DJ gig: FORMA Design.Build

I played music at the showroom opening of FORMA Design.Build, a very cool home design studio specializing in custom, hand-made work in the European style. The event was open to the public and a lot of fun, with lots of cool things to look at, including the photography of Gusmano Cesaretti. The showroom is right next to Silverlake's popular Red Lion tavern, so there was a lot of hipster foot traffic mixed in with the highfalutin-types. Probably 100 people at the most.

A great success i think, and the patrons and management complimented me several times for my selections, which was a relief because I was just playing whatever I felt like that might also fit the ambience. As you'll see in the setlist below, I definitely indulged myself.

Click to enlarge

Setlist 

1. Underworld - Ansum
2. Saint Etienne - How We Used to Live
3. Moloko - Familiar Feeling (Martin Buttrich Remix)
4. Annie - Greatest Hit
5. Goldfrapp - A&E (Maps Instrumental)
6. Mylo - Valley of the Dolls
7. The Prodigy - 3 Kilos
8. Underworld - Oich Oich (Lemonworld Jam)
9. The Chemical Brothers - The Boxer (DFA Version)
10. M.I.A. - Paper Planes (DFA Remix)
11. Daft Punk - Fresh
12. Underworld - Cups (Salt City Orchestra's Version)
13. Primal Scream - Autobahn 66
14. Röyksopp - Happy Up Here
15. Mylo - Emotion 98.6
16. New Order - Thieves Like Us (Instrumental)
17. Beck - Diamond Dogs
18. Meat Beat Manifesto - Everything Counts
19. The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want (Soulwax Remix)
20. Underworld - Jumbo
21. Moby - Porcelain
22. Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Andrew Weatherall Mix)
23. Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Beta Version)
24. Mylo - Guilty of Love
25. Underworld - Dirty Epic (Dirty Guitar Mix)
26. Daft Punk - Voyager
27. Leftfield - Release the Dubs
28. New Order - Regret (New Order Mix)
29. Saint Etienne - Hug My Soul
30. David Byrne & Fatboy Slim featuring Nellie McKay - How Are You?  
31. The Chemical Brothers - Das Spiegel
32. Pet Shop Boys - Flamboyant (Scissor Sisters Silhouettes & Shadows Mix)
33. Scissor Sisters - Running Out
34. Antônio Carlos Jobim - Insensátez
35. Underworld - Banstyle (Jam Version from Everything, Everything DVD-ROM)

Sound + Vision 2

Sound + Vision combines two of my favorite things: sharing music and taking photos. Included with each photo is a streaming song that I thought worked well with the image. If you enjoy that track, I hope you'll purchase it cheaply with the helpful Amazon link.

♫ Waves, Waves, Waves

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Rainy Day MIx

Right-click or CTRL-click here to download (233MB MP3)

This is my latest DJ mix, inspired by the beautiful Los Angeles rainstorms of the last several days. The songs were selected and the mix was compiled specifically for rainy day listening, preferably in a setting where you can also hear the rain in the background. Obviously, I missed getting this out while the L.A. storms were in full effect but I reckon it's probably raining somewhere else in the world right now or will be soon. Fellow Californians, I hope you'll add this to your emergency rain survival kits for later.

Naturally, the music here is mainly somber and introspective, reflecting either lyrically or sonically the themes of rain or water, with a really thick, wet sound that is not very danceable at all (although there are quite a lot of beats -- this is not an ambient mix). You'd think this would make for an easier time on the mixing end, but Rainy Day was probably the most difficult mix I've undertaken. While the technical aspects of a high energy dance mix can be daunting, achieving a decent flow or arc is quite a lot easier than it is with relatively chill music, at least in my opinion. The challenge was compounded by the longer running time -- 100 minutes, as opposed to the far leaner 60. It was a real chore, discovering the optimum track list and mix points, but I think I did a good job. 

My favorite moody mixtapes were always those sent to me by friends and didn't include a track list, so I will continue that tradition here. But you will hear the sounds of Blur, David Bowie, Goldfrapp, Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, M83, R.E.M., Radiohead, Röyksopp, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and more, plus one or two what-I-hope-will-be-pleasant surprises. I must warn you, Rainy Day is a bit goth. 

