I can name that tune in, uh, one note.

THE DEEJAY, JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT. LET’S KEEP IT THAT WAY, DOOMSDAY.

I spin as DJ Five-to-Midnight. I’ve been away from the booth since 2009. I want to make a return to try out some new themes.

Three of these possible themes:

  1. an Australian/New Zealander set, despite this being Toronto — presenting an entire catalogue of pop music which North Americans know very little of. I’ve long had a soft spot for Antipodean pop, and I think I’ve enough knowledge there to put together a fun OzCon/KiwiCon set. Hello Tranzac? You need this to restore some cred to that name of yours!
  2. an ’80–’90s cusp set, which really needs a much better name than that. This deliberately does away with ”80s retro” or “’90s retro” by periodizing (yes, I just said “periodizing” as if I was still in university) between the decades. Music produced between, say, 1987 and 1993 share a mess of relationships which get lost in strictly decade-based sets. This era is one I probably know best.
  3. a more free-form approach using the library of what I know. This means, well, it’s going to be the least predictable, but the most interesting. What makes this more than some glorified iTunes DJ shuffle tool is that some technique is used, and whatever the set, there will be a thematic journey involved. Yes, that sounds cheeseball. But you’ll have to trust me on this one.

So, like, if you’re a venue in Toronto and you’re wanting to give one of these “it’s kinda obscure, you’ve probably never heard much of it” themes a try on one of your open nights, just leave me a comment below.

 

REMIXING, BECAUSE CAKE BATTER DOESN’T TAKE TO THAT TOO WELL

Soundcloud hosts some of the songs I’ve remixed — or more precisely, extended into proper 12-inch singles, where pre-existing commercial recordings of extended versions either never existed or were, well, lacking in some nagging way. I produced these between 1996 and 2002.

On each, I tried to maintain a faithful sound and feel for the remixes — mimicking what one might have expected to hear then, not something totally anachronistic.

A couple worth sharing here, remixed in 1996 and 2000, respectively:


 

HEY, IF YOU’RE A MUSIC STALKER, YOU’RE REALLY CREEPY (YOU KNOW THAT, RIGHT?)

There’s also a Last.fm scrobble-bonanza. You may notice that some of those songs do get played quite a lot. I tend to do that — the single-song repeat thing. It helps with my writing. Be glad that no one else has to hear that.

 

BROADCASTING NOTHING BUT THE VERY LATEST IN HIT FICTION!

A mostly off-again Tumblr project, Fake Soundchecks, takes long-lost radio station bumpers (those bits you hear bridging songs together with station identification) and mixes them with song pairings — at least the end and start of two, that is).

Every bumper is real, but these “sound checks” never actually aired, nor did the accompanying narratives actually happen (such as that one about the dead cousin from Los Angeles, coked up at the time of his car crash in 1991).

Just pretend. This is music geeking at its very worst.

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