electric relaxation

I graduated to United Premier status with the first leg of my trip to Goa for Preetesh’s wedding. I’m pretty sure that’s why I was upgraded to Business class for the second leg (Zurich to Mumbai). It was fucking phenomenal. I slept like a baby and ate like a king.

I’m now in the Shanghai airport on my way home via Jet Airways. Jet’s actually pretty good, but apparently they’re not a United Premier partner, or something. Anyway, having to step back down to peasant class has been painful to say the least.

Triumphantly breaking free of the shackles of Oedipal guilt, I beat the living crap out of my mother in a Scrabble game. I demolished her respectable 317 point tally with a monstrous 441 point explosion, including a 67 point, 7 letter play of “wittier” – the only downside of which is that unattainably high epigrammatic expectations were set for the eloquence of my subsequent self-aggrandizement, and as you can see I’m falling short.

I gotta create a new category for this stuff.

First – a random idea that someone might not have actually done already: I wonder if there’s any good software out there for managing metadata about playlists and mixes that work, e.g. BPMs etc. Serato has some of this stuff built-in, but it doesn’t seem terribly intuitive.

Next, today’s mixes:

M.I.A. – Paper Planes (acappella) over Gang Starr – Mass Appeal
Jay-Z, Snoop and Pharell – Drop It Like It’s Hot (remix) over Gang Starr – Mass Appeal

Both of them work really well. Too bad I’m probably the only person I’ll ever meet who actually thinks Mass Appeal is suitable for a party .

Slum Village – Raise It Up
A Tribe Called Quest – Mind Power
Mariah Carey – The Roof (Shook Ones Remix)
Mobb Deep – Shook Ones (pt. 2)
Method Man & Redman – Blackout

I’m starting to put together continuous sets, since I can now beat match within about 30 seconds.

Ok, this is totally party material:

Lil’ Jon and Youngbloodz – Damn!
Gheto Boys – Damn it feels good to be a gangsta (just the first verse, for the novelty factor)
Fabolous – Keepin’ it Gangsta
Lloyd Banks – I’m So Fly
G-Unit – Stunt 101 (Ratatat Remix)

I must admit I’ve developed a new respect for Girl Talk. I started trying to work with the massive collection of acappellas and instrumentals that I’ve amassed over the past several days of trolling my sources for that sort of thing, and I discovered that it’s shockingly not quite as easy as I had hoped to produce something aurally pleasing when trying to mix a random rap acappella over an arbitrary rock or pop instrumental.

On the way to work yesterday, it occurred to me that the drum line for Heartless is almost identical to Clipse’s Grindin’. I think that’s actually what jumped out when I first heard Heartless, and that’s in fact what I was drawn to in the Kanye song.

I easily found a copy of the Grindin’ instrumental, but I couldn’t find the Kanye acapella. I’m glad I tried though, because I stumbled on a bunch of acapella and instrumental compilations that should be a lot of fun to mess around with…

Anyway, even without the acapella it works reasonably well, since the Neptunes beat is so dominating and Heartless is fairly subdued. I’ll post a recording of the outcome when I’m not too lazy to hook up the loopback audio cable.

Next time: Ramesh does his best Girl Talk imitation as he searches for something to mix over Space Age Love Song (the ’80s New Wave hit by A Flock of Seagulls).

Ok, I haven’t actually tried mixing two Jungle songs together yet, but I did find a nice transition mix:

Herbaliser – Who’s the realest? (-2%) to DJ Zinc – Six Million Ways to Die (+8%)

Update:

Done. That shit was easy, son.

DJ Zinc – Six Million Ways to Die (+8%) to Freaky Flow – Let Me Kow to Xzibit – Paparazzi (Congo Natty mix) (-4%)

Holy shit, jungle is ridiculously fun to play around with in this setup.

I’m both too embarassed and too lazy to put up any mixtape material just yet. But I wanted to start making a list of songs that I played with, since at least a couple ended up working as nice mixes. All very simple beginner stuff. I will say that beat juggling and scratching instrumentals with the Serato feels a lot more like playing Guitar Hero than playing the violin. That is to say, it fucking rules.

Tracks:

Whodini – Five Minutes of Funk
Kruder & Dorfmeister – 1st of Tha Month (remix)
Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony – 1st of Tha Month
John Kennedy – Tell Me How You Feel
DJ Krush – Jugoya
DJ Krush – Kemuri
Outkast – New Jersey Drive
DITC – Day One
UGK – Tell me How You Feel
Youngbloodz and Lil’ Jon – Damn
DJ Krush – Just Be Good To Me (Code 4109)
Black Moon – Who Got Da Props
Eightball – Throw Your Hands Up
Nas – Halftime
OC – It’s My World
Nas – Made You Look
Noreaga – Mathematics
Xzibit – Mean Mugging (Hero remix)
Nas – Hero
LL Cool J – Headsprung
Keri Hilson and Justin Timberlake – Headsprung (remix)

Update:
DJ Krush – Kemuri to A Tribe Called Quest – We Can Get Down to Freddie Foxxx – Part of My Life
A Tribe Called Quest – Phony Rappers to OGC & Heltah Skeltah – Leflaur Leflah Eshkoshka

Butter.

Over the last few months I’ve been ripping tracks off YouTube using Audio Hijack Pro. The sound quality isn’t the greatest but it’s pretty easy to do, and the selection is just ridiculous. It’s funny how much better YouTube’s related video section works compared to like the Genius Sidebar (which I’ve never used, but fuck it, how good could it be?).

Case in point. From the comments in the Mass Appeal link from my last post, I found at that the 30 second clip at the end was MC Ren’s “Final Frontier” (that flips the “Bridge is Over” beat), and a minute later I’ve got the track. Ill shit.

Plus there are dudes like this guy who just crank out remixes and put them up on their little YouTube channel. I guess I too could end up just like this eighteen year old from Canada. Yes I realize that this is exactly what teenage kids use MySpace for, and I’m sure you’re all making fun of me. Screw you guys.

On an unrelated note, Scratch Live can’t play back .m4p (iTunes protected audio) files, so I think that’s the final nail in that particular coffin.

I had a five and a half hours marathon session with the decks yesterday afternoon. Brian had warned about the nasty time dilation side-effects of owning turntables, and yet I wasn’t prepared. I only noticed when my legs started to cramp up because I’d been standing up right for so long.

Anyway, somewhere in there I spent like an hour just chopping up the Mass Appeal instrumental. It was a life-changing experience. Like one of those times when you feel like you just checked something off the list of things to do before you die. So I think the moral of the story is that I need to listen to Brian more often.

I couldn’t find the USB cable for the Pentax camera I brought to Burning Man, so my photos have been sitting around for months. Anyway, my new X200 has a media card reader slot, so I finally had a way to get the pictures off of the camera, and I put them up here.

If there’s one thing worth checking out, it’s the video of the Giant Metal Hand picking up a car.