Tune Sketchbook on Youtube

2016-04-24 by T Pot

Good to catch-up last night Kev !

Hi all,

Here is the link for my Youtube channel where I dump random tunes. Alot of them are just unfinished beats & ideas that I can’t be bothered finishing :) (although some are just hip-hop type beats and don’t need much else).

There a a few playlists for various samplers that I attempted to do everything in the box with. I’ve broken the S3000XL, sold the MPC 1000 but still have an MPC 2000XL.

Lately I’ve been using old random vintage video clips for them for a laugh. Anyways, have a listen if you like.

Cheers :)

Sometimes you've just gotta hit record

2014-10-03 by Big J

Long long time no post.

Had this little mix knocking around my head for weeks after being introduced to the rock-solid “Snakes in the Grass” by Quantic. Seemed like it needed a little more Chuck-D.

If you didn’t already know, it’s pretty hard to find a bad Quantic tune!

Much pitch shifting and practice noodling later, here is where I decided to stop…

Download MP3 (5:35min / 10MB)

A Little Closer to the Sea

2014-10-01 by Seani Love

Maria by Dizraeli

Once upon a time, a few years ago now, a beautiful mermaid woman emerged out of the sea at Brighton Beach and introduced this song to me. Being the romantic type I quickly fell in love with her. Sadly, I think she only surfaced a short while ~ just long enough to get a few folk to fall in love with her, introduce a few folk to some amazing choonz, show people the depths of beauty that was possible by being alive and then she vanished for ever, much like Maria did in the song you’re about to hear.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me say that this is emotive UK Hip Hop at its most beautiful and most evocative. Maria is a spoken word story of love and loss in the modern age by UK’s man-o-wonder Dizraeli and his team the Small Gods

The song leaves me wondering, how can we be true to our artistic selves when we need to make a living? How can we get our daily bread when we’re feeling daily dread over the grind of day to day life? Can we be satisfied and celebrate our loves if we’re always completely knackered? I don’t know if Dizraeli and the Small Gods answer these questions but they’re good questions to ask as we wander aimlessly from point A to point B in our otherwise meaningless(???) lives. I love Maria. I love her with all my heart. I hope you do too.

You’ll need to check the band web site for Gigs, workshops and tour dates, and other miscellany that I won’t go into here.

As for the mermaid, I often wonder what it would have been like to have followed her and as I do, I get a taste of the sea by way of tear on my cheek. If she has Internet access beneath the waves and gets to read this I hope she knows I remember her fondly.

Download MP3 (6:53min / 6MB)

Golden Hearing

2014-02-16 by Hal Berstram

The Space Lady – Radar Love

Right kids, here is a cover of one of the great mid-70s hard rock singles, Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” (original shown below):

But this is a cover by The Space Lady, a San Fransisco busker who used a Casio keyboard, analog delay and vocals to cook up a sound something like a 3-way collision between Nico, Hawkwind and early OMD. At double speed. Easier to listen to than describe… but great stuff whichever way you cut it. A compilation of The Space Lady’s “greatest hits” has just been issued, and this is from the extra CD you get from the double CD version sold in indie record shops (or as an MP3 download on the vinyl).

From now on, whenever I post stuff that is still available to buy new, I will be adding a buy link to one of a rotating selection of indie record shops (rather than the tax-evading infestation that is amazon, iTunes etc.) Just to give you an idea of where you might want to buy from. Until the next time…

Download MP3 (4:46min / 11MB)

It's lonely outer space... on such a tiiiiimeless flight

2014-01-09 by Hal Berstram

As Lonely As Dave Bowman – POD Four

A trip into space ambience now, with possibly one of the best band titles ever – “As Lonely As Dave Bowman” (Dave Bowman being the guy who goes through the stargate and into the then-revolutionary ‘slit-scan’ animation sequence in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

According to Discogs this appears to be not actually a band at all, but one guy, Sam Rosenthal, who has also released as Projekt Electronic Amerika and under his own name (including many cassette-only releases in the 1980s).

ALADB has only one release to date – POD, a US-only CD in 2007. All five tracks are a fairly similar menu of glacial ambience – very much recalling the end of the stargate sequence where Bowman’s ‘pod’ is drifting through a vista of false-colour imaged mountains, lakes etc. Absolutely brilliant if you like this sort of thing – which I do.

This may be a tough CD to get hold of – the mp3s were available to purchase on emusic at one time but are no longer there as far as I can see. There do seem to be some available 2nd hand on Discogs so your luck might be in if you want to purchase what is a somewhat neglected ambient gem IMHO.

