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Pearsall presents One Last Night: An Om Unit Tribute Mix
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Recorded in Berlin, August 2023
100% Vinyl
(58:23, 134 MB, 320 KBPS MP3)
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Direct link to the file:
http://sonicrampage.org/mixes/om_unit/Pearsall-OneLastNight(AnOmUnitTributeMix).mp3
Tracklisting:
- Blocks & Escher – Broken (Om Unit Remix) [Narratives]
- Om Unit – Runes [Om Unit]
- Digital & Spirit & Om Unit – Skull [Function]
- Pawn & Calculon – Larchmont (Om Unit Remix) [Shoot]
- Kid Drama – Grind feat. Om Unit [Exit]
- Om Unit – Righteousness [Om Unit]
- Om Unit – Rubberneck [Om Unit]
- Om Unit – Ulysses (The Unreleased VIP) [Om Unit]
- J:Kenzo – Ruffhouse (Om Unit Remix) [Tempa]
- Machinedrum – Gunshotta (Om Unit’s Rollers VIP) [Ninja Tune]
- Om Unit – Underground Cinema (feat Krust) [Cosmic Bridge]
- Seba – External Reality (Om Unit Remix) [Secret Operations]
- Philip D Kick – Hyperspanner [Astrophonica]
- Philip D Kick – Bleach [Astrophonica]
- Dream Continuum – Set It [Planet Mu]
- Host – Survive (Om Unit Remix) [Hoover Sound]
- Om Unit & Sam Binga – Transatlantic [Bunit]
- Nasty Habits – Shadow Boxing (Om Unit VIP) [31 Recordings]
- Om Unit – The War (feat. Jehst) [Metalheadz]
- Om Unit – Timelines [Metalheadz]
- Mahakala – Tomahawk [Om Unit]
- Mahakala – Tomahawk VIP [Om Unit]
- Om Unit – Joyspark [Om Unit]
For my final mix of the year, I would like to present a very special project: my long-awaited (by, well, me) Om Unit tribute mix!
Om Unit (aka Jim Coles to his mom) has been probably my favorite electronic music producer of the last ten years. I don’t really know that much about the guy personally (I know he’s very tall and he lives in Bristol!), but his music is just amazing.
I love how he integrates his distinctively synth-heavy, melodic, bass-forward sound into all kinds of musical frameworks. He’s done everything from 110 bpm (and slower) dub / downtempo beats to 140 bpm breaks and dubstep and then all the way up to 160 bpm footwork and 170 bpm jungle and drum n’ bass. What’s really cool about his work is that even though he works at different tempos and in quote-unquote different genres, his music always sounds like him. In this day and age, it’s hard to find artists with a clear and distinctive sound, and he really has that. I love that he doesn’t compromise his musical vision, that he bends the genres to his sound, instead of the other way around.
He’s also insanely prolific – he’s released so much music, and so much of it is of an excellent standard, that I procrastinated for years when it came to making this mix. I have really wanted to make a tribute mix for a seriously long time, but sorting through the tracks seemed just too daunting, too much of a challenge. Where to even start? How could I do it justice?
I’m not kidding when I say that this mix is literally years in the making; I’ve had a section of my record shelves dedicated to Om Unit’s music that I would periodically pull out and try to design a mix that made sense, but the seeming scale of the task always paralyzed me. What to leave out?!? Every time I started planning the mix, it quickly climbed to 50+ tracks, and it just seemed like an insane undertaking, so the whole thing ended up getting shelved for ‘sometime later’.
Sometimes deadlines help.
When you’re stuck in a creative process, a deadline can give you the kick up the ass you need, and in my case the deadline that delivered me from procrastination hell was our impending move in mid-August of this year. After ten years in Wilmersdorf, we were finally moving to a new Berlin flat, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do any new mixes for several months, since my home office / mancave / music room in the new flat was going to be the last room to be finished.
Not exactly ‘now or never’, more ‘now or a lot later’, but in any case it gave me the impetus to finally do the mix.
In the end, with this deadline bearing down on me, I made the decision that ‘something is better than nothing’ and decided to make an hour long mix that showcased Om Unit’s faster stuff, delivering a mix that’s in the 165-175 bpm range. I wanted to capture a range of sounds, from meditative halfstep to frenetic footwork to more classic jungle breaks to weird unclassifiable stuff … I wanted to get it all in there!
So why is it called ‘One Last Night’? Pretty simply because I recorded this on literally our last night in the flat. It seemed like making a mix of tracks by my favorite producer of the last decade was an appropriate goodbye to our home of ten years. When you live somewhere so long, it becomes totally familiar to you, it becomes part of the story of your life, and so moving becomes a bittersweet thing, even if it’s also positive and the right thing to do from a rational standpoint (i.e we wanted to be closer to the kids’ school).
In fact, the cover image was taken from our bedroom window right after I finished recording the mix – it’s looking into the courtyard (or Hof) of our building.
Given the time constraints that I was operating under, I’m really delighted with how this mix turned out. If you only give yourself an hour to record a mix and you haven’t really practiced it beyond putting the records in an order that you think makes sense, you’re basically crossing your fingers and hoping your sixth sense for what records will work well together hasn’t failed you, and that the tracklisting you’ve put together will work as well in practice as you imagine, and that the records will actually fit together when you mix them.
In this case, well, I have been extremely happy with the result. I’ve probably listened to this several dozen times since I recorded it, and I think it takes you, the listener, on quite a journey in just one hour. The mixing is solid enough, given zero practice, and I think that I managed to pay appropriate homage to the breadth of Mr Coles’ musical vision. I’m good with it! I hope you like it too.
And that’s it from me for 2023, I think it’s been another year where I’ve produced some excellent mixes, both for Sonicrampage as well as as a guest for other people. I also managed to play a couple of fun gigs this year for Parallax, and I’m looking forward to more music, more mixes, and more gigs (fingers crossed) in 2024. Thank you to everyone who has listened to, liked, and shared the mixes in 2023 … see you on the other side!