A mix for Secret Thirteen

I made a mix for Secreet Thirteen, serious and influential online musical journal. Artists such as Biosphere, Machinefabriek, ASC, Richard Chartier, Steinbrüchel, Sun Araw, Tropic Of Cancer, Scanner, Aidan Baker and many others provided mixes before, so it's quite an honour.

http://secretthirteen.org/secret-thirteen-mix-074-gosh-snobo/


If you care to know some background behind the mix, read on. Otherwise just head on to the mix, sit back and enjoy...

  • Initially I had an idea for a conceptual, thematic mix, but it didn't work. So I stuck to approach I love the best, which I have been exploiting in my radio mixes - just accumulating the tracks I have a strong personal attachment to, ideally - the ones that literally beg to be played, discregarding any genre, time of recording or mood limits. In other words, being as cross-genre as my listening habits are.
  • I used to play a lot of microsound, minimal ambient, drone, abstract stuff, deeply blending tracks into seamless meditative soundscapes. I still listen to a lot of music like this at home. However, when it comes to mixing, I felt that I've lost interest of playing around with that stuff because it just started to feel kinda all homogeneous to me... and instead focused on tracks that are concrete, emotionally charged, often with vocals and/or bright melodies but at the same time with a certain skewness, weirdness, sonically challenging to a degree, and often distinctly non-electronic.
     
  • I followed my frequent whim of including some pop music that is really important for me, and to make them fit the mix better I did my own special edits. I've also edited some other tracks to make them shorter, more concise, for the same purpose. One of the edits is made from a live performance never released officially, and available only in a form of a video.
  • In the end when the mix was done I realized that all vocals in the tracks are female, and many instrumentals are played by female artists. So it turned out that unconsciously I still got pretty close to my initial failed concept - doing a "girl power" mix, with songs and tracks only by the women I love ;)
  • Also, when I finally listened to a mix in full, I thought that despite its strong melodical and acoustic content, it produces a feeling of emotional tension, strain, that is only released in the coda, which sounds almost out of place, or like a postscriptum, like the sound of an afterlife... Maybe it's a reflection of an uneasy period in my life I'm going through... or maybe it's just me reflecting myself onto the mix, and to a casual listener the impression would be completely different.
  • After four years of constant selecting, mixing, playing out, hosting radio shows I feel that this chapter in my life is closed and I'm going inwards, concentrating on things that are more important for me these days. I'm not planning to make mixtapes in foreseeable future, officially my last mix was drawing the best of 2012, and the Secret 13 mix is a kind of postscriptum.

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