Audio Player
Here’s another Serato mix, an hour of mostly of dubstep, bassline house, and the like. I have at the moment lost (if I ever had it) the tracklist. I know it starts with Andrew W.K., and has Benga & Coki, Dexplicit, T2, DJ Q, TS7, some Drop the Lime… and some more stuff.
Audio Player
Donald Spivak a moniker I used (for a mercifully short time) when residing predominantly within the techno genre, and this set reflects an early attempt (for me) at an entirely techno dj set (though I did sneak in some mashup goodness right at the end).
Much thanks to The Librarian for quite a few of these tracks.
Audio Player
This is another “practice” set I did before one or another of my gigs; judging from the date (02/27/08), I was preparing for the March ’08 edition of Schwarz, the electronic night hosted by The Librarian and me.
As I mentioned when I uploaded this before:
i’m a little rusty, so this week is going to be devoted to un-rustifying.
i threw this together earlier just figuring out what i’m doing again
it’s mostly dubstep-ish things.
Tracklist:
77 Klash – Mad Again (feat. Johnny Osbourne)
Vex’d – Pop Pop V.I.P.
Lone Wolf – Slayed by Shadows
Aaron Spectre – Music Is the Weapon
Benga & Coki – Night (Buraka som Sistema remix)
Cloaks – Hi Tek Buzz
Drop the Lime / Mathhead – Bricks
Twista – Tattoo (a cappella)
Audio Player
In fact, it can be considered a cover of the latter, as I used DJ /rupture, one of Vicki Bennett’s WFMU colleagues, as the source material. Specifically, I used the February 6, 2008 episode (see here), which featured his interview with Dexplicit.
I didn’t strictly stick to the bits in between words; I also left in self-identifiers (“Mudd Up”, “DJ /rupture”, etc.) and words like “wow” and “like”.
Audio Player
This is a short, 20-minute-ish Serato mix dating back to when I was first starting to play at Clique. There are a couple rough spots, but it’s a good view of where I was musically at the time.
tracklist:
Jamelia “Something About You (Mr Oizo Mix)”
Lil Mama “Lip Gloss (Kid Fresh & Haterboy ReFix)”
Lillica Libertine “Ultra 10”
Cybotron “Clear”
Debbie Gibson “Only in My Dreams”
Federico Franchi “Electron”
Chromeo “Bonafied Lovin'”
Black Ghosts “Let’s Get Physical”
Midnight Juggernauts “Road to Recovery (Miami Horror remix)”
Dandi Wind “Stop Die (remix)”
PROFF “You’ll See (original)”
I was burning it on 3″ cdrs for people for a while. Most people didn’t know what to do with them (especially people with macs) so I stopped.
Audio Player
I was asked to play a noise show downtown Cincinnati at a place called BASE Gallery. Instead of trying the stuff I’d been doing in The Black Fives, I wanted to do something new: play a dj set with pieces of sandpaper instead of records.
I used normal turntables & needles, along with a Kaoss Pad for effects. Someone asked, in a myspace comment, something to the effect of, “Wouldn’t that mess up your needles?”
In short, yes:
The blue needle on the left of the low-quality scanner image is a new needle; the two black ones were old, worn out needles i hadn’t yet thrown away. As you can see, the sandpaper completely ravaged them.
And for the record (no pun), I used multiple grits of sandpaper over the course of the set, and some with masking tape in a plus-sign shape across the sandpaper to make a kind of rhythmic sound.
This is just under 10 minutes of my performance at the ExBe Showcase in Cleveland. I was plagued with technical difficulties for the first half of the show, as I remember, and you can tell from this snippet: the right channel of one of my decks was not coming through.
The tracklist on this is essentially two mashups: firstly a Venetian Snares track (something from Songs About My Cats) blended with a bit of The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame”, and then into some exercise record, which blends into something from (I believe) Original Hamster.
That show was particularly special for me, because John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask stopped into the venue to play a few songs. It was the weekend before Election Day, and they were traveling around Ohio (a swing state) to try to just get out the vote. I was (and still am!) a huge fan of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, so I was incredibly excited not only to see them, but to share a bill with them, however accidental.
I was busy playing when they were walking around talking to people, but I did manage to get one pic with John Cameron Mitchell (too bad I look silly as hell).
Audio Player
This live set dates from 2004, at Recycled Rainbow 9.0 in Cleveland, OH. At this point I (as Donald Spivak, or schädel) had only just joined the band, which until then had been pretty much what you hear in this set: dark electronic beats with added noise. Essentially all the beats and music in this set, other than a bit of synth stuff I played off the cuff, is Gabe (a.k.a. Harold Knockworthy)’s stuff. The noise and spoken stuff in this set is both of us.
Not long after this, these “songs”, the beats & music at least, got pulled into his Seeping Kind project, leaving The Black Fives as an improv ambient noise band. Recycled Rainbow is now an outdoor experimental music-type festival. At the time we played, it was in Every Man’s house. The event had a theme of “Classic Literature”, so I read bits of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine into a baby monitor.
download: DJ Empirical, Mix for Fashion Show, Part 1 2 3
28 aug 2004
This was a mix done in Sony Acid for a fashion show in downtown Cincinnati. I would have just done a live mix, but they wanted literally a different song for every girl/outfit (about 45 seconds each), and wanted things to gradually speed up over the course of the show. That would have been well beyond my means in those pre-Serato days, so I spent some time doing it all in advance. There were to be three catwalk segments of 15 minutes each, thus the three parts. Each time you hear a new song, imagine a new girl walking out.
Sorry, no track list on this one. The music is a good mix of stuff, from house music to 80s dance, with quite a few stops in between.
Fun to make, and still kind of fun to listen to.