sixty4k the Ambient Rockstar

Adele’s back.

I could just listen to this on repeat for days. Thankfully the radio will probably take care of that, till I’m sick of it.

It’s gross to me that people tried to associate Adele with Duffy. Yes, they can both kinda be filed under blue eyed soul (isn’t that a funny way to say white folks singing black?), but Adele fills her songs with actual soul, so much emotion in the squeaks, while Duffy sounds like a corporate version of soul… all the right notes, on time, but bereft of any actual soul, any depth, any real feeling.

monday morning video

No embed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmVDr93UJQQ

Throwback sound, adding this to my long list of oddball foreign hip hop.

One day there’ll be a hip hop round the world mix. I got japan, uk, australia sorted. sweden. I know there’s a ton of good french rap, but my ill gotten internet cache got lost ages ago. Need to refill in that loss.
Need reps for china, eastern europe, russia and friends. Know there’s lots of good shit from south america and africa, but again, I don’t own it. yet.

set up a new domain for podcasting from. Now gotta get my shit in gear.

Music from a tree?

Diego Stocco makes instruments out of things like trees, and broken bits of other instruments. And then plays them, quite amazingly. And thanks to the wonder of bandcamp, you can have them for your very own.

Can I just say right here that bandcamp is pretty much the coolest thing on the internet currently from where I stand. 80% of my recent new finds have sent me there to get free tracks or pay a few bucks for an album far better than what I’m finding at the music store.

G-d bless the interwebs.

San Jose

Headed down to San Jose for work tomorrow, should be able to wrap it up with some time to spend in Streetlight, maybe Big Al’s Record Barn as well.

Definitely missing my digging time, but family and work and life in general no longer afford me weekly trips to the record store. Nor am I as keenly tuned into what new shit is coming out.

How it Should Sound

This looks, and sounds kinda ill. Mental note, keep an eye on this dude.

AFX thru a classical filter

The Pretty

Very Little Else

more about them if you can read dutch, I think.

Work continues in the bootystudio to get things in a working state before Feb so that I can attack the RPM Challenge from a good starting point.
Wireless mics and assorted usb bits and bobs cover the turntables, my ‘listen to this’ folder is getting to multi-gig size, my feed reader is gonna crash trying to process the backlog, and I have a stack of creative ideas gathering dust. On the other hand, I got like almost 8 hours of sleep last night (in convenient 2 hour chunks), and Beatrix is getting more and more active and interactive.

We got family pics taken over the weekend, so I suspect I’ll be posting some proud papa pictures sometime soon.

A Question

Would you rather I post dj mixed style podcast jobbers or talked about music and played tunes at you? Both?

pretty.

A Video

Some Words

Sitting with my daughter asleep in my lap, I’m on repeat three of this video. Fatherhood is making all my soft underbelly show.

Oldest mixtape upped, maybe one or two more this weekend, then perhaps a new mix.

Old Mixes: Ebb and Flow

Winter 1998 : XMas gift mix

This was the first mixtape I put out, and in some way still my favorite.

Side 1:

Negativeland – Over the Hiccups

Unidentified

ClockDVA – ??

Bladerunner Soundtrack – Blade Runner Blues

Apollo440 – Mass in…

Legend Soundtrack -

Herbalizer –

Morcheeba – Trigger Hippy

Scanner – Is Someone there

Side 2:

Scanner – Is Someone there (cont)

DJ Spooky – The Terran Invasion of Alpha Centauri

Future Sound Of London – Just a Fuckin Idiot

Tape Beatles?

Unidentified

Tape Beatles again

Garbage – Milk (tricky remix)

Coltrain/Ellington – My Little Brown Book

WE – ???

digging dubstep

Today’s Hype Track

DZ looks to be starting a series of dubbed up motown classics, promises to be pretty hype if he continues at the level he’s starting (or better yet, goes upward from here). check it.

Dubstepping

People dug on the dubstep set WaNP dropped at the Evil Breaks 5 year and what I brought to We <3 Bass. I'm really liking a ton of stuff I've found out there, and still feel like I'm only just grazing the surface of the genre. It seems like there's probably a big scene in the bay, but I'm blissfully unaware of it.

I don't feel like I'm really finding a groove in playing it however, my mixes are fine, but very outro into intro. Basic. I haven't found a happy finesse point. More experimenting needs to be done, as that super simple outro/intro trance dj style makes the baby jesus cry.

Entirely Unrelated

Benjy teaches you “everything you need to know”.

I got offered a job about two weeks after I accepted that I couldn’t afford the drop in pay that went with it. The act of looking, and of getting the offer helped me not feel so damn trapped at current job. And admitting to the boss that I was not happy seems to have greased some gears towards making things better.

Trying to get the bootystudio fully operational in the fits and starts method of a new father. Pretty much everything I do is in fits and starts, a few minutes found here, a few there.

Also trying to flip a beat in the Stones Throw Forum Beat Battles at least once a month, maybe more as the studio becomes fully operational, and I don’t have to dick around to work.

A Brand New Day

The Intro

After a series of junky hand coded websites, some with actual content, some without, it’s time to get something going here that actually reflects where I’m at right now.

This here will be that reflection.  Old mixes will get reposted, but more importantly new mixes will get posted.  The occasional gig will get promoted.  My ever growing collection of dollar bin sins will get aired out, with commentary and suchlikes.  Pods may be cast.

Wait, who are you again?

My name is mike.  You may know me as sixty4k, or more exactly as: sixty4k, the ambient rockstar.  Somewhere back in the hazey daze of the 90s SF Bay Area rave scene, I fell in love with the free for all chill room styles of Boomerang Fidget, Andy W and Sig.  My initial forays into DJing house music fell flat, I just wasn’t into it, but when I started fiddling with found sounds and shuffling beats, beat poets played backwards over hip hop instrumentals, I hit a groove, I found my home in the chill room.  And I rocked it.

Hard to grasp the idea of rocking a chillroom, but it was done.  Rocked so hard that listeners couldn’t get out of their bean bags, too lost in the sound to even dry hump.  Well, at least some of them.

The Future

Playing out has slowed down as my day job went from being the place I slept off the weekends to something more like a career like, and a beautiful wife, and now a daughter, came onto the scene.

As well, the rave scene I loved has long since disappeared, there’s no longer a party I need to be at every weekend, more like 3 or 4 a year.  In it’s place clubs and post rave events that only occasionally call for chill rooms at all.

I’ve also flirted with dance floor filling music, trying my hand at house, electro-house, fidget, dubstep and assorted bass.  And while I love that too, I have no interest in the grind for gigs, or being up until 4am on a weekday.

So really, the future is here on this blog.

Other Thoughts

I have seen things you can only imagine.  Lost and found myself under the influence of strobelights and glow sticks and earth shaking soundsystems.  For just a moment, held the potential for a better tomorrow in my head and my heart. Saw the dream that a generation before me had seen and lost in the drugged stupor be found and lost again in a different drugged stupor.

And in my baby’s soft murmurs I hear the seeds of that better tomorrow still growing.