10/8/09

Mix Week: Thursday

It's time for Thursday's mix. This one's probably the less conventional of all, or at least danceable of them. It comes from one of the big names in the edit game: French Pilooski. He's probably most known for this classic northern soul rework, but I might actually dig this one Elvis song more.

For those who don't know, edits are rearrangements (like making an intro longer for mixing purposes etc.) of mostly old songs. They have become THE big trend in the last few years that's up in certain parts of dj community. The markets seem to flooding with edits of old obscure or not-so-obscure records and almost every dj/producer has to give his opinion on them in the interviews.

The whole edit thing links pretty nicely with a certain aspect of dj'ing I wanna highlight with this mix: collecting interesting rare and not-so-well-known songs. Pilooski has once said the biggest part of doing edits is finding the right material. Here's a one interview with him.



PILOOSKI @ BEATS IN SPACE
Download
Tracklist

This mix was actually published in Tim Sweeney's excellent radio show "Beats in Space", which is kinda fitting: Pilooski's mix conjures images of space and listening alone to late night radio. I remember when I was a little kid, there used to be a radio show called "Space Junk" here in Finland which mostly consisted of weird ambient noises and space sounds. It came very late Wednesday evenings perhaps, and even though Pilooski is musically far from ambient, this mix has the same mysterious, floating-in-space feeling to it. It's less about musically going somewhere or playing good tracks and more about discovering new mysterious things within the same spacious, nightly atmosphere. There's a few pauses and tempo jumps in there, so it's not really building steam towards the end - of course it's not supposed to.

The mix begins with the only Pilooski record that hasn't yet been sold out at Juno. From there on it takes a step deeper with Risque's Starlight. When you listen, you may notice the running space/darkness/night vs. light-theme on the songs he picked. Of course it reflects not just on the lyrics, but on the music as well.

I think there's a certain quality about Pilooski that resonates with our little Disko WTF?!-thing: we try to make some disco out of non-disco records. Or try to make a succesful club night with unknown songs. There is a real raw edge to Pilooski's music which comes from the fact that only a few of these records are conventional dance records - they're mostly obscure findings that have weird qualities and raw sounds that are reworked to fit together. It's massively interesting to just leave your trainspotting conscious mind and dive into the weird discovery trip to see & hear what he has found for us. This record digging and music ecletisism is definitely one of the aspects of dj'ing I respect. I mean, we all can use hypem and download the 30 most blog-hyped songs as mp3s, but where's the excitement in that?

Tomorrow's mix is probably going to be a party-ish stuff. I haven't yet decided on that, tune in anyways.

-P-Funk

No comments:

Post a Comment