The Signal: EP117 – Summer jamz now that summer is leaving. We present to you, humbly and with malice aforethought, 45 minutes of musical sounds and a couple moments of non-musical sounds.
As ever, the file can be gained by a click on the image above for a limited time only. If this is your first Signal mix, welcome aboard. There’s no cost to try and no cost to buy, so don’t worry about the fact that I don’t tell you what’s in the thing, forcing you to look in the id3 tags of the file to figure out which name goes with which track like some sort of techno-detective.
There are some notes below where numbers correspond to tracks for those looking for insight into the process, such as it is.
01. Can you believe we haven’t heard Ken’s amazing voice in a Signal mix since 2012? This is practically the 3 year anniversary. (I’m only off by 5 days.) And the last time before that was 2009. So we really pace them out. Don’t want you getting burned out on him.
02. Thanks to Roshan for this one.
03. I’ve been picking up lots of beat compilations from Bandcamp, which is a contributing factor to why it took so long to come out with this mix. Didn’t want to do an all-beat, all-instrumental mix.
04. But there’s plenty of beats anyway. I did get some interesting stuff that has, like, Arabic vocals? I think? But it didn’t quite fit in this time around.
05. Power pop! Yeah!
06. Posted about this album before. It’s been scratching a particular mid-90s acid techno itch.
07. Something from my July trip to India. Recording cafeteria muzak while eating a dosa.
08. I coulda swore the version of this from Letterman made it into a mix, but maybe it didn’t? The sound quality wasn’t that great, but I rewatched the heck out of that clip. This reworking is much better than the album versions weird synth sound.
09. Still listening to a bit of vaporwave. But it didn’t take long to burn out on that sound.
10. Groovy funk from Italy!
11. We used to feature covers quite a bit in these ol’ Signal mix, so if that used to be your favorite part, here you go.
12. Another beat!
13. No reason.
14. Time for more funk! This time from the UK! (As the name might lead you to suspect.)
15. And then we slow it down with some blues-y turntablism.
16. And a final beat/vaporwave thing to close us out.
In looking over the above notes, there wasn’t a lot of thematic linking, or background info to share for this lot. Sometimes it’s just: All these tunes sound pretty good in this order.
Sometimes that’s enough.