I didn’t post this as quickly as I usually do after the show; part of the problem was technical issues, but most of it was the Holidays. At any rate, continuing a trend, I focused on a few new releases — full lengths by Sepalcure, Author, Pinch+Shackleton and Altered Natives. All of which are wicked good, you should give them your Christmas money. Also features a premier of my remixes for Peter Kirn who writes the well-known Create Digital Music & Create Digital Motion blogs.

Worth special mention: Cherie Pyne’s non-dance music track “Tender Steps” which is the closing credits music for the fantastic and fantastically depressing Canadian movie Crackie. I loved the song when I saw the movie; apparently the only way to get her music is to contact her directly — cheriepyn at gmail dot com. Cherie graciously sent me “Tender Steps” by e-mail. She’s also in the band Ledge’s Blast. She’s part of the whole separate musical world going on in Canada; I listen to the Canadian stations on XM Radio and often think that the Canadians that we know about in the USA aren’t necessarily the best, just the most ambitious and luckiest.

This DJ Mix Brought to you by Wild Turkey, Bourbon of Champions.

I usually post a track list with my sets, but I’m too tired and have other stuff to do. So there’s some stuff you’ll recognize, some unreleased tracks from me & my friends, and a lot of tipsy effects tweaking. I selected the tracks by combining all the lower-bpm tracks from previous DJ sets, and I really like the sub-120-bpm territory.

I didn’t buy any new music in the past couple weeks, but Liz McClean Knight (aka Quantazelle) sent me e-mail about the new free compilation she’s releasing on her label SubVariant, Frequencity, and the day before David Powers sent me the promo for the new EP on Klectik, Back To The Islands by Synox. So I just figured out how to jigsaw that collection together, more or less. It ranges from 95 to 170 BPM, so some serious tempo creeping happens throughout. Not to mention the genre U Turns.

Full disclosure, Liz chose a track of mine for the last Subvariant comp Robohustlin, and I’ve had an artist crush on her ever since she played a show in Iowa City years ago. She does a lot of very interesting work in various capacities, from her music, to her electronic component jewelry, to the brilliant Electronic Musician’s Emergency Pack. Women are still relatively rare in Electronic Music, which truth be told is mostly a sausage fest, but the women who do get involved have something unique to offer.

M50 invited me to do a mix for the Streetbeat show on WNUR in Chicago, and it finally aired October 28th. So Now It Can Be Shared.

Sean Deason	NCW	The Black Dog

This mix is focused pretty tightly on a couple of upcoming releases – Elements Volume 3 by Sean Deason, and Panther Veil By NCW — and the very recent release by The Black Dog, LIBER DOGMA. It’s also one of the few mixes I’ve done that focuses on Techno almost exclusively. Though there’s plenty of the 4 on the floor beat that is techno’s hallmark, there’s other rhythmic grooves represented. I think that Techno is a feeling as much as it is a collection of common attributes, and these tracks represent a pretty wide range musically while staying true to that feeling.

The show itself was interesting because of a guest spot from DJ T, who played a short set of the sort of stuff I don’t really like — commercial ‘electro house’ — but it represents a generational difference. I thought T was a very nice guy, actually, so I don’t want the following to seem like I’m dissing him.

For anyone who’s been around dance music for a while — and I’ve been interested in it going back to the middle 1970s! — there’s always going to be stylistic breaks. I have a hard time getting into what’s currently popular with the 20-somethings, who don’t really know music that wasn’t made in the past 5 years. The current ‘it’ sound seems to be missing soul, and focuses on the least subtle and most ear-bleeding synth sounds. It seems to me that it’s immediate percursors are the music that I hated 10 years ago — poppy progressive house and commercial euro-trance. But I think it’s interesting that there’s a parallel underground scene, that the tracks in this set represent, that is every bit as current, and to me ismuch more musical, soulful, and durable.

But kids — what are you going to do with them. They like what they like. I’d like to think they can be taught about the history and ongoing relevancy of dance music going back 40 years or more, and I don’t think that calling what they like crap is a good way to start. I don’t want to be like middle aged people back in the 70s when I was a kid, holding tight to their Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey records.

