Digitizing the DJ Cassingle Source Tapes

It's cold and wet in Oregon this time of year, so it's vital to find indoor activities to keep yourself from going stir-crazy. Today, I'm starting in on a project I've been meaning to get around to. I'm digitizing all the source tapes I use for DJ Cassingle sets, to be archived and burned onto CD for future live usage. The tapes are all recycled C90s, and one of the issues I've had in using them in performance is that i always end up in the middle, so the stuff at the ends doesn't tend to get mixed in as much. Having the CDs as viable alternative will make it easier to get around to all the contents. Here's a shot of the tapes, in their handy tape book, which once held a set of FDR Fireside chats tapes, which too have been recycled and recorded over.

There are 8 tapes in total, one is missing from the shot. The content of these tapes is hours of the funniest, craziest, and strangest stuff I could find on YouTube. Religious speeches, alien conspiracy theories, weird radio frequencies, anything I could find that would make for a good compelling tape-mixed audio experience. Small tape players are a central part of the DJ Cassingle setup, but the turntables and CDJ's I have hooked up to the system are employed as well.

I'm not really planning to release these recordings, but they will show up in future DJ Cassingle mixes and broadcasts. If you feel like you've just really gotta have a copy, trade me something!

Diggin' Deep DJ Night Teaser Graphic

Last year I had a DJ night called "Diggin' Deep". We did well for a while, but then our venue closed. However it opened up again, and now we have a new night, with new DJs Ian Lawless and Avitar Virgonian. Here's the graphic:

Our first night back will be Friday Jan 11th starting around 9 PM. I'm excitied, because we had a lot of fun doing last time round. the venue really likes having us there and we get to play whatever we want, so long as we throw in a little Grateful Dead here and there for the owners! It's a free event, with a big emphasis on collaborative DJ culture, record nerd culture, etc.

Cuts & Edits - Swamp Thing

This week I've been working on a different sort of challenge, inspired in part by cooking shows like "Chopped". I've been selecting certain records and trying to complete a remix loosely within 24 hours. Here's a photo of the stuff I was sampling from today. There's no guarantee that what made the setup photo ended up in today's track, but it's a good document of where my mind was in the process.

 

Today's track is kind of a shuffly swamp jazz funk sort of thing. It's at 100 bpm, like a lot of tracks I've done lately. I like working at that tempo, because tracks at that tempo can work in a wider range of playback tempos, and fit into downtempo and hip hop contexts more easily. There are a lot of areas with finer and more detailed edit work, and a lot of rhythmic interplay. There's a lot of restraint as well. When you listen to the piece, you'll feel as though you expect and big stomping hip hop beat, but it doesn't build to that; it lets the slowed down jazz the piece is in part made of set the pace and keep the live sound. Here, listen.

W18th Technomotive YouTube Channel

One of my label/organization projects, W18th Technomotive, now has a YouTube channel. Through it I plan to release a lot of back-logged work of my own (within the dance/remix genre). To start things off, I uploaded the tracks from my "Beat Jackers vol. 1", a cut-and-paste sample epic I assembled in 2003. Here is the link to the playlist of those tracks. There will be more to come, but for now, enjoy this classic piece of samplemania!

The playlist contains all the songs on the album.

DJ Cassingle Friday the 13th MIx

One of my other side projects is a live mostly tape thing under the name DJ Cassingle. The name came from a project I was working on two summers ago, where I needed to quickly come up with several aliases. I chose DJ Cassingle for one of them because it was the most preposterous thing I could think of. However it stuck and I've been using the name for occasional live broadcasts and mixes. Here's a shot of the setup I use for work under this alias.

It ended up happening on two occasions in 2012 and 2011 that I was mixing and broadcasting on Friday the 13th. I basically do this style of mixing when I feel like dragging out the various pieces of gear, which are different from my regular DJ setup. If I wanted to be pointlessly odd about it, I could only do these mixes on Friday 13th, but I won't go that far yet. What I have for you here are the two halves of the Friday 13th mix of 2012, recorded from live broadcast on There Exists Radio.

Senegalese Music Selections: Mbalax and More

One of the mixtapes I made as part of the Music of Africa Mixtape Series is this one here highlighting 90 minutes of music from Senegal. If you're not familiar with Senegalese music this mix may prove to be a good introduction. Senegalese music is characterized by a high dramatic singing style (which will give you goosebumps) and what at first seems like an impenetrable wall of drums. Drums are very important in Senegalese music and the way they are played is a dense web of polyrhythms with a relaxed gait. The overall effect is one that is very exciting and sometimes heart-wrenching.

