The mixtape gets it name from the first track: 'Summer Madness' by Kool and the Gang. Get the decisions right and you might just soundtrack a night that will become one of their most treasured memories. Get these decisions wrong and the diners will become unhappy. DJing is like serving a meal at a restaurant, and every individual track is a potential dish: it might be that you, the restaurateur / DJ have the finest almond and cinnamon danish pastry ever created, but if you offer it up to someone who in the middle of eating a roast chicken dinner, then they're not going to want it right at that moment, no matter how good it is. Equally a night that looks doomed can be rescued by a good selection. Just like countless other DJs, I've watched dance floors for years and have learnt that context is everything even the finest tracks can fail if they're presented in the wrong way or at the wrong time. I've always enjoyed the compositional element of DJing. If you wanted to distill DJing down to it's very barest elements, it's this: Track selection is the single most important factor no doubt but my opinion has always been that once a DJ has achieved and is maintaining a collection of the finest music, then they can enhance the listeners experience of their music, simply by when they play a particular track and how they manage the transition from one piece of music to another. Making this much disparate music somehow gel and flow together as part of a larger whole is a particular skill, one that some DJs aren't too concerned about, instead insisting that track selection is the single and only important factor. This 'Supa-Summer-Sounds' mix covers many different genres and music from a 40 year time span and includes music released this year. Yes, no worries, I'll get straight to it. My ideal Sunday afternoon is a friend calling and saying they urgently need 2 hours of exquisitely programmed, mulit-genre music for a book launch, consisting only of artists whose names begin with either P or R. And the name of the 'Sunburst' Band - that's pretty summery right?įor me, its great to have a focus or theme when doing a mixtape, as it helps narrow down the content. And whilst there are plenty of other tunes that also have this quality (a substantial amount of Air's back catalog for example - of which more later) these two served a specific purpose within the context of the whole mix, so they got in. Through some careful or accidental manipulation of melody and harmony or clever juxtaposition of tone and texture, they somehow evoke the sun's sparkle on the sea in summer or the feel of hot black tarmac in the midday sun. To my ears they both sound essentially 'summery' - they have a quality to them of still, shimmering heat and of glowing warmth. Quite what this quality is is hard to quantify, and much easier to communicate with the music itself listen to 'Feel it all Around' b y Washed Out or 'Strollin' by the Sunburst Band for example. Aside from songs which actually mentioned summer or the sun all the music also had to possess an essential 'summeryness'. This mix was triggered by a chat on Facebook one afternoon, with me soliciting suggestions for the perfect summer mixtape.
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