After our jury congregated, DJ Hohme came out the winner! All the pieces are being collected for DJ Mag and will be ready for publishing in the forthcoming issue, along with the above pictured insert in the DJ Mag Weekly e-mail. Congratulations Hohme!
Yes, there are older heads/musicologists in the Pioneer DJ Network jury as well. This time around, upon hearing the Sequencers from Mexico, these senior members of the jury raised their voices when it came to the final decision! While recent winners, in their own brilliant way, have come through with the greatest in progressive house, electro and minimal, Sequencers caught us off-guard with a smashing set of disco house!
Hey guys, congratulations! What do you think you got right with your song selection and vibe?
Thank You! We really like this disco vibe a lot! It’s very rich musically; it has all the right elements to make you move in every possible way and also is versatile enough to blend with a lot of other genres perfectly. Concerning the song selection, well we really enjoy music and that is what lead us to a constant search for new sounds, melodies and rhythms, so it was this way that looking in our record collection we found all the tracks that seemed right to build this mixtape.
As in everything we do, we try to make it with some certain sequence, particularly in this mixtape we passed from point A with slowed down grooves and laidback melodies all the way to point B of pulsating beats and relentless bass, we like to use music that can suit in the mix seamlessly without getting too monotone. From the very beginning this mixtape was intended to make you dance, have fun and never lose the funk!
Late at our Basement Mixtape from Sequencers at Letsmix.com.
A lot of the music you spin has come to be associated with Northern European DJs. Has it gotten popular in Mexico as well?
That’s right… we try to follow as many labels and producers as we can, this music is often associated with Northern European DJs and producers but there are also many talented producers in South America that have amazing records! Nowadays you can find great music from all around the globe; it’s just that you have to look in all the right places!
On the other side Mexico has been developing a great scene in general, at least we can speak for our hometown Guadalajara where a lot of people have been involved for quite a while now, good promoters that in combination with great venues make exposure of many international artists as well as emerging local talents, this has helped being an eye-opener for the people who is interested in the scene.
However this particular sound isn’t really popular in here as maybe other commercial genres! In general terms we can say that this kind of music has the crowd that really needs, nothing complicated or pretentious just people who wants to go straight to the dance floor and have a good party!
What is a typical gig weekend like for you?
To be real honest we don´t have this “gig weekends”, in fact we do this simply for the love of music and fun, our “gigs” are mainly with friends, whenever we can throw a nice but pretty local party.
We’ve never been involved in anything too serious although it would be great, but right now between jobs and college we have a pretty tight schedule!
Nonetheless we do program some studio time on weekends to re-listen all the tracks we found in past days and decide what we really dig so we can buy those records, also try new things on the decks or write and produce some pending tracks as well, we make edits of tracks that we want to play, which by the way are pretty basic, just for the purpose of making them a little bit dj-friendly and ease things out.
In a few words our weekends are simply about playing a lot of music and practising any recently acquired and very ridicule dance moves!
What features will you get into on the mixer after unboxing it?
We don’t know where to start! This mixer features a lot of functions that we are really eager to try, we guess some of them are the midi mapping plus soundcard to make use of Ableton and CD players in a more integrated way, besides the frequency mix and FX will totally help to build a smoother mix and then we could get creative with the sidechain FX manipulating audio, also the live sampler sounds interesting! Maybe we could use some live vocals? Our intention is to explore all the sound capabilities it can deliver!
Right now: Another round of Pioneer DJ Network is on!
Let’s Mix wants to wish the talented Mr Young good luck at ADE! We took the chance for a quick mini interview with the ADE Next artist hunt grand prize winner.
Tell us two things about yourself which are also important facets of your music making.
Spontaneity is very important for me, I like to go into a studio with an open mind.
I never know in advance exactly what I’m going to produce, and my productions mostly depend on what kind of mood I am in. In addition, for me quality is of great importance.
I like productions that are well constructed, this helps to give a track a certain feeling.
So much going on for the Netherlands. As if soccer and Dutch house weren’t such dominant forces in Europe, you also have the ADE festival (and yourself)! Any thoughts on that?
The Netherlands are not only bursting with talent, many established artists are also from the Netherlands. The ADE is a great opportunity for these two groups to meet and to meet a lot of important people in the dance scene like bookers, promoters and so on.
Everybody who works in the dance scene is present, so it’s a perfect place to network.
It’s also a great stage for the big DJs. For example, during the ADE I have the chance to see all the great DJs playing and due to the character of the ADE I sometimes can even have a nice conversation with them.
SanderYoung Promo Mix from SanderYoung at Letsmix.com.