Sublime Porte, Istanbul

My obligitory left-field choices are ‘Virus’ from Björk, which is lovely, and Enya’s ‘Boadicea.’ The latter has been going through my head for weeks, after I was reminded of it by an oddball mixtape on Soundcloud. My own track “Anguish Riddim” isn’t particularly anguished musically but a several unpleasant changes were happening at the time I was working on it. We’re all OK, but you know, life has plenty of ugly surprises…

I spend a lot of time at thrift stores, garage sales, and second hand stores looking for records. When I’ve collected enough interesting records together to fill a radio show, I lug the vinyl to the IMU for a radio show.

Someone who spends time on EBay and Discogs searching for records, who spends hours combing through YouTube going from one obscure house track to another in order to assemble their ultimate vinyl wishlist, end up with a certain sort of record collection. They’ve spent time boning up on music, read books on the subject, made and lost friends on the internet over records. They’re the true students of the art.

I’m more of a magpie — selecting records based on the relatively short list of producers and artists I’m already familiar with, and winging it based on extra-musical cues — the record label it’s on, the cover art, the song titles. I’m also happiest picking up records for a dollar or two. This mix is an assemblage of that sort of records.

And there’s some true gems that are in amongst all the copies of the “Victory At Sea” soundtrack album. How else would I have ever found out about Joy Ryder, or Claudia T? By the way I played Claudia T’s “Fatal Destination” at 33 when it should have been 45, and I think I like it better at the wrong speed.

And the incomparable Cissy Houston? Now, if people know who she is at all it is as the mother of R&B trainwreck Whitney Houston. But Cissy’s career went from gospel to backup singer to flirting with being a disco Diva. Her singing on “Think It Over” combines impeccable phrasing with deep soul.

Sometimes you can judge a book by it’s cover, after all — I do it all the time, and I’m pleasantly surprised more than I’m disappointed.

So this is a little different in that I wanted to focus on particular releases and artists. The stars of this show:

Kate Simko whose new album “Lights Out” raises her profile considerably in the dance music world.

Stewart Walker whose new digital label Son Of Cataclysm takes his techno experimentalism to new depths. The Sweetnighter track is an unreleased demo from his new guitar-based project collaboration with Reynold, aka Sam Rouanet, the label boss of Trenton Records

John Tejada whose new album comes out this week. John is a producer who has released a ton of music, always of the highest quality. I wonder when he sleeps.

Reggie Dokes is one of the 4th or 5th wave of Detroit dance music producers. Detroit is really a crucial center of house music’s renewal, with a long list of amazing musicians making crucial tracks. He’s not as well known as Omar S, or Moodyman, or Theo Parish, but he’s every bit their peer, and I expect him to become even more prominent.

Not a person, but a singular constellation of genre-bending music Hessle Audio just released 116 & Rising, a label retrospective that features 12 new exclusive tracks. It’s the only current label in the UK dance music world about which I’m an absolute completist.

Once more into the breach: stitching together something from various styles of music…

Radiohead — for those who bought King Of Limbs they sent out e-mails about a free download of 2 songs “Supercollider” & “The Butcher.” If you pay attention to the whinging class King Of Limbs sucked, but to them I suggest they go listen to Weezer or something. For those of us who love electronic music, Radiohead has been trying nothing less than to make art songs with one of the best live bands in the world, using all the tools of electronic music producers. It’s some 4th or 5th category, and if your’e not enjoying it, you’re not really listening.

Burial — talk about 4th or 5th Category, Burial is his own genre. Massively influential over the past couple years, his morose, introverted, wistfully vague assemblage of house music and audio detritus never fail to kill me. I play all 3 tracks of his new record.

Kode 9 & Space Ape — dropping a new album of (again with the categories) uncategorizable illness. I have a hard time with hip hop any more — it’s either coke-dealing fake-hard, po-faced backpack, or artistically bankrupt commersh. These guys are what I wish hip hop was again — moody storytelling with evil, deep beats.

