1. White Mice - It’s a Shame
2. Mungo’s Hifi feat Kenny Knots - Don’t Let Them Break Your Heart
3. Tenastilin - Burial Tonight
4. Sister Nancy - Bam Bam
5. Papa Levi - My God, My King
6. Mungo’s Hifi - Babylon
7. Mungo’s Hifi feat Topcat - Herbalist
8. Mungo’s Hifi feat Soom T - Did You Really Know
9. Disrupt feat Soom T - Survivor
10. White Mice - The Youth Of Today
11. Professor Grizzly - Fight The Professor
12. Wailers Band - Higher Field Marshall (Dub)
13. LV feat Dandelion - CCTV
14. King Midas Sound - Meltdown
15. Kode 9 feat Spaceape - Ghost Town
16. Rhythm & Sound feat Jennifer Lara - Queen In My Empire
17. The Bug feat Flow Dan - Run
18. Mark Pritchard - Elephant Dub

1. Instra:mental - Watching You
2. Breakage - Clarendon
3. Instra:mental - Sakura
4. MC Conrad + DJ Furney - Drum Tools
5. Bok Bok - Ripe Banana
6. DJ Champion - Motherboard
7. Bubblez - Ice Rink
8. Untitled
9. Scratcha DVA - Nasty Nasty Nasty (Roska remix)
10. Cooly G - Dis Boy
11. Untold - Just For You (Roska remix)
12. Instra:mental - Leave It All Behind
13. Martyn - Mega Drive Generation
14. Kode9 + Space Ape - 2 Far Gone
15. Skream - What Did He Say
16. DJ Madd - Someone (Breakage’s unspecified remix)
17. Distance - Nomad
18. Loefah - It’s Yours
19. Pinch ft Yolanda - Get Up (Jack Sparrow remix)
20. DLX - Matter Of Fact (Breakage’s relatively speaking mix)
21. Kode9 + Space Ape - Time Patrol
22. Ramadanman - Revenue
23. Pangaea - Memories
24. Untold - Nobody Likes A Smart Arse
25. Naphta - Soundclash (Grievous Angel remix)
26. Joy Orbison - Hyph Mngo

00:00:00 (tracks 1 - 4): ~175BPM section
Four drum & bass tunes to kick off because I recorded this mix with a mate in mind who’s into it. I haven’t engaged seriously with the genre for a decade but I’ve started to buy the odd bit here and there, and I love the dBridge school of spacious D & B (which caused me a proper “what the fuck is this?” moment when I heard him play at my first Forward back at the start of this year)…as opposed to the tired and tiring “fill every frequency slot” stuff I normally seem to hear. There was a dBridge tune I wanted to include in this but I couldn’t fit it in without buying an extra CDJ. All four of these records are very different (but ace), and mixed together they add up to a genre crime I expect, but never mind! My favourite track is the epic, epic Clarendon which has one of the baddest jungle basslines ever.

00:11:56 (tracks 5 - 14): ~130BPM section
I said before that this is the centerpiece of the set, and musically this is the happy place that 2009 has taken me to. I’ve hubristically thrown in one of my own creations which is a sort of junglist / funky hybrid. Really excited about this direction in 2010!

00:38:44 (tracks 15 - 26): ~140BPM section
Dubstep roundup. More genre crimes but I intended this section as a varied showcase of dubstep sounds to try and steer my mate clear of Chase & Status and all that gormless shite. Mostly these are 2009 tunes but I also threw in a couple of enduring favourites (It’s Yours and Nomad). The mixing is rough in places because this section was recorded with an absolute skinfull of mulled wine in me when I should have been packing to go on holiday. (In fact there were two takes of this, from which I’ve cherry-picked the best bits and edited them together in Logic…) Matter of Fact for me will forever be associated with hearing the Plastic People sound system for the first time. Even though I own the record, in there it sounded like something else…

Enjoy!

