Unfortunately (with the odd exception) theyre mostly insipid chillout mixes, conforming to the Cafe del Mar Ibiza sunset post-rave definition of ambient - all soft sounds and rounded corners, texturally deficient, with no dissonance, darkness or dirt to unsettle the comedowns of their intended audience.It seems like a long time since the first edition, but its only been 10 months or so since the series began.As you may have noticed, episode 10 featured a CD length special from the Heatwave crew, and as the extra time allows for more thorough explorations we decided to repeat this format every 10 casts, with this mix being the second 74 minute set.
Colleen The Golden Morning Breaks Rar Files Download The EpisodesYou can subscribe to the cast here if you havent already, or simply download the episodes you want (thats all of them by the way) here. This fortnights contribution is a revisit to the themes of that first episode and comes courtesy of The Fear - AKA, myself, Slug, and production and DJng wunderkind DC with whom we sporadically operate the label of the same name. Since Slug and I recorded the first Shwantology set at the beginning of last year, weve been pleasantly surprised by the amount of positive attention its received. For a project that began as a fairly throwaway and personal endeavor (see Shwantology 1 notes ), this series has grown organically in both concept and technique and has stimulated expansions into areas of music that we had barely touched upon in the past, despite our (so called) pedigree in the area of ambient electronic music. ![]() Now, both Slug and myself have written at length about the method behind these sets here, here and here, so Im not going to bore you with repetitive talk of aleatoric approaches and sound soups - but I do have a few thoughts about the creative development of this process and how it fits in to the whole ambient milieu if youll just bear with me. The exciting thing about this process for us is the unpredictability and novelty of it all. When we start one of these sets we really dont know what the end result will sound like, and theres an unquantifiable element that seems to make the sum more than the parts - an intangible quality which is all the more interesting to us as our traditional approach to DJng depends so much on close analysis and micro auditing of technique. Without any implication of equivalence with real musicianship, Id liken it more to freeform jamming than the standard linear approach to mixing - Ive described it as pure DJng before, and that description certainly seems apt from our point of view. Theres a real feeling that were doing something that weve never done before, and its all the more exhilarating as we cant pin down exactly what it is that makes it work. Consider this: There are 3 basic ways to perform an ambient set. You can treat it like any other genre and beatmatch the tunes - most ambient music has a tempo if not an audible rhythm. Despite the obviousness of this approach its rare youll find DJs who attempt it. You can simply fade each track into the next with no real technical method - more selecting then mixing and by far the most common approach. ![]() This requires a very good ear and is difficult to do well when playing solo on just 2 decks. Now all of these approaches have their merits, and can sound good when done properly, but each presents their own problems and restrictions. Exclusively beatmatching cuts out the possibility of playing a whole range of non-electronic and non-sequenced tunes, fading doesnt offer any opportunities for harmony between tracks, and layering means you cant play tunes with audible rhythm and only sounds good when done with a huge amount of care and consideration. Colleen The Golden Morning Breaks Rar Files Trial Ambient ForWith Shwantology weve tried to combine all of these methods and add some of our own - deep layering of 3 or more tunes is achieved by classifying a range of material in advance - drones, soundtrack, minimalist and atmospherics for background washes, avant, concrete, field recordings and industrial ambient for organic texture, classical, world, spoken word, and heavily melodic for linearly sequenced events and the top layer. Rhythmic pieces are beatmatched where necessary and the fades between layers are blurred through the use of timestretching, pitching and FX. A major advantage to this utilitarian approach is that it drastically increases the scope and range of music you can fit into a set. So much so that even after 3 studio mixes, 2 live performances and nearly 10 hours of recordings In total (with almost no repetition of material), It seems like the surface has barely been scratched. As weve flirted with multi-genre DJng for many years its immensely gratifying to be able to draw common threads through almost a century of modern music. Subotnik rubs shoulders with Takemitsu, Carpenter plays a duet with Phillip Glass, Aphex Twin has a drink with Penderecki, Throbbing Gristle chats up Joe Meek in a dark alley. Do a search for ambient mixes and youll find about a million and a half links - of course not all go to DJ mixes, but its surprising to see just how many sets are out there.
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