Freedom frequency in the Netherlands mix

Looking out the window of a flight at the Netherlands

I started this mix following the one in Malta, It’s been kicking around on my phone for a while but didn’t sound quite right. With my flight from Amsterdam I got time to redo it and decided on the fly to give it more tunes, which just worked.

I use freedom, as its my first mix now being free from the BBC and although nervous, gives me a lot of freedom which I’m starting to fully understand. I feel like I’m on a different frequency.

This was done during the flight and slightly edited at the end because the air pressure in my ears made it more difficult to hear the mix fully. I won’t lie this mix kicks and is full of highs and deep tunes, hope you enjoy it too.

Enjoy on Peertube or my own mixgarden

  1. Gouryella (Alan Fitzpatrick Tribute to ’99 extended remix) – Gouryella & Ferry Corsten
  2. Aluminium (Extended Mix) – Robert Nickson
  3. Fade To Grey (Moreno J Remix) – Visage
  4. Inferno – Carl Cox
  5. Seven Cities (V-One’s Living Cities Remix) – Solarstone
  6. Killer Instinct (Original Mix) – Sneijder & Bryan Kearney
  7. Erase – Brooks Aleksander
  8. Whites Of Her Eyes (Original Mix) – Simon Patterson
  9. Inferno (Space 92 remix) – Carl Cox
  10. Emotions Of Colour (Extended Mix) – Cosmic Gate
  11. Tell Nobody – Basil O’Glue
  12. Floyd (extended mix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
  13. The Girl With Her Head In The Clouds (Ellie’s Song) (Extended Mix) – Factor B
  14. Adagio In G Minor (Extended Mix) – DIM3NSION
  15. Outlaw (extended mix) – Fatum

R&D advisory and labs winter party dance to this mix (2024 edition)

People party in a underground bar

I recorded this mix live on the Pacemaker device’s build in recorder/editor while mixing at our work end of year do. Its a little ropey in places but its all mixed live and with new tunes that I wouldn’t normally mix with. This is similar to the Amstels thriller chiller mix in some of the tunes.

As it goes out on Peertube, I need to mark it as explicit because it contains one swear word in the first tune – Animals (Christmas remix).

Some will enjoy this short mix, we only had 30 minutes to play and went over that even. But I certainly could redo it into something better, now I know the tunes more.

Listen on Peertube or my mixgarden

Isolation but not Inactive in Amsterdam mix

Amsterdam Nemo museum colourised with clouds
Nemo Amsterdam

Following on from my time in Berlin, came a number of conferences in Amsterdam. Between a number of excellent conferences, time in a theme park and lots of time on the Amsterdam metro system I caught Covid for the second time. Although not so bad as the first time, I isolated in a hotel room to avoid infecting others. I was very aware there was no need to self-isolate, I couldn’t bring myself to infect a number of people. Hence this mix a late entry into the locked down mixing out era of my mixes.

In between working, sleeping and watching a lot of media, I was able to craft and record this mix then redo it on the aggressive hour plane back to Manchester.

Recorded live and it leans on the Berlin Donnerwetter mix with another swift 136ish BPM plus a real interesting bag of old and new tunes. Originally longer but the hour flight set a better time of under a hour.

Enjoy here or on Peertube or in full quality on my mixgarden

  1. Dark Side Of The Moon (RYDEX Extended remix) – Susana
  2. Opium (Stan Kolev Remix) – Jerome Isma ae Alastor
  3. Back to Earth (rave mix) – Yves Deruyter
  4. Energy Crash (Extended Mix) – Maarten De Jong
  5. Stealth bomber (Chris Schweizer remix) – Bryan Kearney
  6. Erase – Brooks Alexsander
  7. Silence (Jerome Isma-Ae Extended Remix) – D-Nox, Baya, LENN V
  8. The Wave 2.0 (Extended Mix) – Cosmic Gate
  9. Labyrinth (Paul Keyen Remix) – Lee Cassells
  10. The Legacy 2.0 (Alphazone remix) – Funabashi pres. Saltwater
  11. Headliner – Jorn Van Deynhoven
  12. Home (Cosmic gate remix) – Paul van Dyk feat. Johnny McDaid

Amstel’s thriller chiller mix

Amsterdam canals at night
Amsterdam canals at night

I think of this mix as the evil little child born in Amsterdam during the freaky time of Halloween.

