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ODDIOFILE Blog
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OdDio's Blog -
Music
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Written by Andrew
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Friday, 05 September 2008 10:32 |
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Well, it's a mix. Not new, exactly, but something that has, until now, only been distributed by hand on lightscribe CDs. I put the mix together in late March, the day before leaving for a trip to California. I had a few gigs in San Diego and Los Angeles and wanted something to give to the people who came out to see me. That was one motivation for recording the mix on that particularly hectic day; the other was that it was the last moment I could record it. My roommate Evan, a Drum and Bass DJ, was all set to move to Chicago while I was on the west coast, and he was taking his turntables with him. The whole time Evan and I lived together we had three (of our total four) decks set up, with my mixer, on the kitchen counter. The third turntable had opened up new possibilities and caused my mixing style to evolve. Such a setup allows you to really get creative, to think about sets in a less linear way, and I grew less and less satisfied with just mixing one record into another. I began to use more accapellas, sound effects, and bonus beats to make the tracks more my own and more fitting to each particular mix. If a track seemed a little thin instrumentally, drums could be added. If it was repetitive and had little progression, the right accapella would complete it. Seriously, DJs: if you're never worked with three audio sources, it's worth checking out. Just know that you'll probably love it, and will soon be on the market for another turntable or CDJ. The luxury has ruined me; two now turntables leave me feeling very limited, and I really need a third to play the kinds of sets I want to play. Take this mix as an example: because of the layering and the use of accapellas, there is no way to make it without a third deck. Despite the rush I was in to commit this stack of wax into ones and zeros, I think it turned out pretty well. It moves from disco to deep organic house, then gets a bit of a cosmic disco edge to it before moving into broken beat and finally winding down in the super-depths of a couple of 5am late-night classics. So here it is: 80 minutes, three decks, 22 slabs of wax...probably the most layered mix I'll put together for at least a year or two. I hope you like it. 
OdDio - "Libelula" (click the above image to download) - 1. African Suite - "In The Pocket" - MCA
- 2. Cerrone v. Little Louie Vega - "Dance Ritual" (12" Mix) - Vega
- 3. Femi Kuti - "Traitors of Africa" (Shelter Dub) - Un-Restricted Access
- 4. Wahoo - "Make 'Em Shake It" (Accapella) - Defected
- 5. Bolla - "Olu Huru" (Part ???) - Sacred Rhythm
- 6. Lidell Townsend and M.T.F. - "The Dugout" (Club House Mix) - Mercury
- 7. Tony Touch - "I Wonder Why?" (MAW Dub Mix) - Tommy Boy
- 8. Spook - "Feel Up" - Discograph
- 9. ?????? - ?????? - ??????
- 10. ?????? - ?????? - ??????
- 11. DJ Gregory - "Don't Know Malendro" - Faya Combo
- 12. Ian Pooley - "What's Your Number" (Jazzanova Renumber) - V2
- 13. Lanu - "Disinformation" (12" Mix) - Tru Thoughts
- 14. Sygaire & Defcon - "We Did Dat Thing" - Melting Pot
- 15. Julius Papp - "Astral Wave" (Jazee Ride Mix) - Yellow
- 16. Raw Artistic Soul - "The Light" (Karizma's Deepah Remix) - NRK
- 17. Herb LF with Matt Flores - "City Rush Boogie Dub" - Farside
- 18. Ron Trent - "I Feel The Rhythm" (Inner Experience Revision) - Prescription
- 19. Osunlade feat. Divine Essence - "My Reflection" (Accapella) - Defected
- 20. Little Big Bee - "K.G.O." - Flower
- 21. DBX - "Losing Control" - Peacefrog
- 22. 51 Days - "Paper Moon" - Touché
[note: sorry about the incomplete track information. I will add what's missing when I find the records.]
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OdDio's Blog -
España
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Written by Andrew
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Tuesday, 15 July 2008 00:00 |
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It’s weird.
I live in Spain now. In Spain. Just like that.
It’s hard to explain why something so obvious this strikes me as being so implausible. I mean, I spent over a year planning for this; it should come as no surprise. I repeat the phrase in my mind, over and over, as if trying to convince myself, but the idea is still totally foreign: I live in Spain. How strange.
