your greatest dj mix...ever

i don't prep at all for gigs, just try to make a well put together bag. i prep like crazy when i do my podcast. but i always felt like the gold standard was no prepping at all. theo parrish said "if you really know how to dj you can make any record you own work with any other record you own". and that's where i'm trying to get to. just vibing, grabbing shit i like on instinct, making choices based not on bpm and key but on feel and memory and maybe cover art connections and track titles ... just using the force. or as theo parrish alternately put it "don't think it feel it"

i was serious when i said my favorite mix is always my newest one ... because i'm still at that point in mixing vinyl where i'm not 100% sure i'm going to make every mix cleanly. i'm still pulling off shit i didn't know how to do before, still learning things every time i grab a record. and this new one is no exception ... but this one is even more special to me.

see last night i completely lost my shit at some dear friends on the internet over some dumb social justice dispute. working too hard and taking things too personally. and so when i woke up this morning i was still feeling bad, so i decided to try to get all my feelings out in a mix. so i just started grabbing random shit and putting it on. no planning, no second take. totally spontaneous. this is the first time i've ever been brave enough to upload an unfucked-with first draft to ILM. and it's not perfect. about an hour in my friend lamarr drove over and surprised me with some bbq because i had jump-started his car for him earlier, and i had to put on two long-ass records in a row while i said hi to lamarr. and i tried mixing "man with the red face" which i never do, because man laurent is just totally fucking about live on that record and it drifts like a motherfucker. and i tried mixing jungle, which i don't even know how to do yet. but i want to be braver in the future. so this mix is my favorite right now, because it is, in a very small sense, one of the braver and more vulnerable gestures i've made.

DJs post your mixes for download

listening!

<3 tlg!

got yr mix on now, tlg. last year someone told me i take things too personally, and i decided she was right and i'd try to cut it out. it has done amazing wonders for my mental health.

it's good to mix whatever u feel like. bpm and key are just more data that you can use to guide mixes when u feel like using them.

one of the braver and more vulnerable gestures i've made.

this is a lovely thing to write and to read.

idk it feels kinda pretentious ... but thanks! learning to mix has been a 24 year process for me. and i've had to work hard to see my failures and struggles as a humbling process as opposed to a humiliating one. because i am just not a very well coordinated or musically adept person and western society has backwards ideas about learning. but it's made a hige difference in my life and ever present struggle with mental health in terms of cultivating a growth mindset. and i guess a new part of that is being honest about where i'm at and appreciating it and not being such a perfectionist

see i even default to fixed mindset language!

i should say i am not as physically coordinated and musically adept yet ... as i hope to be in the future

It's not pretentious at all, it's refreshing. Reads good, feels good.

We're all feeling very deeply rn. Fuck it.

I used to prep a lot more but these days it pretty much involves loading a whole bunch of songs I like into a Serato crate, maybe having a vague idea of how to start but ultimately seeing where the muse takes me. It's a lot more fun that way. If I were mixing on vinyl, I'd probably have to prepare a lot more, but on the rare occasions I do play a vinyl set, it's also fairly haphazard as I can't really beatmatch vinyl very well, so it becomes more about segueing disparate tracks together by mood rather than tempo/style

i love these posts. i love reading the context. loading up your mix for my run, today, tlg :)

my friend who is a well known west coast record distributor
and legendary deep cult balearic dj once told me over tequila that the concept of set preparation was preposterous because you never knew who was coming to the party or what was going to happen at the party, and that you had to mix the vibes, not the records. for the same reasons he said he thought that solo dj practice was an affront to the art, worse than futile, and that mixing without an audience was to dishonor one's tools

good thing i have a dog!!

he also told me fuck the concept of messing up and that i would get there. if he hadn't said that i probably would have given up by now. he flatly said i could figure it out given enough time and practice, because anybody could, if they just allowed themselves to ::be in the flow:: instead
of worrying about messing up. that becane like my magic feather. this was during a phase in which my friends would only give me sad smiles when i asked them if i was making any progress

maybe it was the tequila that made it sound convincing

later on i saw him on a dance floor in a tank top and shorts. as we watched a mutual friend badly trainwreck two unedited disco records he raised his skinny arms and yelled W00000 HUMANITY

these are some all-time dj stories tlg.

he's an all time bro!!

one of the main reasons I started livestreaming my sets was because solo dj practice during lockdown felt like an affront. that said, I've always made mixtapes that are just for me, so I kind of enjoy doing high-concept things like that. they usually start out as Spotify playlists though

oh yeah i mean fuck that, how can you play to an audience if you can't play to yourself, right?

you have to learn to also attune to the inner vibes

um i was going to say something about how i liked to think of some of my favorite mixes (kirk degiorgio's check one, or mark broom's excursions mastermix) as being made in a reflective personal mixtape mode, but then i remember how that kinda turned into a cheap marketing gimmick (latenighttales, another late night, back to mine, etc etc) and now i'm not so sure ... i guess it seemed like a good idea at the time though?

i don't think i've made my greatest mix ever. i'm still very much an amateur/figuring things out, and the mixes themselves demonstrate how much i have to learn. (it's somewhat liberating to read you say that mixing has been a 24 year process for you, TLG!)

having said that, i had lots of fun putting this mix together, and it weaved together a lot of my musical preoccupations (house, italo, r&b), so it feels very "me" even though there's still some bits that my perfectionist self finds a bit clunky: https://www.mixcloud.com/tempohouse/the-summer-that-almost-was/ (i worked on this mix concurrently with the one i posted most recently in the 'DJs post your mixes' thread, but that one's a good bit slower/darker)

re: preparation - my home mixes are usually prepared pretty thoroughly in advance, particularly if there's a theme or mood i'm going for. at the DJ gig i had from december to march of this year (which was at a bar with no dancefloor to speak of so i was really just playing to people seated with drinks/food) i used my laptop, no CDs or vinyl. as a result i kind of needed to do a little advance preparation because sifting through endless numbers of files on a hard drive to pick the next track to play can feel overwhelming in the moment (one of the real advantages of DJing with physical media, for sure: you can't haul your entire collection with you to gigs). serato's crate feature is helpful in that regard, in that i would just move a small number of tracks in there and restricted myself to playing just those songs over the course of the night.