Deep tech breaks, melodic electro, and of course epic progressive and psychedelic breaks.
Download (174.6MB 192kbps MP3 127’10″) 1366 downloads

Download (174.6MB 192kbps MP3 127’10″) 1366 downloads

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You may have seen that Beatport has had a facelift recently. The old creakily slow Flash interface that you needed to peer at with binoculars to read the text has finally been swept into the bin, to be replaced by a swanky new HTML5-based site. “New Beatport” has a nice clean design, and seems more responsive, and a lot more intuitive.

So congrats to Beatport, and indeed, yay… but I have a problem with it. It’s all gone a bit… well… white…

Maybe it’s because I spent my formative years programming on greenscreen monitors, but I’ve never found black text on a white background very pleasant to look at on a screen, and I dispute the rationale behind it which is leading to it becoming a de facto standard on the web. Black-on-white is certainly good for printed text on paper, but on a backlit computer screen, it means you’re staring at bright unfiltered fluorescent tubes (or LED equivalents) all day. I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone, but it’s a more serious problem for me personally: my eyes are unusually sensitive to light and I really can’t be spending hours tune shopping on Beatport with the glare of a thousand suns boring into my retinas.

So I fixed it. One of the great things about increasing web standards compliance, is that it grants us, as individuals users, a great deal of flexibility to adjust aspects of a site to better fit our individual requirements and preferences, which can range from a small style tweak to full-scale dynamic page rewriting by the likes of Greasemonkey. But in this case, all I want to do is change the colour of various elements on the page, so a User Stylesheet is just the ticket.

Here’s my User Stylesheet to modify Beatport’s colour scheme. I wrote it mainly for my benefit, but I suspect there will be others of you who prefer the old Beatport colours of light text on a dark background, so I’ve made it available to everyone in the public domain. You may use and copy it without restriction.

This is exactly the same Beatport page as the picture above, but with my stylesheet applied:

If you want it to look like that for you, here’s what you have to do:

If you use Firefox:

The easiest way is to install the Stylish add-on. You can then go to the Beatport Dark Theme page on userstyles.org and simply click the “Install with Stylish” button. Easy peasy. If you don’t want to install Stylish, then you’ll be downloading the file and putting it in a certain place on your computer; userstyles.org should have full instructions.

If you use Safari:

Use Firefox instead. You can get this working in Safari, but it’s loads more hassle. Firefox is the easy option.

If you really want to use Safari:

Alright then, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Here we go:

1. First you’ll need to install a couple of plugins: SIMBL and SafariStand. These are the only way I’m aware of to get per-site user stylesheets in Safari.
2. After installing them, restart Safari to get them loaded in. There should now be an extra menu called “Stand” in the menubar.
3. Load up www.beatport.com in Safari
4. Go to the “Stand” menu, then “SafariStand Setting…”, then select “Site Alteration”. Make sure “Enable Site Alteration” is ticked, and click the “Add” button. This should add an entry for www.beatport.com. Tick the “Alter” checkbox next to “User Stylesheet Location”. Click on the little arrow next to this text field, which will pop up a menu, and select “Open User CSS Dir”. At this juncture you just need to know where it is.
5. Grab the stylesheet from here and download it to a file in that directory. You might like to call it beatport-dark-theme.css.
6. Edit that file in your favourite plaintext editor. Delete the whole line near the top that begins with @-moz and ends with an open-brace ({). Then go down to the very bottom and delete the very last close-brace (}). Save the file.
7. Go back to the Stand configuration window you left open a moment ago, and put the full path to the stylesheet file into the “User Stylesheet Location” text field. You can now close that configuration screen.
8. Clear your cache (Safari > Empty Cache) and reload Beatport. If that doesn’t seem to work, you might have to restart Safari again.

This ridiculous procedure (which is the simplest method I’ve been able to find) is only necessary because of the lack of builtin support for per-site user stylesheets in Safari, something Firefox has had for years. Since user stylesheets usually only make sense on a per-site basis, this seems a bizarre omission… Meanwhile, you are, of course, free to use Firefox instead, which, let me remind you, only requires one button press, and no restarts, to save your eyes from Beatport’s dazzling shiny brightness.

One thing I should mention. I am not affiliated to Beatport in any way (other online music retailers are available). This is a completely unofficial “patch” to a third-party site. So at some point they are bound to make a change to their site which results in an incompatibility with my stylesheet. It might just look wrong, or it might cause a more serious obstruction to your ability to use the site. If you encounter any problems using Beatport in conjunction with the Dark Theme, please disable the user stylesheet (trivially easy with Firefox+Stylish) and try again without it. I will endeavour to keep the stylesheet up-to-date with the site, but there are bound to be times when they drift apart. Your use of any of the code or techniques described in this article is entirely at your own risk.