Track list:

dj maxximus - neo (shackleton’s neo bln rmx)
shackleton - blood on my hands (villalobos remix)
scuba - from within (marcel dettmann remix)
actress - hazyville
the black dog - 0093 (berlin mix)

I had enormous fun doing it and learning / re-learning how it all works. Takes up a lot of time though - luckily me, the wife and the boy were all really ill with a bad cold over Easter so I had an entire bank holiday weekend stuck indoors to really get into it. I haven’t given myself a producer alias at this point since the whole business of doing so seems ridiculous and sordid, like choosing a porn name, so it’s just by “Jon Rowett”, in a Laurent Garnier / Dave Pearce / Timmy Mallett stylee. I need to blow my nose again now so see you later yeah.

Time for some dubstep again….

Much as I’ve loved (really, really loved) the last year or so’s excellent releases on labels like Hessle Audio, Apple Pips and Immerse, if I’m not careful with that stuff I end up listening to nothing but polite-step, running the further risk of taking an accidental turn into dub techno. (Indeed, this is how I ended up liking deep house: my listening entered a cul-de-sac which surprised me by having more than one exit). So without abandoning the dub2stepno axis altogether in this mix, I’ve tried to drop in plenty of bolshier-sounding tunes, whether it’s the brash soundsystem warmp warmp bass of RSD’s productions, Zomby and Joker’s next-level chiptunes or the full on balls-out dubstep of In The Death Car. Mixed earlier this evening on two 1210s, hope you enjoy!

P.S. Yes I know it’s too short!

1. Narcossist - Sunblind (Mindset)
2. Narcossist - Targets (Clandestine Cultivations)
3. Grievous Angel - Lady Dub (Devotional Dubs)
4. Scuba - Ruptured (Surgeon Remix) (Hotflush)
5. DJG - Apophenia (Tube 10)
6. Unknown - Rizla Dub (War)
7. Zomby - Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix) (Hyperdub)
8. Zomby - Liquid Dancehall (Ramp Recordings)
9. Evergreen & Landlord feat. Dan Man - Jah Rain (RSD Remix) (Ranking Records)
10. RSD - Pretty Bright Light (Punch Drunk)
11. 16Bit - In The Death Car (Boka Records)
12. Joker - Digidesign (Hyperdub)

For more of that techier dubstep I was talking about, check out Grievous Angel’s DubTech mix, where he mixes a whole stack of my favourite records far better than I ever could (the bastard!)

some of the visual imagery I traditionally associate with the genre of house

As someone whose listening in adolescence jumped directly from Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre to Acen and The Hyper-On Experience, I’ve always been prejudiced against (and ignorant about) house, seeing it as mindless throwback cheese for the nightclubbing hoards. But just as getting into dubstep piqued my interest in dub techno, listening to Deepchord and Basic Channel eventually opened me up a bit to other forms of four-four.

Magnetic by Murmur was my favourite record of last year. It’s got a really stoned sound to it without ever resorting to the washed-out saturated homogeneity of so much dub techno, and it strongly motivated me to seek out music with similar values: crispness and precision alongside weight and warmth. After lots of research (and one or two terrible, terrible minimal techno purchases) I discovered - well fuck me, I like house, specifically (if I’ve got my terminology right) deep house. With all the negative associations I’ve unfairly attached to house music over the years, this feels much - I imagine - like discovering that one’s sexual orientation is not the one you thought it was.

I have, of course, no deep understanding of the music. I spin the records context-free in my dining room, don’t go clubbing and am only dimly aware of its heritage or history. It’s a milestone on my personal quest to locate and purchase a particular sonic: it’s a controllable desire that I can own. I’m still pretty squeamish about the wider genre: vocal samples exhorting me to “move my body” or informing me that I am a “freaky motherfucker” are, to borrow from Bill Hicks, as welcome as turds dropping into my drink. But on the whole I reckon the stuff I’ve taken a shine to can sit on the shelf with my Appleblim, Ramadanman, Pendle Coven and Rhythm & Sound records without causing too much cognitive dissonance.