For this tape I didn't get around to creating a fancy cover, as my tape deck's dubbing function had ceased to work shortly after finishing a couple other mixtapes, which meant that I wasn't able to start making copies of it for anyone. I enjoyed doing it so much though, that I wanted to share it with you all. Here's the link:

Unfortunately, I only have the first half of the tracklist. I'm not sure what happened to the other half, it's possible I typed it in, but with some recent computer crashes, it may just not have been saved properly. So I've got the titles for the first half, and here they are.

Abdou Guite Seck  "Bess B"
Etoile De Dakar  "Doctor"
MAGAYE SECK  - "tegel ma youza"
Yves Niang - "Yow lay xalaat"
Super Jamono de Dakar - "Bass"
Assane Ndiaye - "Diambar"
Aziz Faye & Yatma Thiam "Naari Gorong Sing Sing"
Xalam  "Yumbèye"
Lankandia Cissoko  Kora Music

$5 Record Remix Challenge

Today, J.D Casten, Avitar Virgonian and myself went down to CD World in West Eugene to shoot some video footage and do some digging for a project we're working on. The project is one of remixing material we find with a $5 budget. It's based on another project done by a group of producers in LA, in a video called "Secondhand Sureshots".

Secondhand Sureshots from Sanchir Enkhbayar on Vimeo.

The rules are outlined in the video, but i'll go over them again. We can only use the records we got for source material. No external samples or instruments are allowed. Editing and effects are allowed.

I've done this before, with a random handful of records from my own collection, but this is a chance to do it alongside other people. We had a really great time digging through the records at CD World. Even though we're there fairly often, and know some sections like the backs of our hands, there was still lots of good stuff to find today, and a lot of fifty-cent and $1 stuff that for the purposes or this challenge is much more useful for sampling than it would be for track-based DJing. Here's the records I found for the challenge.

There turned out to be some really interesting stuff in here. There's a James Last album there (usually a good bet), some country-rock from the Janus label, a 3xLP loss leader comp with a lot of good, if not terribly obscure, 70's tracks, and a Russian rock album from 1987 (still well within the era of strict Soviet censorship). The bossa nova album is more on the easy listening side, unfortunately, but for the purposes of this challenge, there's still quite a bit of useful source on it.

Solo shot of the Russian rock album. Contains a significant amount of synth as well.

Our other collaborators on this project are a couple of guys named GUMS and Antitune. I haven't met them, but from what Avitar Virgonian tells me, they'll be coming up with some great stuff on their end as well.

Here are more photos of the dig session today, courtesy of of photographer, JD Casten.

Ethiopian Music Selections Vol 2

This morning I got up and digitized the second volume of the Ethiopian music mixtape. On the first volume I purposely left out any Mulatu tracks, though some were used in DJ Dexterity's mix that made up part of the first volume. This time I used more of the classic Ethiopian sound, the Ethio-jazz type sound that many prefer in the range of Ethiopian music. It's important to have a balance though, between the classic sound and the contemporary sound, which though sometimes a bit 'cheesier' to American ears, is much more 'on the pulse' of Ethiopian society. A good way to get a window into Ethiopian music is to watch Erta TV where a lot of the television programming is music.

Here's the cover and the file. Enjoy!

 

More Disney Tapes

 These are always fun when you find them. Here's a few I picked up the other day. The second pic shows what eventually became of the last Disney tapes I found. That is, they got recorded over and became the source tapes for a John Lithium remix project.

Vietnamese Buddhist CD's DVD's and VCD's

Earlier on in the summer I went down to the Asian food store in my neighborhood. I've gone in there before hunting media, and never found anything more than some overpriced traditional Chinese music CD's, as well as a little of the bland pop you sometimes get in Asian food stores. Go figure, they're a store not a music retailer. But one day I went in and saw in the give-away pile they keep by the front door, which usually has copies of the Portland Chinese Times and copies of previous years' calendars, a box of discs. I looked at them and saw they were in Vietnamese, some were music, some were videos, and they looked Buddhist. So I picked up a handful to take home and investigate, leaving some behind in case someone else would be delighted to find them. To my mild surprise, no one did, so I picked up the rest a few weeks later. This is the lot of them, with some particular ones highlighted in pics of their own.

 

What I plan to do with these is not yet clear. What I'd like to do is rip the video from some of the discs, and do a collage of the audio and video with some glitch treatments. I'll have to talk to some people i know about the best software to do it. In the meantime, i I can find some interesting audio on the MP3 discs, I'll do a sort of mix or collage with what I can extract!