Another travel with Pacemaker mix, this time flying to Amsterdam for a conference over Halloween. It coincides with me djing at a Halloween party just a few days earlier. I started with MK’s thriller and decided it was a great starter for the mix on the plane following.

Originally the mix was a bit longer but I did it again on the plane back and recorded it live using an external recorder. Its likely I could have done it with the Pacemaker device’s own built in recorder but as I was using a later firmware, decided to play it safe.

I have to say, I do love this mix. Its punchy, energy and full of highs. Its even got some songs to sing along to, which my partner would enjoy.

Listen on peertube or on my mixgarden

Here is the full playlist

  1. Thriller (Steve Aoki Midnight Hour Remix) – Michael Jackson
  2. Killer instinct – Sneijder & Bryan Kearney
  3. Dolores – Indecent Noise
  4. Decade (Extended mix) – Chris Element
  5. Music is more than Mathematics – Protoculture
  6. Moon Phases (Extended mix) – Raz Nitzan
  7. Louder – José Amnesia feat. Jennifer Rene
  8. Tears (Protoculture Remix) – Markus Schulz pres. Dakota
  9. Like A Prayer (Extended Visual mix) – Gareth Emery, LSR⧸CITY & Annabel

The night life above and under Martim Moniz mix

The night life above and under Martim Moniz

Its a return to Lisbon’s Martim Moniz after the heights of Lisbon mix, always reminds me of how the square is being used by many different people. I learned the old city wall runs right through it and its interesting to sit and watch the different people come, go and gather.

Bit of a moody mix during a lovely holiday in Lisbon but its winter so wasn’t as warm. Leaning on the tech trance side, this mix has a large number of new tunes and some bold choices with the crossfader, which I kept in. Its a mix which gets you bopping that head up and down with some excellent tunes.

Enjoy on my mixgarden or on Peertube!

WebMix: Webmonetization + Dj mixes for the next internet

Mark and Ian at Mozfest 2018

While recovering from Covid, I got a little time to finally sort out the WebMix idea which I also wrote up for Mozfest earlier in the year.

With the incredible and generous help of Mark Boas of Hyperaudio, I was able to use Hyperaudio lite to make clearly mark up a list of tunes in a DJ mix. Its what I’ve been looking to do for ages to move away from Mixcloud,

My finally setup was something I was playing with for ages but mainly via a self installed wordpress on my raspberrypi. I found problems when installing hyperaudio and in the end decided to go with a static website. I choose Publii as it had a linux client and I could just write the HTML easily (so many use markdown and other things, which would have made working with hyperaudio more difficult than it needs to be)

With the site creation out the way, I needed somewhere to host it.

Originally I was going to use Yunohost but I couldn’t find a simple webserver to just host the static files, instead I found a proxy server, which points at my NAS, which is running a very simple webserver. Of course the NAS has plenty of space, its also where the mixes sit, has a excellent redundancy and backup system.

The result of the experiment all sits here – https://cubicgarden.info/mixes

Digital Italics WebMix

The core part of WebMix (as I’m calling it) sits in hyperaudio’s transcript and webmontization support.

Hacking hyperaudio’s transcripts

Originally I always saw Hyperaudio for its ability to tie a knot between the written word and the audio (& video). It wasn’t till I saw a demo of the WebMon functionality is when I understood it could be the thing I need for DJ mixes.

With correctly written HTML, I can tell Hyperaudio what it should do, and with Mark’s help we had a prototype up and running.

Here is an example of the code from the quiver in the underground mix.

<li class="active" data-wm="$ilp.uphold.com/B69UrXkYeQPr">
<span data-m="0">Activator, I know you can (That kid chris mix) - Whatever girl</span></li>
<li data-wm="$ilp.uphold.com/3h66mKZLrgQZ"><span data-m="127000">Air traffic (Erik De Koning remix) - Three drives</span></li>
<li data-wm="$ilp.uphold.com/B69UrXkYeQPr"><span data-m="445000">Chinook - Markus Schulz pres. Dakota</span></li>
<li data-wm="$ilp.uphold.com/3h66mKZLrgQZ"><span data-m="632000">Opium (Quivver remix) - Jerome Isma-Ae &amp; Alastor</span></li>

Each tune has a time configured using the attribute data-m, this is  in milliseconds. As I have all the data in the old CUE files I created a long time ago. Mark helped me out with a nice script which saved me manually copying and pasting. (I also considered writing a XSLT to do the conversion). In between sleeping and relaxing with Covid, I got a number of mixes up, changed the theming and finally got to grips with the static file uploading process, and the results you can see on the site.

