The fight for diverse and conscious voices

I have a couple of really serious posts I'm working on, and I'm still doing the journaling project. So I've not done music in a while. I'm back in the mode of listening mostly to DJ sets. Here's a list of the regular weekly(ish) things I tend to listen to. They're like regular podcasts, each with a little bit of formatting and self-promotion mixed in. I may highlight some of them or pull tracks now and then, but you can also listen and decide for yourself:

• Groovelectric - DJ Steveboy. House, new-old funk, occasional downtempo chill or drone mixes. These tend to be more curated and less club-oriented than others.


• Maxximize On Air - Blasterjaxx. Very club/performance. Hottest tracks and remixes, rarely original stuff. More monotonal than others, which is good for workouts or pushing through things without distraction but rarely causes me to sit up and search for a specific track.


• Identity - Sander van Doorn. Another European performance DJ. Throws in his own mixes from time to time and posts a decent number of festival playlists.


• I Need R3hab - R3hab. Still club dance, but more varied tempos and styles than others. Also occasionally contributes his own mixes.


• Innerstate - Ummet Ozcan. Tends toward more trendy things, including his own contributions to whatever has grabbed his ear this week. Lots of people submit tracks for inclusion on his cast so we often hear new artists in his top tracks of the week. Downside is that dub and electro-scratch are still pretty popular, which leads to me turning off the episode about half the time.

Many of these, but particularly the "what's popular" compilations make me miss the old days when I could skip forward a track. Each of them shows artistry in how tracks are selected, mixed, and worked into each other so I can see how skipping would miss what the artist is trying to bring, but my alternatives right now are "suffer" and "listen to something else" which isn't great.

I never managed to get the second music post done before heading to Arisia (about which more in a separate entry). Here is the second post, collecting some of the better electronic dance tracks from the past year. This is all going to be house, trance, and vocal dance. Most of these are independent artists who sell through Beatport and don't have big label support. If you like their stuff please buy the tracks.

https://soundcloud.com/nervomusic/r3hab-nervo-ummet-ozcan-1
First of two from Ummet Ozcan (https://www.ummetozcan.com/) who has been working with some of the biggest names in house music. I've heard a couple mixes of this "Revolution" and I like this vocal mix best. It's not terribly sophisticated in either the music or vocals, but it's a good solid high-energy dance track.

https://soundcloud.com/ummetozcan/ummet-ozcan-superwave-original-mixout-now
Second Ozcan track for compare-and-contrast. This one lacks the smooth vocals and has a more energetic high-BPM style. I like it for its variety of styles - it's almost a sampler. I also like that Ozcan is willing to drop the volume and not try to blast everything out as loud as possible. There are plenty of loud passages, but it's not all the same thing.

https://soundcloud.com/vicetone/united-we-dance
Vicetone's "United We Dance" was apparently written for a movie soundtrack, so it's more ?compressed? tonally than a full club mix would be. That's not bad - you get a sense for how music can be built to leave spaces others can fill in. This is also prime remix material.

https://soundcloud.com/protocolrecordings/tritonal-paris-blohm-ft
Speaking of remixes you can find probably dozens of remixes of "Colors" - it was one of the bigger tracks of 2014. This version is more spare and really features the piano bits more than most mixes. I am not as fond of the non-vocal thumpa-thumpa bits but it's worth giving a listen.

https://soundcloud.com/porter-robinson/lionhearted-arty-remix
Continuing our theme of interesting piano and vocal bits, here is the "Arty Remix" of "Lionhearted" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgKDu5pp_fU). The original is much rougher and louder - this remix keeps the underlying track's energy but smooths and mellows the edges.

https://soundcloud.com/doornrecords/sander-van-doorn-firebeatz
I was intrigued by this track because guitars usually don't feature in EDM tracks. To be perfectly honest they're not all that big a deal here, either. Not in the way you'd hear guitars taking most of the load in a rock&roll track, for example. That said, there are some interesting bits where you can hear the guitars doing their thing and it's nice to see people trying different approaches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhkD47AauNQ
Here is AVB spinning Dash Berlin's "Shelter" at the Amsterdam Music Festival. This is the Photographer remix, which makes much better use of Roxanne Emery's vocals than any other mix I've heard. Unlike the Revolution track I started this set with, the vocals here are much more complex and interesting - this sort of thing is what first got me into vocal trance and I'm glad some people are still making these kinds of tracks.