Download MP3 (7:10min / 9MB)

Some Bells for the New Year

2014-01-01 by Hal Berstram

Brian Eno – Reverse Harmonics Bells
Happy New Year to anyone still reading this blog after the infrequency of posts during 2013… I’m going to try to do a couple of posts a week this year, mainly of fairly random stuff that I pick up hear and there. Plus some home-produced tunes.

I thought some bells to ring in the New Year would be nice, so this is a track from Brian Eno’s album Studies for the Clock of the Long Now. The Clock of the Long Now is an ongoing project to build a clock that will run accurately over a 10,000 year period with “minimal maintenance and interruption”, currently under construction in an underground facility in Texas. The clock only ticks once a year.

The idea behind the Clock of the Long Now was to encourage thinking on a (much) longer timescale than the very compressed day-to-day (or often, indeed, instant-to-instant) thinking that the modern information society encourages. Originally conceived in 1986, in the age of Twitter the idea of the Long Now seems even more prescient.

Very occasionally the clock chimes, a sequence of bells which only repeats every 10,000 years. Eno was commissioned to do some synthesised studies of bells to help come up with ideas of what the chimes might sound like. And being Eno, he came up with some pretty weird studies. Of which “Reverse Harmonics Bells” is probably the weirdest.

It’s a good way to ring in the New Year, and if this blog is still going in 12014 CE I’m sure it’ll still be a good way to ring in the New Year then too.

Download MP3 (2:46min / 4MB)

In honour of the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who...

2013-11-25 by Hal Berstram

The Human League – Tom Baker

Not a lot of activity around here recently… so here comes the crazy gang to close out the last 6 weeks of the year with some truly bizarre material.

If you live in the UK and have not been trapped under a rock (or trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy) you will know that the weekend saw the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who, complete with cameo appearance by many people’s (and my) favourite Doctor, Tom Baker.

Scouring my hard drive for Baker-related goodies I found this Human League B-side from 1980. The A-side was “Boys and Girls” which was the first single recorded by the Mark 2 version of the band (after Ware and Marsh had left to form Heaven 17 and they had got in the two female vocalists to back Phil Oakey), and their last single for a very long time not to chart. The single was released around the time of Baker announcing that he was leaving Doctor Who, and there was an inscription on the record simply saying “Thanks, Tom.”

I’d like to echo that sentiment 33 years later.

Download MP3 (4:02min / 6MB)

Frolic: Club 18-30 Mix

2013-06-26 by The Double K

So I had a great time in Lewes at the weekend and danced until the sun was up (somewhere behind the clouds and drizzle…). Here you can hear the records I played – download is enabled on Soundcloud if you want a copy to keep!

It was only afterwards that I realised the tracks are all between 18 and 30 years old, perhaps they should all go on holiday together or something…

And for the trainspotters out there here is the tracklist in all it’s glory:
LFO – Intro
Adonis – No Way Back
Hashim – Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)
Cool House – Rock This Party Right (Fast Eddie’s Raw Mix)
Mental Cube – Q
Together – Hardcore Uproar
KLF – What Time Is Love?
Age Of Love – The Age Of Love (Watch Out For Stella Club Mix)
Ramjac feat. Mixmaster Morris – Massif (Live at The Brain)
Dee Patten – Who’s The Badman?
N-Joi – Phoenix
CJ Bolland – Horsepower (Original Mix)
Dave Angel – 1st Symphony
Metalheads – Terminator
DJ Rap & Outlaw Candy – Intelligent Woman (On A Positive Vibe)
XLR8 – Dubplate (Original)
Roni Size – Music Box
Andy C & Shimon – Quest
Omni Trio – Thru The Vibe (2 On 1 Mix)
DJ Red Alert & Mike Slammer – In Effect

Dilate reunion is ON!!!

2013-06-20 by The Mighty Alboy

It’s confirmed- we have:
Big J flying in from NYC!
the Double K bringing the old school flavour!
the Mighty Alboy spinning all kinds of platters!

Get on down- bit of country air will do you good :)

(Will add a suitable tune in a bit…)

(Sort of) Dilate Reunion!!!

2013-05-25 by The Mighty Alboy

Hey up, tattered remains of the faithful dilated choonz blogosphere!

A summer party coming up down south in the sleepy sussex town of Lewes- two rooms in a local warehouse, all night, good tunes and smiley people :)

Midsummer merriment and sheep thrills…
FROLIC!

And a bit of a reunion: P McDiddy’s gonna play some techno, the Double K might bring a bag of tunes, and Big J reckons he’s gonna come over from NYC.

Come and check it out- it’s more or less my 40th, so I could use the support ;)

About this little number- it’s one of a whole LP’s worth of blinding reworks of Roots Manuva tunes- out a while ago on Ninja Tunes and linked below- a take on son of the soil off the Run Come Save Me album- proper stuff.

Download MP3 (3:30min / 8MB)