Canadian techno producer Mathew Jonson is being interviewed by the Resident Advisor mag. What is interesting about him is his past as being a DnB dj. When asked about that, he answers:

How come you didn’t end up being a drum & bass DJ?

That’s how I started. When I first started DJing from 1995 to 1999 I was a drum & bass DJ, and I kind of lost interest because the music changed a lot. It kind of started getting a little bit cold. It is kind of the direction where minimal techno is turning right now, just kind of getting boring and lifeless. So I played that for a while, then I got into what I thought was minimal techno, the real minimal techno, the deep dubby techno that was coming out in the late ’90s.

Reminds me a lot of the current discussions about DnB becoming very narrow-minded and linear.

Still, he can’t deny the power:

What do you like to dance to, if you were just out having fun?

I like dancing to drum & bass. [laughs] I like dancing to techno sometimes, deep house is fun to dance to, Theo Parrish, Moodymann, all that kind of stuff…but generally if you stick me in a minimal party, or a techno party, I definitely won’t be automatically dancing. If you stick me in a hip-hop club or a drum & bass club, it’s pretty hard for me not to dance.

Same here. I really like techno/house/electro music, but when it comes to dancing, they just too slow for me. I always end up having knots in my feet. Maybe I better slowed down my perception of time, so 140bpm would help me dance like it was 170.

Actually, I’m impressed. Yes, being a digital boy, I’ve been toying around with Traktor since v1 came out, but never made the step to actually working with it live. Hawtin did just that, and in these NI tutorials he shows the vast new possibilities that come from this environment. I completely agree with him, when he says “Allowing the computer to just do one thing is boring, when you don’t use the time this saves you to do something else.”

In short, this means accepting the fact that beatmatching can be done by a software. So delegate it to machine and use the new freedom to be creative.

When I think of it, there could be new ways of bringing together audio material that wouldn’t have matched before, especially to have non-DnB-4×4-tracks sped up and cut their kicks, just to overlaid with appropriate DnB flavoured bits. Wow, I think I’ll have to check that out myself. Thanks, Ritchie.

Interesting map mashup showing locations and some background bits of a huge number of classic album covers.

via Spreeblick

From Music Thing

1. Keep cable runs short particularly low impedance I.e. guitars and mics. It WILL affect the sound. Having said that I don’t believe expensive cables offer significant improvement.
2. Even the best instruments and recording equipment will probably sound like crap in the wrong hands. The reverse can also be true.
3. Don’t suck the life out of a recording by overuse of limiting and compression.
4. Go for performance not perfection.
5. Log EVERYTHING on a recording so that anyone can pick up where you left off. Particularly tracks that should not be used – better still, get rid of them.
6. Always consolidate tracks (in other words all tracks should have the same start and finish times) so that they can be loaded onto a different platform. Give every track a meaningful name.
7. Even if your ideas are making all the difference, make the other person think they were theirs.
8. The two most important things on a great record are: 1. The Song. 2. The Song.
9. Never trust anyone in the music business with a vowel in their name.
10. The check is NOT in the mail.

The one thing to capitalize here is #4. Seems pretty much underrated these days.