Atropolis — Atropolis is a guy from Queens, which is perhaps the most racially and culturally diverse urban community on the planet, and he seems to jam it all in the blender and come up with badass pan-human party music. The tracks I chose mash up Soca with Kwaito, with some distorted MBira a la Konono #9. Sweetness.

Addison Groove — the next ‘next big thing’ — especially if you’re Planet Mu’s label-head/IDM legend Mike Paradinas is the Footwork/Juke sound coming out of Chicago. I’ve not yet jumped on the bandwagon with Juke music, but guys like Addison Groove take some of that Chicago flavor to mess up their UK-based post-whatever grooves. Addison Groove put out a couple of tracks I feature here that have some of that frenetic Chicago ghetto energy.

Area/Lightness — my friend Max from Chicago who is one of the people re-mutating Dub Techno, without sounding like the 923rd remake of Phylps Track II.

David Powers + Max Jacobson — David sent me a 4 track demo that is going to come out on a Mexican techno label sometime soon. He’s definitely into his own brand of deepness, or deep weirdness. Going from sampling Sheila E and Hall & Oates, to dropping in little atonal jazz keyboard squiggles over jacking beats … he’s probably the most traditionally musical house producer I know, in addition to being scary smart and emotionally unstable. He’s everything you could ask for in a 21st Century dance music producer.

Download audio file (2011-04-28-DJSet.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2011-04-28-DJSet.mp3

Special Afternoon edition during the Mision Creek Festival. This was in the basement of Public Space one, standing at a cramped counter with crap monitors. I didn’t have a lot of new tracks to drop, so I let each one ride longer than I usually do in the mix, and I think they’re worth it — particularly the Rick Wilhite and Virgo Four joints. The other things I played might overlap a bit with previous mixes, but I hope this his its own flavor…

Download audio file (2011-03-05-DJSet.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2011-03-05-DJSet.mp3

A little different than the last few sets I’ve done, as I brought the computer; I just didn’t have enough fresh vinyl for a show. It’s a combination of things that have been on mind, some for months, some as recent as this week. The Darkstar album North has been haunting me since it came out last year. Incredibly moody, emotional music.

Of course, for some of us, Radiohead’s new album King Of Limbs has been a recent obsession. It’s without hit singles, per se, but it does have something of what the Darkstar album has — inventive sound design & production as a way to make emotional connections. The When Saints Go Machine song “Fail Forever” is a recommendation from my son Lucas, who is music director at the Earlham College Radio Station. I never was into Radiohead before Lucas fell hard for them when he was 11; I got him to listen to Arthur Russell, so he knew I’d like anything that had some of that AR magic to it. I’m not sure When Saints Go Machine are Arthur Russell heads, but “Fail Forever” is haunted by him.

And then there’s Anika, who I was turned onto by Peter Kirn’s interview with her. The eponymous Anika is produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, and has the sort of dark, noisy, rough production values that make the Jamaican work by Lee Perry and Clement Dodd so compelling. Two of the songs I played appealed to the hippy pacifist in me, Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Greta Ann’s “Sadness Hides The Sun.” Odd, but not that odd, that 60s era protest folks songs are so relevant still. Same assholes killing brown people then as now.

And there are 3 of my tracks, for better or worse. The Pete tracks are meant to get some additional instrumentation added when I can get Pete Balestrieri captured to put down some saxaphone, but I kind of like Music Minus One sounding stuff. Then there’s my shoutout to Muammar Gadaffi, “Hallucinogens in the Nescafe” which I wrote about earlier. He really is an epically evil motherfucker, and sometimes I think he says the hilarious things he does to soften the blow of his unrelenting, remorseless cruelty. He’s not Charlie Sheen, and of course, Charlie Sheen is another real-time tragedy whose humorous aspects can’t be denied.

But I couldn’t resist last night during my show when I tweeted “Thom Yorke doesn’t have tiger blood, innit? Tabby blood maybe.”

On a technical note, this mix is a cleaned up in a few places from the on-air performance — I was warping tracks in a mad rush yesterday and a couple of things were fucked up, resulting in dead air, tracks falling out of time, and one track getting played twice as fast as it ought to have been. There was one hilarious moment when somehow the tempo was following mouse movements when I wasn’t initially aware, so one track swung up and down between 120 and 200 bpm for a few seconds. But I photoshopped that out.

