During a recent holiday to Lisbon, I of course took my Pacemaker Device to create a brand new mix. This time, I went very trancey. Maybe it was the incredible sunshine, the fun of exploring Lisbon or just being in Europe again?
Whatever it was this mix is a much more pacey 135bpm and frankly kicks those tired legs with some force. I’d say this is a excellent mix and full of hands in the air moments. Its also full of new tracks alongside some old classics.
Blood Angels (Chris Liebing mix) – John Starlight
Catch (Martin Roth remix) – Blank & Jones
Humming the lights – Armin Van Buuren & Gaia
Venture (Nifra Extended remix) – Super8 & Tab
Music is more than mathematics (Extended mix) – Protoculture
Communication (Tomas Heredia remix) – Armin van Buuren
However one thing, I didn’t enable record on the Pacemaker device. It was kind of gutting because it was a good set and 90mins got extended to 2hrs, even with the mixer power supply getting overloaded half way through.
Because of the lack of recording, I remembered most of the tracks I played including the starting tune (Stella) and the last one (Anahera), I did a remix of the night also on the Pacemaker device.
Its good mix with some pace and sums up that amazing night after midnight in the laser & smoke filled null sector.
The lovely picture of EMF Camp 2022 from the Null Sector complete with lazers!
I have always wanted to go to Burning man but don’t think I could ever do it due to the extreme heat. I remember hearing about a similar type event in the Netherlands (what the hack) ages ago then soon afterwards Electromagnetic Field in the UK.
EMFCamp is hacker conference over 3 days in glorious sunshine complete with power and wifi to your own tent. In theory it sounds amazing right? Well it is but for a city boy like me, its less appealing. However this year I put in a free 2hour workshop around Adaptive Podcasting and it was accepted. I had planned to stay in a hotel and go back and forth with my scooter (although I didn’t really fancy those country lanes in the dark.
However my wonderful partner suggested going together and somewhat glamping in her huge tent. On top of this we had a bunch of friends coming from Manchester, so we created a mini village together. This with fridges, BBQs, power and amazing wifi made my festival/camping experience well worth it. Can’t imagine doing it any other way now.
Glamping it up with my beautiful partner
I’ll be honest we packed too much and the second tent was useful for our bags, duplicate items and things we didn’t need. If it wasn’t for my partner and friends it likely would have been a completely different experience.
Because of this I had a great time. Everywhere I went I bumped into old friends from all over – going way back to my time in London and the many conferences I went to during the BBC Backstage days. It was a total blast and I’m sorry to anyone I missed.
So much talking and socialising, I didn’t get much time to join the talks and workshops. However I did attend a few including one about trackers (music mod trackers), although with my Ubuntu Dell XPS slightly broken at the moment (it doesn’t know any of the onboard devices including the keyboard unless plugged in) it was going to be a big hassle installing an Amiga emulator on my Chromebook just to run Protracker. Instead I spent time trying to find a Android app, then blowing away my Debian setup on the Chromebook and starting again (for some reason I couldn’t sudo at all). Once I got that working, I ran the incredible Fasttracker2 and Milkytracker.
We also got to see Interstellar on the big screen again, although I really wished I brought my sock hat and gloves! But the Q&A with the SFX artist was great, even if the question I wanted to ask might have spoiled the film for others (of course I didn’t ask it). I think the assumption was that everyone had seen it but the moderator asked and lots of hands were raised saying they had not seen it before, including my partner.
I do have to say my biggest highlight was djing live in the null sector. I followed a DJ on a laptop playing hard house till midnight so the BPM was high but I started with the classic Stella and the shock to the dancefloor was self-evident. So I threw together some tech trance and kept the BPM about 135-ish. Unfortunately I forgot to record the pacemaker set as I was messing around with the mixer and trying to make the transition smooth.