Cover art by me, featuring the lovely Katie Horwitch. I grabbed a few iPhone shots of her while accompanying photographers Lou O'Bedlam and Jon Hill on a shoot in Venice Beach during last week's rain. You can see more of Katie here.

Hope you like it!

Previous Mixes

Download Insomnia Mix 1 hereDownload MTHRFCKRZ Mix here

Sound + Vision 1

While I've never thought of myself as a real photographer, I've always taken loads of pictures.  I remember spending a summer at the Jersey Shore when I was 16 or 17 and buying a roll of black-and-white film and taking pictures of the Boardwalk in the rain (I was in art school at the time and it seemed like a really profound thing to do -- I was wearing a black-and-white flannel shirt if that paints a better picture for you). Later, I bought one of the early digital cameras and drove around the country with it. Then I discovered the mobile phone cameras, and things got messy. 

I spent most of the last decade photographing virtually everything with variously malfunctioning cameraphones. I think I've taken some reasonably cool pictures with phones, but I've always justified the practice by thinking of it in a kind of bastardized context of David Carson's (Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile) concept of fotografiks, a kind of photography/graphic design approach that you can invoke to excuse dubious photography as graphic design elements. Or something. It's a bit much for a hobbyist, really. Anyway, I'm pleased that at least among my friends and a bunch of strangers on the Internet, I've managed to develop a photography style of my own. However, it's been pointed out to me by more than one person that I've taken this filthy phonecam aesthetic as far as I can.

Here are some examples, and you can see loads more here if you like this sort of thing:

In advance of buying a decent hobbyist camera, I've been spotlighting on Tumblr what I think are some good shots from my archives, including some cameraphone stuff I think has some aesthetic value beyond the idiosyncrasies of that format. Because I got such a great response to my This Used To Be The Future... series, included with each photo is a streaming song. It's an idea I stole from the very brilliant and very naked self-portrait photographer Sabrina Dacos (NSFW).

What I think I'll call Sound + Vision combines two of my favorite things, sharing music and taking photos. I'll continue to roll one out every day or so on Tumblr, but I'm experimenting with collecting those photos and songs here every few weeks, both for myself and for anybody who's kind enough to keep up with me but doesn't have a Tumblr (you should get one, it's fun).

♫ Emotion 98.6
 

♫ Big black cloud, little white lie
This one's on me (right-click or CTRL-click to download)

♫ Old World Underground, where are you now?
 

♫ She takes it all the wrong way
 

♫ Wish I could fly like Superman
 

♫ Shoot speed/kill light
 

♫ Heads will roll
 

♫ Something in the air

♫ All these things...
  

♫ They put you down, they say I'm wrong
This one's on me (right-click or CTRL-click to download)

That's it for this edition of Sound + Vision. If you're a photographer or a designer or just an appreciator of those things, I'd love to hear your remarks, feedback, criticisms, etc. 

This used to be the future, part V (Tracks 20 - 1)

I hated lyrics in the 1990s. It somehow got in my head when I was a teenager that lyrics were incidental to the quality of a song and all that mattered was the vocal melody and how it worked with the music. I took this stupid idea of artistic purity further and began resenting songs that reminded me of people or places. I wanted to be able to appreciate a song for its own merits without sharing any kind of personal meaning with the music. 

Obviously, that changed. A great number of songs on this list are ones I love because of their lyrics and what they mean to me personally. And, as I detailed in Part I, it was in compiling these songs that recurring lyrical themes revealed themselves to me, as did the songs' influence on or reflection of events in my life during the time I was first listening to them.  

I'm a little disappointed to report the dominant lyrical themes of these 100 songs are unhappy ones. We're hearing a lot of regret, a lot of heartache, a lot of finality and a lot of oblivion. I wouldn't associate those words with myself in general -- I'd choose words like brilliant, amazing, awesome, tall -- but, paradoxically, I probably would use those gloomy words to characterize a number of my defining experiences in the last ten years. 

But there are positive themes as well, as you'll see in the first song in this final installment of This used to be the future…

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