Frank’s mixes

January mix now uploaded: 06-01-11mix.mp3. File Size is 99.2mb and was encoded at 192kpbs, Runtime is 1:12:12.

Frank McGahon: 06-01-11mix

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Latest mix now uploaded: 05-12-01mix.mp3. File Size is 107.5mb and was encoded at 192kpbs, Runtime is 1:18:17.

Frank McGahon: 05-12-01mix

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Here’s my second upload: 05-10-06mix.mp3. File Size is 103.9mb and was encoded at 192kpbs, Runtime is 1:15:36.

Frank McGahon: 05-10-06mix

This mix was recorded around the same time as the one below but has a slightly different feel, starting with a slightly slower tempo and with a bit more of an organic feel, and a little Balearic influence. It starts off with Began Cekic’s cover version of a Paradise Garage fave, The Police’s Voices Inside My Head. The original is a great tune and was given an extended edit by Dj Harvey back in the mid-1990s for use at his late night/early morning Ruling sessions at the Ministry of Sound. But, I like the feel of this version, with added funk and effects. Next track is Kenny Dope’s re-rub of Manzel’s breakbeat classic, Space Funk. The mix in and out of this this is a little bit rough (but bear with me, it gets better!). Next track sticks with the Space-Jazz-Funk theme, Carl Craig’s rework of Donald Byrd’s Think Twice. It’s not really a straight cover, but is instead based on a breakdown section in the midde. Great driving chord changes. Next track also has some chord-change action and has a nice Jazz-Funk/Boogie flavour, Ski Oakenful’s remix of Incognito. Starts off broken and ends up 4-4 which leads to Kenny Dope’s stripped down dub of Roy Ayers’ Holiday. Normally, I’m not overly keen on contemporary mixes of old tunes, especially so when they mainly consist of quantizing the original record and applying a standard issue 4-4 Kickdrum-based house beat. This is a little different, for starters the old track is not a familiar classic, it was originally written by Ayers to back the campaign for the national holiday now known as Martin Luther King day. This was Roy Ayers’ equivalent to Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday. But it never got released. Ayers has a huge back catalogue of material, to all of which he retained full rights, that for some reason or other he chose not to release at the time. Some of this is being released under the Virgin Ubiquity series by BBE records. The original of Holiday is on Virgin Ubiquity 2 and it is a laidback groove, in the vein of Everybody Loves the Sunshine or Ramp’s Daylight, around 80 bpm in tempo. For this mix, Kenny Dope takes a section of the female vocal, slowed it down and layers a spare groove, little more than bass and percussive 4-4 pattern at twice the tempo of the vocal. This slow-ish sounding vocal stretched over gives a kind of ethereal feel. Which suggested the classic broken King Britt I:Cube remix from 2000. This leads into the balearic-tinged section. The next three tracks all feature some female spoken vocals (Italian, Portuguese and Spanish respectively) and, to me, evoke the original Ibiza vibe, concluding with the classic Sueno Latino. Next is a change with some straight up, Jazz-Soul style 4-4 from Reel People. Leading into MAW’s Razzamatazz-referencing cut for the original female singer on Quincy Jones’ 1980 track, Patti Austin. Breaking up the beat again with some 2005-era Afro-Beat featuring Fela’s original drummer Tony Allen and wrapping up with the organic feel of Alice Russell’s appropriately named All Over.

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Ok, here’s my first upload: 05-10-01mix.mp3. File size is 108mb and was encoded at 192kpbs, Runtime is 1:19:06. Tracklisting below (I plan to add links to Gemm, MusicStack and Discogs for each track when I get a chance)

Frank McGahon: 05-10-01mix

I did this mix back in October just before a trip to London. I had just bought a bunch of tunes from Juno and Vinyl Underground (I’m going to add a shops section to the sidebar soon) and I wanted to put a few together. Some of the tunes I had been looking for for a while - the first two in particular, originally heard on Benji B’s 1xtra show. It starts off with broken beat, Aerodescent has a nice lighter jazzier feel, especially with the little bit of cuica. Another way has a stripped down quality, drum, snappy rimshots and winding bass with an explicit reference to Faze-O’s classic 1977 cut Riding High. This mix is the original demo, the more cluttered remix loses its minimal quality. The next two tracks felt right - more crisp broken drum programming, winding keyboards, the second with more of a latin flavour. Which leads into Osunlade’s deep house, latin percussion cut. The next track, Crescendo has more of a jazz flavour but appears to be based on live drumming, at least at the beginning, couple this with a slightly larger hole in the centre of the vinyl, and it was a bugger to mix in. I think I managed to avoid the horses-galloping-down-the-stairs associated with a dodgy beat-mix but it took one or two attempts. More jazz 4-4 but a bit more punchy with Jazz Room and then a trio by Louie Vega. His mix of Truby’s Allegre is another I had been looking for for a while, it’s basically a little slicker than Truby’s with some extra keyboard action. I’m normally a big fan of Bah Samba but for this particular tune I prefer Louie’s instrumental mix over the vocal mix with its simple repeated latin-ish riff. Next is a stripped down mix of V get’s Jazzy. It was the full version of this track - a cover of the KC Flightt original (or more accurately the Blaze Dope Dub of same) - I first heard on Benji B or Gilles Peterson. But, when I got the record, this minimal version - drums, bass and percussive voice riff - stuck out. The pattern reminded me of an old DJ Pierre track from 95 so I pulled it out and I think it worked ok. Flying High has a tougher feel which seemed like a good opportunity to bring the breaks back with Zinc’s mix of Kelis’ Milkshake, then Seiji’s Ragga-Broken fusion, rounding off with another Co-Op fave: Afrospace.

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Ok, my regular blog is here and it deals mainly with my various musings about Politics, Philosophy and, er, Ph-ootball. I originally intended to do a lot more about music at this blog but for some reason I found it a bit pointless talking about music without any actual music to listen to. Plus, I have got back into the habit of making regular dj mixes and I wanted an opportunity to share them. My first thought was to see if there was some sort of place for sharing mixes, along the lines of photo-sharing places like Flickr or video sharing places like Youtube. Alas, if such a place exists, it eludes Google. So, the next step was to look at podcast hosting, which I reckoned would be broadly similar to what I intended to do. Unfortunately, such services are aimed at talk-show-host wannabes and are more useful for smaller files - my mix mp3s are around the 100mb mark. So, I decided to take the plunge and rent out some webspace. This also gives me the opportunity to try out wordpress and perhaps I might take the opportunity to move my typepad blog over to a proper Internetcommentator.com domain.

I’m going to tinker with this for the next few days but I hope to have my first mix uploaded over the weekend.