One day you wake up, shower and dress, and cram your toothpaste and deodorant in the top of an already-full suitcase and zip it up. You take a cab to the airport and check in for a one-way flight. You send a generic goodbye text message to everyone in your phonebook, then chuck the piece of shit in airport trashcan, trying not to look to suspicious as you do so. You spend the flight as you do any other, between a stack of magazines, an ipod, and a book of sudoku puzzles, but beneath your mood and behind your behavior everything is changing definitively and far too quickly. You can scarcely think about this, and when you do it is exciting and a bit scary, but mostly surreal. When it is time to sleep you sleep in a new bed, in a new apartment, and by then your life is a completely different life. By then Minneapolis is a memory. This all happens far too quickly—in about 30 hours time. For such a move not to seem surreal, weeks would be needed, passage on a slow-moving ocean liner.
My subconscious has yet to catch up. Though I’ve been here for a couple weeks and my personal effects arrived five days ago, I am still having vivid dreams about not getting everything done in time. In them the Fedex guy shows up and I’ve filled out all the wrong paperwork, or a new fuel surcharge gets added the day before I ship and I have to leave ten boxes behind, or I discover a whole closet full of stuff I forgot to pack as I’m leaving for the airport. They’re stress dreams—like the dreams you have after taking a new and demanding job; there’s so much work to be done that some of it must be taken care of while you rest. But there’s also a feverish, hallucinatory, panicked, David Lynch kind of edge to them. I wake up sweating, confused about where I am.
No matter how old I am or how many times I’ve done it, I always seem to forget what a pain in the ass it is to move. It comes as a surprise each and every time. There’s the obvious physical exertion of packing and lifting, the mental fatigue brought by on by having to be on top of a seemingly never-ending list of tasks, but moving also supposes a huge psychic drain that has something to do, I think, with acknowledging and coming to terms with all the shit you own. Unless you live out of a backpack or car, coming face to face with the size and shape of what you own is probably shocking, no matter how zen or minimalist your lifestyle. I’ve never packed lightly, not at all, but the logistics of this most recent move required that I at least try to. I sold or gave away at least half of what I owned (including more than ten crates of records), and sent most of the rest home to my parents’ house for storage, and still ended up with 46 boxes. The 46 boxes and the pallets they were assembled on weighed a total of 2000 pounds—a ton, literally.
  A good percentage of the boxes and an even greater percentage of the shipment weight is made of vinyl. When it came down to it, almost everything else seemed expendable or replaceable. A ton of vinyl—or very nearly that. By the standards of most people, this amounts to a veritable shitload of records, but my crate-digging collector friends think of it more modestly: a young, overworked, underfed collection—with potential, sure, but also some rather large holes that need to be addressed. But for now, I’m happy. After this recent purge, my collection is now smaller than it’s been in years, but it’s also tighter, more integral, and there’s satisfaction in that. Everything I have with me I chose to bring; each and every record is one I actively want to hear again. Though at the time it made me sad to part with so many records I liked, I now feel pretty good about having done so. Today I finished unpacking the last box. The records have been sorted into two new Ikea shelves, and except for two overflow bags they all fit. After a great deal of trial and error, I figured out a way to organize them that makes sense to me, and so for the first time in many years I can actually find what I’m looking for. As with packing, the unpacking process was another small opportunity for self-discovery in that it quantifies, in a visual way, my genre tastes. I now know, for instance, that only about 15% of my collection is disco (I would have guessed 25%-30%), that I have roughly the same amount of Brazilian 12”s and LPs as I do funk and soul LPs. Perhaps the most surprising discovery was that I have nearly as much Nicola Conte-related stuff as I do Masters at Work releases (Kaydee, Dopebrother and Vega 12” labels included).