This set was driven by a trip to Dave’s Records in Chicago, where I crouched on the floor going through the used $1 Dance Records. I also did what I usually do, which is look through a section of floor to ceiling shelves of records in my office I haven’t visited lately.

VINYL. IT’S A SICKNESS, REALLY

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-2010-12-04-KRUI.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-2010-12-04-KRUI.mp3
I usually have a track listing, but I left it at the studio last night, so you’re going to have to be surprised. Various 80s dance pop obscurities and hits, some house and a lot of Detroit techno, ending up with the Afx remix of 808 State’s “Flow Coma”

The past 2 Saturday nights I spent in the KRUI studios playing vinyl. I make no great claims for my mixing skills, but I guarantee this is 100% real for better or worse.

Rather than, as I have in the past, manually type in an HTML table, I made my track lists in Google Docs. That, unfortunately, is no way to get clean HTML tables, not only are they formatted for machine eyes only, they have tables nested in tables with annoying breaks. So I embedded the google docs with <iframe>, which has its own formatting annoyances. But it does get the information in this post with a minimum of retyping.

Oh wait, I spent 45 minutes googling around trying to come up with a nicer way to do that, & installed a WordPress plugin that was even fuglier. Oh well…

Download audio file (2010-10-23-Chaircrusher-KRUI-Set.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2010-10-23-Chaircrusher-KRUI-Set.mp3

Download audio file (2010-10-30-Chaircrusher-KRUI-DJSet.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/2010-10-30-Chaircrusher-KRUI-DJSet.mp3

There’s some overlap in tracks played with my September DJ Mix, but this mix is longer, and starts out with a sampling of the many amazing tracks by the recently-departed and deeply missed Aaron Carl Ragland.

The funny thing about Aaron Carl is that I knew him as a person first and as a fan of his music second. When he came out with his WARMTH compilation last year I did a mix using its tracks, and I began chatting with AC on line, and spoke with him a few times on the phone. It was only after that that I started exploring his catalog and began to realize what a rare, original talent he was. It’s sad when anyone dies, but in AC’s case, he was really coming into his own as a producer and label head, and he was full of great plans both for his own music and of ways to give back to his beloved city of Detroit. When he got sick he had to cancel a European tour that I’m sure would have been a triumph. I really loved the guy, and he will be truly missed.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-2010-10-09-KRUI-Mix.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-2010-10-09-KRUI-Mix.mp3

This is what Google Image Search comes up with if you search for “UK Bass”
Sequenced live in Ableton Live — 45 tracks in 99 minutes. Starts at 100 BPM and ends at 142. I find it hard to stick with one particular beat so there are some hectic transitions.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-SeptemberMix.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-SeptemberMix.mp3

One of my wife’s employees at her store, Sarah C gave her a CD of her favorite dance tunes. Now, I’m a dance music snob, who would never normally play most of these tracks in any context, and many of you other dance music afficiandos probably wouldn’t either. I’d go so far as to say I actively hate the Captain & Tenille song, the Wham song, and I’m not so high on the Whitney Houston. But this isn’t for me, it’s for the people who don’t know “Shades of Jae” from “Firestarter.” It’s Pop. And most of these tracks are stupidly great dance pop — who can resist “Smooth Criminal” or “Walk Like An Egyptian?”

I ripped the CD and resequenced them so that I could do a smooth nonstop mix. I’m used to entire genres inhabiting the same 5 BPM range so I had to play some Ableton Live tricks to get things to add up.
Download audio file (SarahC-Mix-Beatmatched.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/SarahC-Mix-Beatmatched.mp3

Download audio file (CoolyG-DubOrganizer7-Minimix.mp3)

I’ve been accused of having a crush on Cooly G. Why wouldn’t I? She’s talented, beautiful, and even cursory internet stalking on-line research indicates she’s got a bubbly, charismatic personality.