Here’s another mix I threw together over the Christmas period. I was trying to go for something evocative of winter and “sparklyness”.

More, probably, soon.

Tracklist:

Margaret Dygas: See You Around (Non Standard Productions)
Efdemin: Stately, Yes (Dial)
Lerosa: Triage (Quintessentials)
Sevensol & Bender: Live at Coliseum (KANN)
Lawrence: Miles (Dial)
Cavalier: Deep Rider (Drumpoet)
Move D & Benjamin Brunn: New Horizon (Smallville)
Quince: Omnium (Music Man)
Sten: Daylight (Dial)
Efdemin: La Ratafia (Dial)
Petar Dundov: Sparkling Stars (Music Man)

Nevertheless, there is a whole bunch of stuff I want to share with you, not least some of the musical tangents I’ve gone off on in the last four months or so, so I’m going to make another go of this blogging thing. In the mean time, here is a mix of some dubstep tunes that I was sharing with a few mates during my Christmas break up in Grimsby. I had to choose between two mixes: one had better mixing but omitted some important records; the other included more records but was mixed with wrists made of chalk (I really flubbed the mix into Infinity Is Now). I’ve chosen to share the latter here, needless to say, it’s now 2009 and these are 2008 tunes, I have much more to share though so check back soon….

Tracklist:

Peverelist: Clunk Click Every Trip (Punch Drunk)
Kontext: Plumes (Ramadanman remix) (Immerse)
Ramadanman: Core (Soul Jazz)
Pangaea: You & I (Hessle Audio)
Skream: Hitch (Tempa)
DLX: Matter Of Fact (Breakage remix) (Smog)
Luke Envoy: So (Tempa)
RSD: Over It (Tectonic)
Brackles: Glazed (Berkane Sol)
Peverelist: Infinity Is Now (Tectonic)
Geiom: Remenissin (Berkane Sol)
Pangaea: Router (Hessle Audio)
Ramadanman: Blimey (Hessle Audio)
Shackleton: The Rope Tightens (Badawi remix) (Skull Disco)
Shackleton: But The Branch Is Weak (Skull Disco)
Mika Vainio: Behind the Radiators (Touch)

Track list:

• Jackie Mittoo - Ayatollah (Basic Replay)
• Andrew Bees - Militant (Basic Replay)
• Makiko & Bush Chemists - Chazbo & Makiko In Dub (Roots Temple)
• Wailers Band - Higher Field Marshal Dub (PK)
• Rhythm & Sound - See Mi Yah (Hallucinator remix) (Burial Mix)
• Murmur - Magnetic (Meanwhile.)
• Freund der Familie - Sark (Taron Trekka remix) (Freund der Familie)
• October - Raw (Agnes & Ripperton’s Twisted Reshape) (Caravan / Multiverse)
• Function - Anticipation (Sandwell District)
• Sleeparchive - Baryon (Hardwax)
• Substance - Relish (Shed remix) (Scion Versions)
• Philip Jeck plays Charles Matthews - Amoroso (Touch Seven)
• Pole - Streit (~Scape)
• Mika Vainio - Behind Radiators (Touch Seven)
• Rhythm & Aound w/ Jennifer Lara - Queen In My Empire (Burial Mix)
• BJ Nilsen - Viking, Cromarty… (Touch)
• BJ Nilsen - Black Light (Touch)
• Ramadanman - Blimey (Hessle Audio)
• TRG - Less Music (Tube 10)
• Calenda - Forever (Heavy Artillery)
• Digital Mystikz - Shake Out Your Demons (Disfigured Dubz)
• Cluekid - Hovercraft (White label)
• Ramadanman - ? (White label)
• ? - ? (sorry, can’t get my shit together, probably TRG or Ramadanman)
• Martyn - Suburbia (Apple Pips)
• Ramadanman - Carla (White label)
• Geiom feat Marita - Reminissin’ (Berkane Sol)
• RSD - Speeka Box (Punch Drunk)
• Scanone - Skip (Combat)
• Bar 9 - Murda Sound (Z-Audio)
• Pleated Lemon - Cocks & Fannies (Hand On The Plow)

