture, or why it’s your favourite winter picture.

Interested?

Great! Please email the image (the higher-resolution the better), the description, your name, and your website (if you have one) to me at pearsall@gmail.com, making sure to include the words ‘Cold World’ somewhere in the subject field. Having received your photo, I will then be more than happy to include it in the post that will accompany the Cold World mix.

I look forward to hearing from you!

In the meantime, I’ve recorded a tribute to dubstep don Skream, which will be live on the site tomorrow.

New mixes soon!