The Signal: EP115 – 45 minutes of global sounds, the product of a day off and an idiosyncratic library. If you have a free hour, then you could spend 7.5 minutes getting ready to be attentive and still have 7.5 minutes at the end to unwind and recover.
As is traditional, the list of included tracks are built into the mp3 itself, which you can download by clicking on the image above. The link will be available for a limited time only, so even if this is your first visit, it can’t hurt to grab it now and give it a listen later to see if it’s your kind of thing. If it helps any, upwards of 10 people listen to these mixes as they come out and they seem to enjoy them.
01. We open with sounds from a YouTube vid of 5 years back featuring dueling cell phone applications.
02. & 03. Two new tracks representing 90s-era techno genres! Instant nostalgia with some acid & d&b. Track 3 also features an appearance by longtime friend-of-The-Signal Emcee Child! Last heard on EP075!
04. Don’t feel too challenged to keep up with the lyrics. According to notes about the artist, an Angolan who performs in Brazil, he would frequently ad-lib lyrics in “Lingala, Portuguese, French, and on occasion Kikongo, English and Swahili.”
05. Spent some time this weekend grooving to “chicha,” a Peruvian version of cumbia, but instead of accordians you might hear psychedelic-era keyboards or guitars that sound better suited to surf music.
06. Saw this trio playing on a radio station’s YouTube channel and they caught my attention not just because of their music, but because they kept rearranging which instrument they’d play with each track.
07. I love that this guy was part of one of jazz’s biggest quartets, had one of the biggest jazz hits of all time, and when it was time to go solo, he did his own take on that hit’s sound, plus upped the ante with the title. “That’s twice as much as the original!”
08. Thanks to friend-of-The-Signal Dean for posting this one.
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10. It’s Memorial Day, so the title of this one stood out while I was browsing. I like it when a bit of synchronicity enters into the mix creation. This is the first artist I’ve seen on Bandcamp doing a sort of Patreon-style subscription, which I’ve signed up for, just to see how it turns out. Got a bunch of old/rare mixes out of it already.
11. This artist shares, in common with the previous, an association with the Low End Theory community of DJs in the LA area.
12. This track required the assistance of two of the French people I know. One to provide a set of modern French rock/pop bands for review and another to actually get some of my money into the hands of a French vendor in exchange for mp3s. A team effort!
13. I like how the last track’s “Got to get away” is echoed somewhat by “get up/get down”. Coincidence.
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This mix didn’t have a lot of the sort of thing I’d tend to write notes about, as it turns out. So… I guess it’ll just have to speak for itself.
In English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, etc.