Djing live with the Pacemaker device at EMF Camp 2022
The slot was the last one of the night (0000-0130) and it was about 0115 when I asked how long I got left. He replied well legally we need to stop at 0200. So I played for 2 hours-ish… I say-ish because there was 4 mins when the electricity to the mixer was over loaded and people were trying to fix it. Also I had planned 90mins and was absolutely bursting for the toilet. Unlike a club where the toilets are only a few minutes away and most DJs would stick on a longer track (in my case 11mins of Acid Trax might have worked in retrospect) I knew the toilets were outside in the camp site somewhere. So at 0156 from the end, I faded down Ferry Corsten’s Anahera (only the very end). Although the crowd shouted one more – one more. Packed up quickly and make a quick exit.
Loved every moment of it and lots of people wondering what on earth the pacemaker was… Its 15 years old and still going strong!
EMF Camp was great generally, even for a city boy like me. There were some interesting situations but as a whole it was great with good people, good facilities and a wonderful partner to explore something new with too. As EMF is once every 2 years, its very likely I may go back.
Massive thanks to everyone and the massive amount of volunteers which make the whole festival work. I’ll be back but not too soon…
Found on a wall in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, modified by me
My first new mix for 2022 and it comes at a time as Covid19 variant Omnicron has come, peaked and is likely going to move us things from Pandemic to Endemic? Who knows…? Lets hope!
Regardless of this all, I was thinking about the incredible people who helped us all through the pandemic and kind of been forgotten, while also flicking through the new book dictionary of obscure sorrows. I came across the incidental contact high, which is described as “a innocuous touch by someone just doing their job, that you find more meaningful that you’d like to admit.”
Anyway, its really good mix with lots of new tunes, a bit of pace (134bpm-ish) and a good feeling throughout. I’m loving Protoculture’s Music is more than mathematics and the unique remix of Shnorkel.
Its been a long time since i put out a Pacemaker mix. Main reasons being in August I damaged my thumb playing Volleyball. When using the Pacemaker device, I use the thumb to grip the device which was painful. I tried using my left hand but its kinda made for a right handed person (due to the positioning of buttons etc). As that took months to heal (its still not 100%) I also came down with a cold which turned into the flu. Luckily it was pre-omicron covid19 variant and I was testing all the way through the month long (as some people have called it) the mother of all colds.
With all this, I was able to pump out a mix while lying in bed one night. My friend Jasmine suggested it should be called “the sick mix.” So taking that notion, I present a more ambient slowed down mix from my usual mixes.
I got away for the first time during the pandemic. It was an adventure taken on my motorcycle. I of course took the pacemaker device out for the first time in a long time, so I did a mix while in hotel rooms. I did start a mix with key parts of the journey but it was long and didn’t really work together. Instead I took the Ireland part and skipped a few tunes to make this frankly great mix. Its quite different starting with some classic Orbital and ending at Home. Along the path, there’s lots of new tunes which I haven’t used before. What I like about this mix is the gel of the tunes and mixing. I also quite like the vocals in the mix which add something special to the whole thing.
I had the absolute joy to see Laurent Garnier at the Manchester International festival recently (July 2021). During his video there was lots of references to different things in his career including Manchester and also Berlin. There was a distinct moment when I turned to my sister and whispered, I have been to many clubs in Berlin during the first 15 years of the fall of the Berlin wall, but Tresor scared me and I never went because of the fear. I had heard too many stories of this hard techno/gabba club and the crazy things which could happen in the darkness of the disused bank vaults. Do I regret not going? A bit, but it was genuinely a little scary especially with me not speaking German. Maybe this is why Victoria resonated with me. Its certainly a stronger almost techno mix with no let up in pace and heavy beats. Look out for the Acid Trax! Its a classic killer! Imagine dancing in a vault in the dark to the raw sounds of the TB 303!
After a week or so in isolation although negative throughout, I turned to the Pacemaker device for a new mix. Something different from my usual progressive trance style. There’s some tunes I’ve been playing out recently mixed with some classic trance, all at a slightly uplifted 133-134 bpm. Listen out for the Armin van buuren mashup of Eat Sleep Rave repeat drumming through Grotesque.
Nice of Manchester City stadium to put on a light display for my latest mix
A mix with pace and some great old and new tunes. Its short and sweet but packs a punch. Recorded as the UK opens up after its third lockdown. The cases have dropped and the vaccination is going strong. You can get a real sense of the joy in peoples faces and living in the city is once again a great place to be, no matter what Anne Clark says.
