your greatest dj mix...ever

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.