But my real crush is on Cooly G’s talents as a producer. Along with Roska, she’s one of the most visible faces of UK Funky. And she’s gained her prominence having only a single label release — Narst/Love Dub and a track on the Hyperdub 5 compilations. It’s easy to say why those tracks were great — the combination of her vocals, floating in and around the bass heavy beats — but hard to say how she does what she does. Using the tools all modern dance producers have, she seems to come to completely different conclusions.

UK Funky is marked by beat patterns that vary between traditional House and Soca rhythms. Cooly’s beats seem to fit into that same headspace, but they rarely drop into that same repetetive groove. Most producers get a groove going and then throw in change-ups every 4, 8, or 16 bars. Cooly’s beats seem to be all change-up, without losing their own particular quirky groove.

Alongside Cooly G’s DJ’ing and her Hyperdub releases, she’s also been releasing a series of digital-only “Dub Organizer” EPs. They’re only available only for Paypal purchase and announced at her Myspace and Facebook pages. The Dub Organizer tracks are cut from the same cloth as her Hyperdub release, but are arranged more simply — a spare synth line, maybe a sample and beats. They’re straight-up DJ tools, similar in intent to most of Roska’s releases, but a lot less repetitive.

The latest Dub Organizer, #7 in the series is 4 tracks. “ic db” is a driving rhythm that is a sophisticated, layered cousin of funky’s trademark Soca beat. This is quite literally a ‘riddim’ with the only tonal material being a drum sample being bent up and down. And yet it sounds anything but minimal, with different drums coming in and dropping out; the space in a track normally taken up by pitched melodies or chords is full of relentless percussion variations. “well mi seh db” is similarly spare, with only a very occasional trombone stab joining the percussion. “darn db” is based around a repeated synthesized female chorus loop and novel ‘kick on one & four” rhythm.

The star of the EP for me is “full ah sensi db” which is a brilliant re-imagining of dub reggae built around heavily echoed dub samples. In a sense it’s a dub of Dub — it reconnects the half-stepper beat of Dubstep with the original dub reggae sounds, leaving (if it’s possible) more space for sounds to echo in than in King Tubby’s productions. One of Cooly G’s favorite words is “dramatic” and on “full ah sensi db” the drama arises from a low-fi woodblock ‘clok’ sound reverberating darkly. Compared to the maximalist “echo soup” of the (also brilliant) Echospace album Liumin it amounts to approaching the dub template from the opposite hemisphere.

My minimix hits all tracks in this order: darnn db, ic db, well mi seh db, full ah sensi db. I wanted to give you an idea of how they sounded, but encourage you to follow up and support Cooly G by buying the release. Hence it’s watermarked with a robot voice saying “Cooly G Dub Organizer 7.” If you like what you hear, represent!

It’s been mad stupid hot in Iowa City this summer. I like it that way! There’s nothing wrong with sweating. Which is something you learn if you like to go dancing in a club. Somehow the hotter and sweatier it is, the better.

To satisfy this need for humidty I’ve assembled a mix out of things I’ve bought in the past few months. This comprises what I’m listening to when I’m walking the dogs late at night.

Thanks for promos to: Lenny Burden (Octave One) & Stefan Robbers (2Junxion). Drop me a line if you want to send me promos — chaircrusher at gmail dot com.

ALL OTHER TRACKS LEGALLY PURCHASED. Except for the Chaircrusher ones, which I produced.

Download audio file (Chaircrusher-Summer2010-Mix.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-Summer2010-Mix.mp3

Track List

Download audio file (BombSquad-Live@YachtClub-2010-04-01.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/BombSquad-Live@YachtClub-2010-04-01.mp3

The Bomb Squad made history in Iowa City, using the bully pulpit of their fame to bust the dubstep cherry of a couple hundred sweaty nutters in the Yacht Club’s brick-lined basement. They tweeted a link to a Mediafire download link, but I hate Mediafire, so I’m hosting it on cornwarning.com.

I’d love to see a track listing of this mix, but as far as I know that’s not how the Bomb Squad rolls. Also, if you were at the show, you’ll notice Keith’s hyping on the mic wasn’t part of the set recording…