 
This is how I've been spending the afternoon hours, when the heat’s so intense that you can’t do much but sit in front of a fan and sweat—and now I’m completely moved in. Somehow, I still feel as if I’ve yet to fully arrive. I tell myself: I’m in Spain; I live here. How strange. |
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OdDio's Blog -
España
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Written by Andrew
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Wednesday, 02 July 2008 00:00 |
Over the past ten years I’ve moved around a lot, packing up my life in one place and starting over somewhere else, usually quite far from the place I had just been. In the years after I finished high school, I moved from San Diego to Chicago, to Chile, to Scotland, to Spain, back to Chicago, back to Spain, to Ecuador, back to San Diego, to Los Angeles, and finally to Minneapolis. I stayed in Minneapolis nearly three years—the longest I’ve stayed anywhere since I first moved out of my parents’ house in 1997. While the pattern began almost accidentally—with a high school summer spent in the Chilean town of Valdivia and the decision to leave California for college—it became deliberate almost immediately thereafter. Having discovered how much I enjoyed starting over, I sought out opportunities to move to new places: study and work abroad programs, grants and fellowships, a mountaineering expedition—anything that would get me somewhere else for a few months or a year. This wanderlust had very little to do with the specific places I moved to and from. I might have gone to San Francisco rather than Chicago, or Valencia instead of Seville, or Quito instead of Guayaquil, and though these logistical changes would have likely made a major difference in the long-term trajectory of my life, at the time they wouldn’t have mattered to me in the least. As long as a place was new and unknown, it was good enough for me. I was moving for the sake of moving, starting over for the shear pleasure of it. It was that I felt bored in familiar places or constrained among the people I knew; there was something about arriving in someplace totally unknown and building a life there was so exhilarating and ultimately so natural that I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do it time and time again. Being far away from home, it seems, is what made me feel most at home. There are drawbacks to living such a transitory life, a price to pay for the excitement and freedom it affords. One result of frequent relocation is that even as your roots grow wide, they remain shallow. Your community is always changing, and as you forge new friendships it sometimes becomes more difficult to maintain old ones. Another result, perhaps less obvious, is that the different lives you start in disparate places can lead to quick shifts in habits, interests, even personality that complicate traditional notions of continuous identity. In other words, you end up trading continuity for spontaneity; your life becomes a collection of chapters (forgive the tired metaphor) that seem to have been taken from entirely different books. Looking back over the past five years I am faced with a half dozen, seemingly incompatible versions of myself. Which me is really me? All of them. None of them, entirely. The present one, perhaps, but only for the obvious reasons. Not having a good answer to that questions inevitably becomes draining, and fatigue sets itn. Eventually, saying hello isn’t worth the price of so many goodbyes, and the ideas of stability, continuity, and steady community—of deep roots—become increasingly attractive. I write this from Seville on the morning of my first full day here. I’ve moved yet again, this time it looks to be more permanent than any move I’ve ever made before. This time there is no graduation, no program that will end, no visa that will run out, no expiration date whatsoever. Here I will make my life, at the very least for several years. There’s no possibility for a new start in the visible future and, as a consequence, my decisions and actions, seem now to matter more than ever. Everything seems freighted with a special weight and importance.I’m exhausted from weeks of preparation, packing, and paperwork, and a full 24 hours of travel (including a nice 9 hour layover in Paris), jetlagged (I’m feeling like a nap already), and getting sick (the stress of the move and the alcohol of the going-away parties has done a number on my immune system)—but am also excited too for all that awaits me here: a new life, great weather, countess musical undergrounds, my girl, and who knows what else. There is plenty of exploring to do. This relocation is not without its challenges; it will require some changes in the way I live my life. In the recent past, frequent moves have encouraged or at least allowed for a relaxed, even experimental approach to behavior. Because my situation was always temporary, if I lost something important to me along the way or picked up a bad habit here or there, I thought: “why not, no big deal, it’s not permanent.” Without the almost yearly opportunities for re-invention, it is time for me to face up to a very basic fact of life: beyond the playground do-overs are few and far between; the more natural, sustainable, adult way of doing things is to remain honest to your evolving feelings and principles through continuous, subtle adaptations.Speaking of do-overs--this post is the first entry of the new ODDIOFILE blog site. The previous version of the website was sufficiently dead (a casualty of the very long writing hours I had to put in over the last school year to get my thesis done on time), and I’ve opted to re-invent (rather than resuscitate) it. I imagine this newly-designed space as not just a place for posting tracklistings, but also a platform through which to share guest mixes, writings about music, thoughts about music culture, and information about great records. In time, I hope a more visible, involved, and interesting ODDIOFILE site will reach out towards like-minded music lovers the world over, and become a forum for exchanging ideas and information about great underground music.In addition, the podcast—which came out on a regular basis for most of 2006 and 2007 but has been, of late, like the website, severely neglected—is ready for relaunch. The new ODDIOFILE Podcast, “OdDio’s Audio Odyssey,” will start in late August. This is a promise I can keep. I managed to find the time (read: procrastinate) between packing boxes to pre-record the first three episodes. My wax is currently on its way, and assuming the cargo plane doesn’t crash and assuming I can get a job and get some cash together for a new mixer, we will proceed without delay at the new, much-more-manageable pace of one episode per month. I’m still working out the details of the format, but the focus will be on the same genres as always—deep house, broken beat, nu jazz, jazzdance, bossa, samba, hip hop, funk and soul—although hopefully in a more even fashion. I am excited about and committed to this web project and vow that both the website and podcast—as with my new life here in Seville—will grow and adapt and never be taken for granted or treated as temporary. I appreciate the patience of the faithful listeners out there who have continued to support ODDIOFILE through the silence via email and myspace, and thank you for granting me one more chance at a fresh start.
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