Photo credit by @dizzyd718 – Drew Graham on unsplash.com
I have been loving a bunch of tech/progressive trance and decided its time for a nice mix using some of the tunes. I know there is some disagreement about the term, which I guess is closer to the techno category. Especially the tunes by Carlo Ruetz.
Either way its a good mix breaking into some classic trance by the end. The title of the mix is parts of the playlist, and the start is a long lost tune found after listening to one of the very first live mixes I did in Manchester. Roots is a killer start to a mix and sets the vibe perfectly. Reminds me how much I like Tomcraft actually.
Hosted again on Mixcloud but unlike the last one, hopefully it won’t fall foul of the mixcloud rules over using the same artist too many times. (note to say I have got a new self-hosted platform but anonymous web access isn’t ideal)
As I thought, without the Mixcloud restrictions mentioned above, this mix has made it to the 95th place in the Tech trance chart.
Very tempted to see what happens if I rename the playlist for Pattersons pandemic run.
Here is the first mix of the new year and its a Simon Patterson special. If you liked the previous Patterson’s panic attack. Its likely not going to play in certain regions as its all the same artist and mixcloud thinks I’m uploading a whole album.
Its a very heavy trance mix which whips along at a speedy 138 bpm and never lets up for 50 solid minutes.
Try going for a run with this mix playing, avoid those people and wear a mask.
For a long while I have been threatening to leave Mixcloud in favour of hosting my own mixes. I looked around and thought funkwhale looks great as its a federated network for music. With some help from JonT, I started to scrape the metadata I stupidly forgot to keep for myself.
Seems Funkwhale might not be the best solution for the mixes, plus the developer is looking for new maintainers recently. Its really setup for single tracks not mixes. I could upload mixes but my plan to use cue files, won’t work. The only place to put playlists is in the comments. I also need to do more digging as I can’t change the year of the mixes. More importantly, the public sharing is a bit broken for me. You should be able to listen to the radio but its not working for me
As I get my head around it all but you can subscribe via RSS and if you’re using Mastodon or other fediverse applications, you can subscribe to this account: @digitalitalicmixes@mixes.cubicgarden.info.
Enjoy, I’m one step closer to self hosting my mixes.
Its been one heck of a summer, from the covid19 pandemic, national lockdowns to the protests for #blacklivesmatter.
Every once in a while I have been putting out a few mixes under the new album/category of locked down and mixing out. The mixes have been good but I felt they each had something missing, so this is the best bits of previous mixes put together into something extra special.
Its the mix I am listening to when I get out with the Diabolo or go for a long walk.
I won’t lie, I was up till 2am getting the pacemaker editor to work with my Chomebook. But honestly it wasn’t so bad, most of the time was unzipping and moving things around in ChromeOS.
It all kicked into gear when I saw you could install Wine5 on Linux on ChromeOS. I gave it a try on my chromebook, as I could never quite get it working correctly on my Dell XPS13 (likely the something to do with the Pacemaker app being 32bit or something?). However it worked on ChromeOS and my only issue is the Pacemaker app makes everything super tiny even when changing the DPI settings in Wine. Luckily I have very sharp eyes and can actually see it ok without changing the native resolution of the chomebook.
Its a bit of testament to my knowledge of Linux, one thing lead to another thing, including copying the settings from my other wine running machine, changing config files, mounting the SD card full of mp3s in Linux and pick up my Pacemaker maker device in wine.
For reference I have my music collection on a external microSD and the chromebook has one USB A port, meaning I can plug my Pacemaker in without a USB C to A converter. Wine 5 is installed under the ChromeOS – Linux beta. I launch the Pacemaker editor (windows app) from the command line using
Although I have made a pacemaker.sh for it now. Of course this doesn’t show in ChromeOS’s own launcher but thats not too much of a problem. Its not like I will need it every day.
Now its all working, it means when we can finally go away more easily than right now (written during the Covid19 pandemic). I can record mixes and put them out before going home to transfer them. Which was always a bit of a pain to tell the truth.
I had the absolute joy to see 