I made this using one shiny new SL-1210, one ancient Kam BDX-180 belt drive turntable, a Vestax mixer I bought off eBay on the basis of Appleblim’s recommendation in the sleeve notes for his Dubstep Allstars mix, plus my iPod for one or two tracks. Recorded onto my laptop using Audacity, where I made one teeny weeny edit to undo a tiny but annoying cueing mistake i made at the end of Black Light.

These tracks and experiments were recorded in 1996 (and possibly early 1997) against a typical teenage backdrop of dope smoke, poverty, unrequited hormonal urges and academic fecklessness. Most were produced in my bedroom using a mixture of my own equipment, and bits borrowed from the music department at Franklin College, Grimsby, where I was busy failing ‘A’ levels in Music Technology and a few other subjects. One or two were recorded at the college. The kit list varied depending on what was available, and what I had bought/sold from the back pages of Future Music magazine, but these are the various things used at different times (asterisks denote equipment on loan from college):

• Atari 1040 STE running the Breakthru MIDI sequencer
• Korg MS-10 analogue monosynth
• Casio CZ-3000 digital synth that wanted to be analogue but so wasn’t
• A generic Casio home keyboard
• Realistic (Tandy own-brand) DJ mixer
• Oberheim Prommer (EPROM microchip programmer usable as a pretty nifty monophonic sampler)
• Boss DS-330 “Dr. Synth” General Midi sound module *
• Boss DR-660 drum machine *
• Roland CM-32 sound module *
• A Yamaha guitar multi-FX processor *
• Hi-fi tape deck and amp

At no point was all this kit used together in one go! That would’ve been sweet though…

Listening back now, it’s obvious to me that my attempts to imitate the big techno/jungle/trance sounds were almost always the weakest pieces of work, and the best stuff was written when I wasn’t trying to follow a style and just let myself have unselfconscious fun. “Happy accidents” also played a large part. Although I often felt restricted and frustrated at the time, I am now glad that I didn’t lay my hands on a JV-1080, TB303, TR909 and S-950 and make those polished dance tracks I thought I wanted to make.

Now for the songs! I’m going to post the ones I like best first, rather than posting in the order they were recorded:

Virus 123

• You need to excuse the jazzy noodling at the start. After that, things get going a bit.
• The drums on this track sound loose because my sequencer didn’t support swing, so I played them in with some human swing and used very minimal quantising.
• The wobbly bass and the sine wave melody came about from a complete accident which resulted in some corrupted pitchbend data.
• The vocal sample is Kryten from Red Dwarf, saying Now I remember you: you’re a computer virus. Travelling from machine to machine, overwriting the core program.
• The acid line was played live because I didn’t have a MIDI-CV convertor for the MS-10.
• The distorted melody nearer the end was the CZ-3000, which normally sounded pretty weedy, with the signal fed through the phono inputs on the mixer so as to create an overdriven sound. I used this effect a lot to add “meatyness” to my synth patches.
• All the other sounds (drums and synths) were off the DS330 General Midi module.

Virus Version
This is basically a completely different track to Virus 123, but I copy and pasted one of the melodies from that track. The pads were played live on a Casio home keyboard of the bossa nova preset variety. This keyboard was later sold to pay for party supplies when my parents went away for the weekend, and they still mutter darkly about this incident to this day.

Untitled ragga jungle attempt using Audio Sculpture
Before getting into MIDI, me and a mate were really into trackers (four channels on the Atari, no Octamed for us!). I’d used NoiseTracker, Digicomposer, TCB Tracker and some other obscure ones, but finally forked over actual cash for Audio Sculpture, which was excellent. Even with all this music gear in my bedroom, sometimes I just wanted to mess about with some samples so I’d break out Audio Sculpture.

