Doc Martin is one of the most revered DJ’s in the American house music scene. His career goes back to the earliest days of rave culture, and he has toured the world many times over and held numerous residencies at top dance clubs. His many recorded mixes are collected in a number of places around the web: Rave Archive, Ezeskankin, and MPiii to name a few. This particular one is a favorite of mine, collecting many of my favorite house and deep house anthems in one epic journey. This recording combines all four parts of the Visions of Paradise set into one long mix, which was originally spread across two cassettes. I don’t know the year it was recorded, but given the track selections, I would say it was sometime in the late 1990’s.
Greg Wilson has been a pioneer in electronic music ever since the early 1980s. Specializing in jazz-funk and disco, Wilson is known for being the first DJ to ever mix live on British television, as well as the teacher of a young Fatboy Slim. Yet perhaps the British producer is most famous for his DJ sets, in which he scratches and mixes using two reel to reel tape machines. I’ve posted about him before, specifically his awesome BBC Radio Essential Mix and later an except from his essay on the roots of electro.
His set in May 2012 at the Movement festival in Detroit was a tour-de-force of disco dancing and seamless remixing. Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Garbage, and many others get a disco rework that’s both surprisingly funky and faithful to the originals. I’ve been listening to it constantly since May and have to share it here:
I’m back with another DJ mix – this time it’s all about the 80’s! Electro Classixxx is a non-stop megamix of 34 of the best electro jams from 1980-84, and is a great introduction to this massively influential genre. According to British DJ and music historian Greg Wilson,
Electro is the missing link of Dance music. All roads lead back to New York where the level of musical innovation and experimentation throughout the early 80s period was quite staggering. It wasn’t one narrow style that never strayed from within the confides of an even narrower BPM range, Electro-Funk was anything goes! The diversity of records released during this period was what made it so magical, you never knew what was coming next. The tempo of these tracks ranged from under 100 bpm to over 130, covering an entire rhythmic spectrum along the way.
There was no set template for this new Dance direction, it just went wherever it went and took you grooving along with it. It was all about stretching the boundaries that had begun to stifle black music, and its influences lay not only with German Technopop wizards Kraftwerk, the acknowledged forefathers of pure Electro, plus British Futurist acts like the Human League and Gary Numan, but also with a number of pioneering black musicians. Major artists like Miles Davis, Sly Stone, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, legendary producer Norman Whitfield and, of course, George Clinton and his P Funk brigade, would all play their part in shaping this new sound via their innovative use of electronic instruments during the 70s (and as early as the late 60s in Miles Davis’ case). Once the next generation of black musicians finally got their hands on the available technology it was bound to lead to a musical revolution as they ripped up the rule book with their twisted Funk.
This mix bounces a number of different musical styles off each other, building up steam into high energy dance party. I was inspired by some fascinating interpretations of the blues by Kenny Larkin (in his Dark Comedy alter ego) and an Akufen track from the Blu Tibunl remix project. Then after a short detour into the “heroin house” style, I got down to business with some jackin’ house and then electro from Riton, Beck, and a medley of classic Prince tunes.
Where do you go from there? Ghetto house, Bmore breaks, and some straight up dance rock from folks like Blues Explosion, LCD Soundsystem, Blur, The Libertines, DJ Mujhava, and much more. I did lots of edits throughout this mix and even threw in a remix of Juney Boomdata’s “Cookies” I did myself.
Chris Macro, the mixologist behind the awesome Macro Dubplates series (download here) has a new track up on his site. “Brooklyn Slow Motion” mashes up Jay-Z and Lil’ Wayne’s “Hello Brooklyn” with one of the most famous riddims in dancehall history, the Stalag. The results are excellent:
Anyone who reads this blog for the music posts will know I am big fan of Kenny Dope, especially the series of mixes he did through the first half of the last decade. “Breakbeats,” “Hiphop Forever,” and “Roller Boogie 80’s” are all some of my most favorite mixes ever. Now Kenny’s got himself a Soundcloud account, he’s been uploading some great stuff. Soul Trippin’ is a perfect throwback mix, bubbling with all kind of rare funk and soul gems.
Brilliantly odd instrumental hip hop album here from Onra, compiled and constructed around vintage Vietnamese pop records picked up in flea markets on a trip to the far east. 32 short tracks make up “Chinoiseries”, each of them clocking in at the 1 or 2 minute mark and delivering a tight selection of beats that somehow bring to mind J Dilla, Rza, Madlib, Moondog, MF Doom and the Sublime Frequencies label rolled into one beautifully incoherent package.
Onra – “What Up Duyet?”
Having a ravenous appetite for the “Radio Transmission” style beloved of the aforementioned Sublime Frequencies crew, we might be perfectly primed for this sort of thing, but while the dusty exotica, folk and plastic pop of the source material here could so easily have ended up sounding like the sterile plunderphonic coffee table beats that typified so much instrumental hip hop in the late 90’s, Onra manages to harness the mystifying magic of the original material and juxtapose it with a production style that’s still adequately rough around the edges.
Onra – “The Anthem”
And the source material itself is still bathed in the sublime hiss and crackle of hoary vinyl, retaining the unknown wonders of each of the nameless gems that play a central part through each and every track on this excellent album. Like small, perfectly flawed vignettes, each of the tracks here offers a quirky and mesmerising window into the far east of another era. A real treat for crate diggers and found sound hounds out there, wherever you may be.
