Guest Mix – Tr One / Dean Feeney

Wow, we made it to the end!? This is our final guest mix. This is my last post. Dunno if that means the very last post altogether or not. Hopefully the stealth-like GMOS will deliver one more of his gems. Either way, Dean Feeney (of Tr One) was the first person to do a guest mix for ISM way back in 2007 so we thought it fitting that, instead of going out with some big name, we’d just get Dean in to bookend the series of mixes. I hope you enjoyed the mixes we delivered and that the sometimes lack of marquee names didn’t put you off checking out a lot of great – and in many cases, under-rated – DJs we thought we’d give some airtime to. Most of the mixes are still online too, you can trawl through the archives here

To those who enjoyed the 7 odd years of rants, rambling, reviews and whatever else, thanks for paying attention. No heavy-handed eulogising in this here post. The blog has run it’s course, it’s that simple. Still plenty of great music being put out and still a lot of it not getting the notice it deserves but our time here is done.

Over to Dean for a few words from him plus a 2 and a half hour mix made on some ancient yoke of a mixer that doesn’t have faders or volume knobs or an on switch or something…link & T/L below then…

I can’t help but feel honoured, and humbled, to have mixes of mine book-ending the ISM mix series. I remember when Tom, the “infinite ball-busting machine” Cox, told me of his plans to start the blog. It was during that transition period where message boards and forums were beginning to lose traction to certain social media platforms, and the site was genuinely offering something fresh; placing focus on things – new and old – that deserved more attention than traditional forums afforded them, all the while doing so with a kind of critical (polemical?) attitude which was lacking in dance music coverage then and is largely still so now.

After the first few posts I remember thinking how cool it would be to have a mix of mine hosted on such a site, but also being sure that, knowing Tom’s connections across the scene, there must have been a size-able queue of far more important people ahead of me and that I’d have to wait my turn, as it were. Nevertheless I sent a mix to Tom, who replied that it would be the first hosted mix, to my surprise. I guess this kind of encapsulates the attitude of ISM; on the one hand there was a sharpness and critical “we don’t give a fuck what the received view is” stance, yet on the other was a genuine desire to give some coverage to ‘up and coming’ cats.

About the mix. I recently acquired a Pyramid dj mixer which, being rather old, doesn’t offer independent EQ controls over each channel. This forces one to completely change their style of mixing, as you no longer have the ability to surgically remove or increase frequencies in the mix. In fact, if I could offer one piece of advice to younger deejays (provided they are not of the “record bag on a usb stick” variety), it would be that I cannot overstate the importance of EQing; it is, in my opinion, equally as important as keeping tempo together, and especially so when mixing across genres. It forces you to think about frequencies and try to let the records do the work.

Musically its a reflection of where I’m at at the minute, and features a lot of music which has been big for me both at gigs at home in Cork, and abroad, over the past year or so. A good friend recently remarked: “Smell of PPU off Dean and Smell of Dean off PPU”, and I can say that there’s certainly a strong whiff of both off the mix.

So, yeah, enough of that sentimental stuff; thanks to Tom for starting the shit up, and to all the extended family for getting involved and building a great community, and also to Kenny for keeping it going this long and indulging me in all this nostalgia business.

D.