This is a really simple jungle track, I’ve no idea what the vocal says, I sampled it off the TV. It’s unremarkable except for about halfway through when the beat gets reversed and the strings come in, I love that bit!

Geotropolis
A kind of lightweight trancey thing, slight overtones of Selected Ambient Works, for some reason this sounds a lot more “complete” than most of my stuff.

Spacehopper intro
The intro for a demo tape I recorded under the (rubbish) moniker, “Spacehopper”. Like my other “demo” tapes, only one copy ever existed and it never got duplicated or sent anywhere. This is a kind of sci-fi strings workout with some echoey samples thrown in. It’s pretty cheesey.

Attempt to combine acid bassline with jungle
Long before Dillinja released Acid Track, I had the idea to put 303 bass over jungle breaks. Unfortunately I had no 303 and no grasp of how to write jungle. This is shit.

Ultraspace
I fell into the orbit of a techno DJ who was into his Plus8, Stay Up Forever etc, he oversaw this unremarkable and flaccid techno effort. That gnarly synth sound is some Yamaha FM obscurity I found in a cupboard at college, I can’t remember what it was.

Accidental Orange Theme
Using the phono input overdrive trick again. This is crap until halfway through where it sounds like a half-decent psy-trance tune. Unfortunately it also sounds a lot like a wholly decent psy-trance tune, Cygnus X’s Orange Theme. Honestly, this was not intentional.

Guitar Scratch
An exercise in learning how to use the music department’s 8 track studio. My fellow students were all guitarists who wanted to be either Sepultura, Nirvana, or Hendrix. The whale-like noises in this are a bassist scratching his strings, put through loads of reverb. The synths were live, the drums programmed directly into the drum machine. I also mic’d up a room for some “ambient noise” which is why during a quiet bit you can hear a voice say the words “juicy buttocks”.

Pianoey jungle tune
Parts of this were a blatant rip of a better pianoey jungle tune written by a classically trained and massively talented friend / part time collaborator. I actually went into our local dance music record shop to get them to listen to this and give me their opinion, and they were really kind, this put me on a massive high for the day…although I cringe to think of it now.

Digital
Absolute wank, a pointless nihilistic tracker effort. I think I’d been listening to Aphex Twin’s Classics a lot but it’s really no excuse.

Digital (alternative version)
Why the hell did I make two versions of this?

Drum machine and Korg MS-10 with LFO and didjeridoo sample.
First track I made with my MS-10. Very boring.

There you go! I have more tapes so expect more installments. The styles, era, equipment and techniques vary quite a bit from tape to tape, so the next batch should be quite different…

This work by Jon Rowett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The mix was recorded using two decks and my MacBook, with a bit of normalisation and compression added afterwards using Audacity.

Tracklisting:

Pole: Winkelstreben (Peverelist mix) [Scape]
Vex’d: 3rd Choice (Loefah remix) [Planet Mu]
23Hz & Numaestro: Galleon Dub [Immerse]
Kuma: Dawn Stepped Outside (Horsepower mix) [Immerse]
Cult Of The 13th Hour: Wickedness [Soul Jazz / W/label]
Untold: Kingdom [Hessle Audio]
Cluekid: Toadstep [Bullfrog Beats]
Tubby: Steppa [Soulja]
Headhunter: Futurebound [Tempa]
Juju: She [Narco.Hz]
Zomby: Spliff Dub (Rustie remix) [Hyperdub]
Loefah: It’s Yours [Ringo Recordings]
Ramadanman: Carla [Soul Jazz / W/label]
Untold: Purify [Hessle Audio]
Benga: Track E1 from “Diary of an Afro Warrior” [Tempa / Promo]
Headhunter: Descent [Tempa]