Current webmix site

Payment and royalties

You will also notice each tune/list item also has data=”wm” attribute with a $ilp (payment pointers). Currently they are pointing to myself and Mark Boas. Obviously I would change them to the payment pointers of the artists/producers/djs involved but I don’t know any which have them so far. Which leads nicely on to the next challenge for WebMix.

I did/do have a plan to do a mix with dance music from artists which have payment providers but that is still in the pipeline. Along side this, myself and Mark thought about some kind of database/airtable/spreadsheet/etc with payment pointers crossed linked to their discogs profile.

WebMix active on my site

Maybe this is something which could be done in the next grant for the web call for participation?

Back to the current experiment, here is Opium (Quivver Remix) – Jerome Isma-Ae Alastor. You could imagine one payment provider decided between all involved which could be used to pay for each time its played on the site. (I am very aware this is very simplex and the royalties of music is a total nightmare!) but the point of the payment pointer is to hide the complexity behind one simple payment pointer, how its divided afterwards is up to each of the parties involved. I’m imagining a management agent, organisation or even dare I say it DAO; responsible for the payment pointer. There’s already things like revshare, which means you can have multiple people/entities behind the payment pointer and theres interest in this space. Long tail economics certainly could benefit here.

Anyway its a long complex area which I’m best staying out of…?

The main point is its all working and expect more updates soon… I know Mark has other ideas, while I still need to get older mixes up. I also would like to tie the whole thing to something federated or at very least setup a activity-pub feed.

Maybe I should be more ill more often?

The ravers ravenous retro revenge mix

The ravers ravenous retro revenge mix

With my thumb getting better, I’m doing more mixes again on the good old pacemaker device. This one was part of a much longer mix but the start was a bit crappy so cut it off and included the last 80%.

The ravers ravenous retro revenge came about after watching the Matrix Resurrections. There was lots of parts (seen it a few times now and still score it 8/10) but I found this line fascinating.

Morpheus: Nothing comforts anxiety like little nostalgia.

I have a lot to say about nostalgia but I decided to do a mix where it feels like the mix is being taken over by the rave. Does it work? I’ll leave it for you to decide. Maybe I should have called it R4 instead?

Listen to the Ravers ravenous retro revenge mix, on mixcloud and my own cloud.

Enjoy!

  1. Electric Sunrise – Mental Overdrive
  2. Air conditionné – Julian Jeweil
  3. Silence (Jerome Isma-Ae Extended remix) – D-Nox, Baya, Lenn V
  4. I want you (Forever) (Full on mix) – Carl Cox
  5. Opium (Quivver remix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
  6. Open up – Leftfield
  7. Sleeper in metropolis (Club mix) – Anne Clark
  8. Rewind (Makkas remix) – Emma Hewitt
  9. Charly (Alley cat mix) – The Prodigy
  10. Feel the beat (JS16 dark mix) – Darude
  11. The storm – Interitus Dei
  12. Back to earth (Rave mix) – Yves Deruyter
  13. Unchainied – Diego Morrill
  14. The sky – Summerland

My own mixcloud, finally?

Mixing live in Skopje

I have been for a long time looking for an alternative to mixcloud. I have tried many things including some self hosted solutions like navidrome, subsonic, madsonic, airsonic and ampache. They have all been good except they are best for private sharing. I really wanted to use funkwhale but it was so geared up for single tracks it just didn’t make sense to run a node with my own mixes on it. There is so much I could suggest for  making these software/services better for DJs rather than musicians. A DJ version of funkwhale could be pretty cool, especially seeing the amount of DJs using Youtube and paying for Mixcloud premium to mix live during the pandemic. Heck you could even use web-monetization too (just done).

So with all this and finally thought I have the bandwidth and the storage, I just need a site and some simple software which can share the music files. So I decided to actually setup WordPress with it looking at the local file system (which I can easily have tons of storage). I was going to explore the static file generators again but decided to get something going.

