I guess there’s not much point in rehashing what a crazy and turbulent year this was for pretty much everyone on the planet – you lived through it too, you know what it was like.
So with this being my final mix of the year (I think!) I thought I would instead drop something a little bit fun and not too serious.
Goal achieved
One of the goals I set for myself for this year was to hit 60,000 listens on Soundcloud for the year … and I hit that goal last weekend (see above)!
So that was nice!
Why 60k, though?
In practical terms this is, of course, totally pointless. It’s meaningless internet points in one sense. It doesn’t make any real difference to my life or to my family.
But it’s fun to set yourself a goal and try to hit it. Plus 60 is a nice round number (also meaning an average of 5k listens per month) and I hadn’t hit it yet – the highest I had previously gone was 2018 when I got 59k, and last year when I got 57k.
So just a fun little thing, but it’s cool that I achieved it.
Also, I had a lot of fun making mixes this year – as time has gone on I’ve refined the process so that I can be even quicker and more productive when putting together mixes. Since I just don’t have anywhere near as much free time as I used to, I’ve totally abandoned doing mixes over and over and over again until I am close to 100% happy with them. If I can do it once and I am reasonably happy, then we’re good to go.
So this has meant that, really against all the odds, this has ended up being a really musically productive year for me!
I’ve now recorded a pretty damn impressive 17 mixes so far this year – 14 for Sonicrampage and three guest mixes for various music platforms (including one for a Berlin-based techno podcast that’s not been released yet).
Actually that’s another thing that’s been nice this year, that more and more people have been asking me for guest mixes, and they’ve been such different people asking for such different styles – so far this year I did techno, hard dance, and drum n’ bass mixes (plus was asked to join the grime crew Begrime), and I still have to do a jungle mix and a breakbeat hardcore mix for some other people who have asked me; should have those ready sometime early 2021. It’s nice that people are interested in and enjoying my mixes!
Broken down by genre I’ve done the following mixes this year:
Unquestionably Fake Berghain in My Spare Room. It’s four hours long, and putting it together was an incredible undertaking. I really poured a ton of thought and effort into making it an interesting and cohesive listening experience, including getting an awesome cover made for it, as well as writing what I think of as one of my best essays that I’ve done for this blog – part photo essay, part musical discussion, part travelogue, and part love letter to Berlin. It’s not been my most popular mix this year, but it is undoubtedly the one that I am happiest with, and I am so proud of it.
As I mentioned when I did the first mix of the year, Super Rhythmic Facts, the plan for 2020 was to focus on tribute mixes – tributes to artists, to labels, to events, to clubs, and so on.
This was the path that I mostly followed – eleven of the year’s mixes were tributes of one type or another – but it wasn’t an ironclad rule. Along the way I also took the opportunity to step outside the tribute plan and just do a mix that I was interested in doing, of tunes that I wanted to listen to more closely and more often.
Like with this mix!
What’s going on here?
Nothing much really … just that I’ve been enjoying electro quite a bit again over the last few years, and I started buying new tunes on vinyl (which is both a good and a bad idea), and I wanted to throw some into a mix together. I mean, I already did my Mechatronica mix a few months ago, and there was an electro section in Fake Berghain in My Spare Room, but clearly that wasn’t enough.
I’ve got the itch, and it needs to be scratched.
With electro.
Which my daughter describes as ‘farting robots fighting music’. Which is a good description, no?
So this is that mix. Anyone who has been listening to my mixes for a while knows that I like fast music, and always have, and I’ve been enjoying the revival of properly fast, ravetastic electro over the last few years. High speed bassy beats are and always have been my jam. Therefore, last weekend I pulled out a stack of electro records, flipped through them to find only the ones that could be pitched up to at least 142 bpm, hit record and just improvised my way through 25 tracks of high-intensity pumpers, cranking it up all the way to 155 bpm by the end.
It’s a rump-shaking apocalypse!
I hope you enjoy it.
This is also the first mix where I really tried to master it after recording, by adjusting the levels so that the tracks are roughly equal (I mean I always try to do this while recording but it’s not always so easy), plus I also tweaked the bass up. Let me know if it sounds ok.
So that’s it for 2020! I hope you enjoyed the mixes.
What’s coming up next year?
Plenty more mixes and, just to mention this, I’ve made a four track EP and will be getting it pressed to vinyl in 2021. Really! Will drop some previews in a couple months.
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