The DJ who was supposed to be covering Ali’s show had some kind of technology-related disaster, and by the time I tuned in there was dead air, so I jumped on to cover for the cover, so to speak, hence why this is only 72 minutes instead of 120.
But in that 72 minutes we got epic psybreaks, tech breaks, prog breaks, electro breaks, oldskool breaks, wrongcore breaks, and even some drum’n'bass.
Here’s the high-quality archive for your enhanced aural pleasure:
My most excellent friend, superstar DJ and now budding co-producer of most excellent tuneage Ali Rutt, asked if I would like to cover his show tonight. Fortunately I’ve been catching up with the tune shopping recently anyway, and I had baskets full of new stuff at DJD and Juno already.
Mostly not breaks though. Breaks releases seem to have dried up a bit of late (while the tech-house and techno proliferate with over 1000 releases a week on DJD alone… mostly of badly produced shite that would never have made it onto vinyl… the cross I must bear for it being easier for me to sell my tunes when I resume production, is to trawl through this great haystack of dross looking for the tiny handful, 10 on a good day, but often just 2 or 3, diamond-tipped needles shining amongst them. It takes hours, so I don’t do it every week, and then suffer the FEAR that I have missed the GREATEST TUNE OF THE YEAR, the one that puts goosebumps the size of molehills in your skin, that sends rushes of colour and sparkles of electricity radiating around and through your whole body…)
I digress. It’s been a while since I’ve played 2 hours of breaks. I tried to bring as much variety as I could within the genre, but it ended up staying on the fairly full-on side of tech-breaks, psy-breaks, electro-prog and glitchy wrongness. All good dirty fun.
In a new development, this show was the first successful test of archiving at a higher quality than the broadcast. The show went out at 96k mono as always (Yes, mono; NSB seems to think it’s 1950), but the download here is at 192k stereo. Yay for darkice, and for my 7-year old PC coping with the extra load. I’ll do this for every show now, unless I get told off. You deserve quality, dear listeners. Your ears are a holy shrine, a temple devoted to music, and they should no more suffer a 96k mono stream than listen to music on AM. In my not very humbly-expressed opinion. The several artists who contacted me to thank me for including them on Late Nite Tech Trip, which is at 192k, suggests that they understand that having their tunes included on high-quality mixes means more people get to hear their tunes, more people like their tunes, more people go and buy their tunes. No-one over the age of 12 is so tight that they’d rip a tune out of a mix instead of buying it, which would be the modern equivalent of making a compilation tape from bits of songs you recorded off Radio 1 and attempted, not very well, to edit out the bit where Bruno Brookes talks over the end.
We kicked off with some classic house, then oscillated around some tech-house, techno and oldskool acid trance, a bit of breaks took us into the wrongcore and psy-wonk midsection, from where we pulled out, via a bit more techno, to finish on the tech-breaks and psy-breaks. Yeah, I’m a genre tart.
I’d been on standby during Ali Rutt’s show in case he had internet problems. He didn’t, but JoeBot did on the following show, so (despite having had a few beers by that point) I ended up covering for an hour and a half. Many thanks to all the chatroom crew for the positive feedback
Well. I got back from the pub about midnight, and then instead of going to bed like any normal person who has to be up at 7am next day, I stayed up and did a mix from the CDs I’ve just burned of the minimal techno I bought online yesterday and haven’t listened to yet. I’d inscribed the CD “Techno and/or Minimal” but it now seems the “or” was superfluous. This is not deep, chilled minimal like the middle part of this mix, and neither is it full-on hard stompy techno. It occupies that perfect centre of afterhours music (as far as I’m concerned) where it is equally suited to dancing around the lounge, hipswinging while seated, mild head nodding, or non-motile appreciation in a more horizontal and relaxed position (but definitely not sleep.) Most importantly of course, it progresses, it journeys, it trips, and takes you with it through different places and spaces in your imagination. It is alchemical - by means of sound, it creates images, feelings, sensations. Or, you create, it facilitates. I merely facilitate the facilitation. And I LOVE doing it.
There’s probably a couple of rough edges due to the fact that I was (and am) a bit mullered (could you tell?), I’ve never played these tunes before, and I couldn’t hear very well as I kept the volume low out of respect for my neighbours at this hour. But sod excuses, I managed to blow my own head off repeatedly both during the mix and listening to it back afterwards, so I thought I’d share it with you. Hope you like it, and as always your feedback is always welcome (add a comment or send an email).
For reasons best known to itself, my streaming software (darkice), which has always worked flawlessly before, decided to only record the second half of tonight’s show. Meh.
So here is that second half anyway, in crispy clear 128k MP3ness.
This is a spool of my live 2-hour Void Radio show on Brap FM on 17th Dec 2007, journeying through psybreaks, progressive trance, psyhouse, techno and minimal.
