I stole this tape out of the bedroom of a semi friends sister when I was 16. I am sorry. But you will never get it back. There were two tapes at one point. “Doc Martin, Live at Unlock the House”, 12-9-1995 tape one and tape two. Tape one is gone. Long live tape one. I thought I tracked it down, but it was not the one. I will always remember the Spanish guitar jam that the crowd lost their shit to, because I walked everywhere with it, losing my shit on the bus, on the street going over to Dickey’s house, in my living room with 25 invited friends over at 8am on Sunday morning.
This tape is deep as fuck. Doc at his peak. Heavy. Slamming drums, big vocals and nasty stomach twisting basslines. Snare rolls. Breaks, builds, tension and mother fucking drama in the club.
Extra points if you can tell me what the Energy Flash mix is at 21:00.
40 seconds later he starts teasing the tambourine from Green Velvets “Flash” in and you hear it: “FUCK YEA!”
Shit. I can talk about things I know nothing about till I am blue in the face, but once I need to do my job my brain gets scarce.
4 songs make up one E.P. The lean includes techno, ambient, experimental, dubstep. All recorded with broken dolby, tape-hiss real/faked, real pianos, faked horns, real/faked drums, faked talent, and no urgency to publish the damn thing.
Obviously I want to say something about this mix, but I am not sure where to begin. For starters, if you are a chin scratcher, or afraid of liking tunes because they have melody or worse yet, a breakdown, then you might want to just go back to the batcave and keep complaining about how “good music is getting harder to find”.
Not saying this is some uptempo trance fest because, well, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Summer is over, and the clouds rolled in quickly to make that point. Some good ideas turned into bad ideas and I have never been less inspired to actually write music since… who knows. I have not played out less, dj or live since I started doing this over ten years ago. Just keeping below the radar,
I am not complaining, just marking the fact that this mix is cool colored. Not blue, not grey, just cool. Full of heart and feeling, but still sad and expecting.
Quality tunes though, both serious classics and some current classics in the making.
Take Dave Angel’s “Endless Motions”. Released in 1993, and full of everything that shows how important the British music scene was in pushing Techno farther and in different directions that America was going.
Jeff Samuel’s “Off the Mark” is stunner, showing off his talent for combining movement with heart. Listen and listen again. The synth work by itself is incredible, bringing that kind of emotion with something so superficially confining like Techno is work best left to the masters. The innovators. The Jeff’s.
Gregor Tresher has been catching my attention recently, taking a playful approach the the minimal and electro sound, while keeping it dance floor friendly. “A Thousand Nights” is melancholy, sexy, girls like it and clubbers love it. Chin scratchers hate it.
Orbital comes correct with “Fahrenheit 3d3″ Giving techno and acid a distinctively British lean. One of my favorite Orbital songs. 1992, yo. Seriously.
Leftfield’s “Swords” brings the whole thing down. Deep, dark and something I slept on till a few weeks ago. Not perfect, me.
I took a friend out for his first time on the fly. He is new in the area, and wanted a scenic drive, so we swung past Chinook Bend on the way up to the Middle Fork. The flows were at 4500 when I left at 7am and while the big gravel bar was accessible, the water was fast and dark.
Note to self; Bring a machete next time, or let someone else lead. I am pretty sure that either those were noxious weeds that we were prancing through, or perhaps I now have robotic scabies.
We dropped by Fall City to see what the water looked like. Looked much more fishable, but still dark.
There was a gentleman, who was trying to fish using a style I was unfamiliar with. Using a spincasting outfit, he would launch the paylod 30 feet straight up and about 15 feet out. Was he trying to bonk the fish on the head? Distract them while someone sneaks up from behind?
While walking back to the car he started yelling and screaming. We were out of range for a visual, but I think he caught either a neckfish or landed his tackle on top of his head.
Middle Fork Road is a really nice drive in the morning. Lots of sunlight peeking through. The road was in really bad shape in march after/during the winter/spring thaw, but had been sanded and graded very recently. Better surface to drive on than the road I live on.
We headed out to the main bend about a half mile before the bridge. I wanted my friend to have some space to show him how to cast poorly. Above the falls the flows were just under 1900. By the time I was home they were at 1600.
The river was running full and chalky and green. Fast too.
There is a pool left of the run, and there were fish jumping everywhere. I am still very new in my insect identification, but I will describe what I saw. The flies seemed to have a lighter colored wing and a copper body. I grabbed one off the surface, only to find that the case was empty and that the fly had gotten away. It was soft, not like the barrels of sand that you find with a caddis. The shucked case was orange or copper. I changed from a Parachute Adams to some gifted fly with a copper colored body with white wings. Two casts and a bump. Two more casts and a little 10″ beauty. Two more bumps, and the fish seems to back off the pool.
We talked for a bit about the hatch, me knowing little, trying to educate one who knows less. I caught another bug, hoping for a good look at what the fish were locking on to and it seemed to be a different bug, same size, same wing white/grey wings, but a straighter body, this time a grey/green body. No more bumps, blood sugar dropping, my friend needed a place with TP.
BWO? Caddis? Will there ever be a bikini hatch of 17-18 emergers or is that just for other people?
Verified. Mayfly hatch, followed by a Caddis hatch.
The below pics are from a trip to Icicle Crick. 1 8″ trout. Threw it back, gently of course. Sure did wiggle.
Today is the first day of summer. I am sitting in the studio in my sweat shorts, and polo, with long black socks on, all the shades drawn, door locked and not taking any phone calls. Why? Should I be cycling around the lake, or slumming on some beach somewhere looking at this years fresh crop of “adults”? Perhaps sneaking a steak on the unused “vegetarian” grill at a house party some where?
No. Not when there is good work to be done in this world.
Soul Music. Funk Music. Deep Blues. This is music made for both big feelin’s and feelin’ big. No room lackluster. No room for anything but letting it all out, no matter if you have a tissue handy or not.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
--Hunter S. Thompson