Over the last few days between helping someone out with Linux and cryptocurrencies, I setup WordPress on my RaspberryPi 4 using Yunohost again. As its pretty much static, I think it makes sense.

So here is my own mixcloud site, which I’m still populating, but the latest mixes from my locked down, mixing out album are up complete with artwork. Expect to see more changes over time including a better audio player, more mixes and more everything.

Its not exactly a mixcloud replacement to be fair and my plans to use the .cue files and make better use of playlists, is put on hold for now. I’m sure there is audio plugin which will make use of them. Love to have UPnP and Subsonic apis access from wordpress, but I dream?

Do enjoy and let me know what you think could be improved.

Little update

Following my point about making it work for DJs and mixes. One of my biggest bug bears is playlists. I have been through many of the wordpress plugins for audio playback and I can’t find one which allows me to specify points in a long mix, when different music is played. Its simply a tracklist but all of the ones I have seen and tried are focused on single tracks. Meaning slicing the mix into pieces instead of marking out areas. None of them seemed to support CUE files or things like Ogg vorbis chapters. If there is one I should be looking at, do send it my way because it seems like such a simple thing to do, but I guess theres not enough interest to make it?

Another update

I have retired the old Mix site and replaced it with a new better one.
Learn more about the changes and WebMix.

Digital Italics WebMix

Stellar’s freedom mix

Looking into the universe
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Not really had the time to do many mixes in the last few months. I did this one while wondering around the Manchester when the Covid19 lock down was lifted. Its not very long (less than a hour) but its a interesting quick blast through a few newer tunes.

I haven’t yet setup my funkwhale or airsonic instance, so its mixcloud for now. Although I am making cue files along side my nfo files.

Enjoy!

  1. Stella – Jam & Spoon
  2. Natural (extended mix) – KhoMha
  3. The Dark night – KhoMha
  4. Floyd (extended mix)  – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
  5. Opium (quivver remix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
  6. Open up – Leftfield
  7. Follow me (Roger shah Extended deeper translation remix) – Jam Spoon
  8. Running up the hill (Jerome Isma-Ae bootleg) – Placebo
  9. Freedom (extended mix) – ARTY vs Muvy
  10. Tears (protoculture remix) – Dakota

Update

Stellar’s Freedom made it to 78th in the global tech trance chart. Not bad as lots of DJs are now using Mixcloud in lockdown.

78th in the global techtrance chart

Update Monday 10th Aug

Another update to say Stellar’s Freedom is now at 47th in the global tech trance chart. I think its one of the highest rated mixes I have done. Going to need to do another one soon.

stellars freedom 47th in the global techtrance charts

Cruising at 35000 feet mix

I was able to rescue one of my mixes from a flight from Helsinki. Its a little rough and ready in parts but theres some excellent tunes and mixes. This one needed a lot of work because the crossfader was in the wrong place for critical parts of the mix.

At just under 2 hours it certainly a long musical ride into trance

Enjoy!

  1. Empty Cities, Dead Ghosts – Fictious Riceboy
  2. Big Sky (Agnelli & Nelson Remix) – John O’Callaghan Feat. Audrey
  3. Gallagher
  4. Bulgarian (Signum remix) – Travel
  5. Hello (Jerome Isma-Ae remix) – Above & Beyond
  6. J’ai Envie De Toi (protoculture remix) – Armin Van Buuren presents Gaia
  7. The Oblivious – Muhamed Sherief & WAAJII
  8. Journey (extended mix) – Iversoon vs. Alex Daf vs. Glus
  9. October winds (deep care november mix) – Six Senses pres Electric Nova
  10. Labyrinth (Paul Keyen remix) – Lee Cassells
  11. Please Save Me (Push Remix) – Sunscreem Vs Push
  12. Love stimulation (Pvd love club mix) – Humante
  13. Resound (Original Mix) – Thomas Bronzwaer
  14. Shadow World (Original Mix) – Thomas Bronzwaer
  15. Refused – Mark Sixma & Jerome isma-Ae
  16. Rapid eye (R.E mix) – Circa Forever
  17. Orange sky – Signalrunners presents Syndica
  18. The Pride in Your Eyes (Martin Roth Remix) – Tillmann Uhrmacher