Guest “Mix” – Chaircrusher

I am still not sure how I feel about Ableton sets in general. I have heard a few good ones, and many bad ones. This one is a little more like a standard deejay set in that the songs aren’t edited/looped into nothingness so it works well for me. Less is more. You can even hear some mistakes in it, which adds to the humanity of the set. The mp3-jay is our man Chaircrusher who hooked us up with the Stewart Walker live set a few months back and the man behind our mix hosting. I’ll let him describe the scenario of the mix:

As most people know, Iowa in general, and Cedar Rapids and Iowa City
in particular have been flooded out over the past few weeks. My
mother-in-law’s consigment clothing store took on five feet of water,
and we spent a couple of days removing several tons of stinking, soggy
clothes from the building, piling them into a mountain of fashion
hopes dashed. We’ve been through this before, but it still saddens us
all. My immediate family had no issues with flooding — my wife’s
business is in a building about 6 feet above the river’s highest
excursion. But even for those those houses and businesses were
trashed, there is the one consolation that nobody died as a result,
but everyone wanders around gobsmacked at having their town trashed
yet again.

But back to more selfish concerns: I played a Ableton DJ set Saturday
night at a disastrously under-attended show. Originally my friend
Dave Powers was going to drive in from Chicago to do a live
house/techno set, but his car wasn’t up to the job; one of the other
guys who was supposed to play had his laptop laid low by OS X. So
after a scramble, I was able to get two noise/electronic bands to jump
on the bill — Lwa and One Indian Tear.

The end result was that what had been a mostly dance-oriented bill
turned into a mostly noise/experimental show, which I opened to an
empty club. People gradually filtered in, but they were not a
dancefloor audience — they huddled in the back by the bar throughout
my whole set, which doesn’t get the performer juices flowing exactly.
I was essentially playing electronic music for people with little
affinity for it. Ironically about half of the 20 or so people there
came up afterwards and said they really enjoyed it, so maybe I made a
few conversions in the process.

At any rate, I didn’t get a recording of my set so last night I sat
down at home to knock one out based on the tracks I’d pulled together
for the saturday night show. I can’t really say in words the feeling
I was going for but I think I achieved it. After all when you try to
make some sort of art the real goal is to do something unexplainable
and irreducable, isn’t it? The outer intellectual goal was to make
something that incorporated a lot of music made over a the past 30
years, and yet incorporate a bunch of relatively recent tracks that
have been knocking me out. Emotionally it was a sort of escape from
recent craziness, a retreat to higher ground, if you will.

Most of the tracks are pretty obvious choices, but they were obvious
because they were tracks that grab everyone’s ears. Nothing that has
been played out to the point it’s annoying, and I hope there are at
least a couple of surprises.

The tracklisting is as follows:

1. Ectomorph – Lost Angles (Manyangles Version)
2. Adult – Nightlife
3. ESG – Dance
4. Chaircrusher – Purple
5. John Tejada – Sweet On The Walls
6. Five Mic Cluster – Basildon Lover
7. Ame – Sun Sugar
8. Alif Tree – Forgotten Places (Moodyman Remix)
9. Arthur Russell – Get Around To It
10. Thom Yorke – Harrowdown Hill
11. Liquid Liquid – Caverns
12. Carl Craig – My Machines
13. GrandCru – Out Of Isolation
14. Omar S – Untited B01 (Detroit EP AOS-2)
15. Tolga Fidan – Tanbulistan
16. Fred Giannelli – Delirious
17. Modern Lovers – Pablo Picasso
18. Gregory Tresher – A Thousand Nights
19. Sebbo – Watamu Beach (Moritz Von Oswald Rework)
20. Laurie Anderson (Henry Cullen Bootleg remix)
21. Coldplay – Talk (Francois K Dub)
22. Eamonn Doyle – Red Shift
23. As One – Chiaro
24. Blackdown/Burial – Crackle Dub
25. Burial – Archangel
26. Reinhardt Voigt – Charge Your Dreams
27. Coolzey vs Chaircrusher – Easy Pimp
28. Terrence Parker vs Joe Smooth — Love’s Got Me High/Forever My Love

There’s some of Chaircrusher’s own original material in there, as well as a house mash-up he did at the very end that works quite well. This will kick off a string of really nice mixes over the next few weeks here at ISM. Enjoy!

Download the mix here.