What can we expect from your set at ADE? A lot of live programming?
The last few months I spent a lot of time in the studio. I have many new productions and I also made some great collaborations with a friend of mine, Pieter Steijger. So expect my set at ADE will be filled with brand new productions.
Guess who just won the Premium members contest on Let’s Mix? Alexander Fog, that’s who! Here’s a glimpse of what the feature will look like once DJ Mag hits the stands.
We ran out of space for the interview, but we wanted to share this part of the Q&A with you guys.
Looking at some of your promo pics… what do you do to stay fit and avoid bad food on tour? How can we have a belly which is not flappy like ours?
- Ha ha, I need to say that I’m not putting in too many hours of gym, now that studio time consumes all my days. So maybe my belly has got a little bigger too.
- Eating and drinking on the fly makes you fat, and fat fast. The best rule is to sleep well, and have a good session in the gym to throw the stress of your body. Try stay away from carbs. Pizza… whoa. And also, have a very good sexual life.
Get the full story in the forthcoming issue of DJ Mag!
Alexander Fog TMR @ DjMag Comp from technomafia at Letsmix.com.
If you’re following the Let’s mix blog, you know we’re big fans of Brooklyn DJ collective The Rub here at the office. In what is no doubt an unprecedented feat, The Rub’s DJ Ayres, Cosmo Baker and DJ Eleven have collected all the best tracks from hip hop’s great history and mixed them into one helluva tight mixtape for every year.
You’ll find them all the mixes on The Rub’s profile page – and we’ll continue pushing them weekly on the blog too. But since today saw the release of The Rub’s latest mix in the Hip Hop History series, the year 2000, we thought it was time to catch up with Ayres, Cosmo Baker and Eleven and talk to them about putting all this phenomenal music together.
Interview after the jump!
History Of Hip Hop Volume 22: 2000 (Mixed by Cosmo Baker) from The Rub at Letsmix.com.
Hey Rubbers! You’ve done an amazing job compiling and producing the Hip Hop History mixes. How did you come up with this, slightly crazy, idea?
Ayres: Thank you! If I remember correctly, I had the idea for a series of hip hop history mix CDs at first, but it just seemed crazy to try to dump that many CD:s on the market place. Most of the years would have been double or triple CD:s. But yeah, Eleven and Cosmo were both into the idea to do it and just give the mixes away on The Rub website and Brooklyn Radio. So we split it up between the three of us into years, like “I’ll take 1979, you do 1980, he does 1981…” and so on. It felt really ambitious but also once we got the bug, it was a project we had to do. And it is awesome now because it has found such a huge audience and people keep finding it and emailing about the mixes long after we first put them up.
How long did it the whole process take, from compiling the tracks, via laying out the order in the respective mixes to finishing the actual mixes?
Eleven: The mixes got longer the further we got into them. But they average around two hours. For each of those, there was three-four hours of tracking down and going through music, a couple hours of prepping to record, three-four hours of recording and touch up. So each show probably took at least ten hours. By the time we bring the project up to now, we’ll be 300+ hours in!
How many tracks are there in total on all the mixes, as of today?
Ayres: Nearly 900 songs. It was fun to work on this together because we got to share a lot of music with each other, like when I was missing something from my collection I could just hit up Cosmo and Eleven and they would usually have it. And it was a great excuse to rip all these records to MP3, so we kind of have every hip hop song we need now, in our digital collections.
Did you have a process for the track selection, like voting or something?
Cosmo Baker: We selected what years we wanted to do and then after that it was an individual choice.
Which, in your opinion, is the best year in hip hop history – and the best mix of the ones you did?
Cosmo: There’s no best year in the mix. Every year has its flavor, and all three of us bring our own interpretation of those years to our individual mixes. Like I was partial to the years 1986, 1990, 1996, 1999… So I think they’re the best mixes per se, but that’s discounting such a wide swath of music that it’s impossible to pin down. My two cents.
Eleven: That’s like asking what the best hip hop song in history is or the best hip hop album of all time or the best year in hip hop history. There’s no answering that. It’s totally subjective, so there’s no right answer. There were great records in every year.
Ayres: Mixwise, I still listen to Eleven and Cosmo’s mixes but I am less likely to listen to mine because I spent so much time on them, it’s kind of like staring in the mirror for two hours. But I was really happy with how 1994 came out, with the blends and stuff.
If you could add just one more track to all the mixes, which would it be?
Eleven: Every single record I had to cut was agony. There’s no way to go back and pick just one. There was too much great music left on the cutting room floor.