Finally, if you find a bug in the stylesheet or have any suggestions for improvements, please do let me know. See the Contact page for details of how to reach me.

TOTI is one year old! To celebrate, I was delighted to welcome Jon Ward, in his Fat Mandy and Mr Faster guises, to join me in the studio for both live PA and DJ sets.

After a brief intro from yours truly, Fat Mandy kicked off the show in future-retro style with an Ableton set of electro-swing. I spun a set of progressive and psybreaks after that, then it was the mighty Fat Mandy Live PA, lush evolving breakbeat squelch, interstitially poised somewhere between breaks, dnb and chill. Then Jon switched hats to his Mr Faster persona and we went back to back for nearly three hours of psytrance, rolling, dark, forest, bouncy, you name it. Wicked fun times!

Thanks to Jon for coming along (he’ll be back!), and for all the shoutbox crew for keeping us company!

(In the tracklists below, Jon’s selections are this colour).

Download (437.0MB 192kbps MP3 318’13″) 610 downloads (This is the archive of the whole 5+ hour show. Alternatively you can download individual sections below.)

0. Intro

1. Fat Mandy electro-swing DJ set

Download (75.5MB 192kbps MP3 54’59″) 572 downloads

2. Quextal progressive/techno/psybreaks DJ set

Download (55.6MB 192kbps MP3 40’27″) 698 downloads

3. Fat Mandy Live PA

Download (69.6MB 192kbps MP3 50’42″) 609 downloads

4. Mr Faster vs Quextal psytrance DJ set

Download (223.2MB 192kbps MP3 162’31″) 553 downloads

If you’ve been struggling to get through all the recent 4+ hour shows, you’ll be pleased to hear that this month’s Interstitial clocks in at a mere 3½ Although since I only just posted December’s, you may have quite a lot of catching up to do…

Warning: it starts off very glitchy: I think I inadvertantly lost a few listeners in the first minute who thought there must be a technical problem. Oops. Nope, it’s just a weird intro track from P&G…

After the intro we kick off with two of my latest artist discoveries: dope crunky beats from Opiuo, and blissed out fusion sounds from The Nasha Experience. Then we go delving into the darker, glitchier side of psybreaks and electro for a while. That leads into some techy and progressive 4/4s, before we bring the breaks back on an epic trippy nuskool tip, throwing in some techno and tech-funk for good measure, and finally bringing you down gently with a more chilled dub-tech breakbeat vibe.

Big ups all the Shoutbox crew for their support, especially n0sS – another enthusiastic new convert to Quextal’s Radical Interstitialism See you next time!

Download (297MB 192k MP3 216’27″) 1028 downloads

Download (297MB 192k MP3 216’27″) 1028 downloads

Many thanks to my guest Digital Fist for bringing his unique blend of deep and dark glitchy and hypnotic breaks and techno to tonight’s proceedings. He’ll be back (in the meantime, if you need more glitch to sustain you, I recommend picking up his latest mix, it’s a corker). And a big shout to all the listeners and chatters, record-breaking numbers of both

Download (170MB 192k MP3 124’18″) 1757 downloads

Download (170MB 192k MP3 124’18″) 1757 downloads

Next show: Tuesday 15th Sep, 19:00 BST, PsyMusic: the next episode of Tales Of The Interstitial…

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).

Download MP3 (83MB 192k 60’21″) 828 downloads

This mix is also known as:
“If you don’t love minimal techno… You Will.”

1. (00’00″) Bigger Than Jesus – Itchy Glitchy Spider (Fergie rx) – Silver Planet
2. (05’24″) Bread and Butter – Kartoffel – Hot Slice
3. (10’35″) Cabal – All In Off – Subtronic
4. (14’03″) Patrice D’Angelo – Happy Lab – Freaky Cabs
5. (19’59″) James Unk – Drop – Lessizmore
6. (25’34″) Javy Union – Gate 9 (Pascal Feos rx) – Plain
7. (31’42″) Jesse Voorn ft ZoXenia – SeeMe (DJ Lion dub) – USB Digital
8. (37’13″) Sara Galli – Machete – 303Lovers
9. (41’25″) The Junkies – Uneasy Feeling – PBR Recordings
10. (47’21″) The Touch – Heart Of The City (Pig & Dan rx dub version) – Trunkfunk
11. (53’32″) Utku Dalmaz – Little More – Bosphorus Underground

By popular request, I’ve upped the audio quality: from now on studio mix MP3s will be 192kbps.

Download MP3 (83MB 192k 60’21″) 828 downloads

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