I just finished the last mix for this year. It became the longest – and if not my best mix of this year, it’s definitely the most interesting.

I’ve been thinking of putting together a mix of epic trance for a while now. It’s an interesting genre – I accidentally found a good description from Discogs while browsing around:

Epic trance has “musically interesting, constantly changing elements, and building suspense and emotion through means other than twiddling the frequency knob on a filter.”

There’s so little of this kind of trance released these days. Long tracks with lots of variety, several parts with different musical themes and truly innovative and challenging electronic dance music.

When choosing the tracks, I ended up leaving several nuskool epic tracks aside as well as some too obvious epic classics. And yes – the whole mix could have included only Sunday Club releases and been as epic as it’ll ever get, but there wouldn’t have been too much point in it.

Now, I’m pretty satisfied with the result. The sound describes very well where my electronic music roots are and also what was the whole idea of trance back in the day: hypnotic yet beautiful and driving.

Next year I’ll concentrate more on new music and leave oldskool aside – at least from the mixes. And as the autumn has been pretty trancey, the next mixes will be based more on house. Let that be the first promise for the new year.

Anyway, the new mix, Roots, will be online no later than tomorrow containing music from Sunday Club, Bedrock, Sasha, Gloat, Tenth Chapter, Spooky, Seafield etc.

See you soon.

Sibelius-Academy’s Development Centre for Artistic Activity has kindly approved our application and given us a grant for producing an audiovisual music production. The production will combine both traditional and electronic music plus visuals and motion tracking in a way which is – at least – new in Sibelius-Academy.

I will provide here a link or two as soon there’s more information available.

I’ve been writing several blog posts about the fight between vinyl and mp3 supporters, archiving digital music and the relationship between a DJ and a music format. I’ve always tried to point out that there really aren’t any universal truths in this fight and that there are some facts you just can’t deny. And finally I’ve gotten to a conclusion:

I’ve been already thinking for some time what would be my response on the change of the DJ-culture. Follow the flow, sell my vinyl collection, start playing only digital music and make the best out of it? Or make a lonely fight-back, keep supporting vinyl and keep the amount of CDRs in minimum and play only promotional tracks in digi format?

The only what is certain, is that some changes have to be made. I’m happy that I’ve come to a conclusion which satisfies me both as a vinyl freak and as a music lover: With a “small” amount of work I’ve listed all the old records I still need in order to call my vinyl collection perfect and complete. In addition to that, I won’t leave the collection to the state “2006” but I’ll update it constantly with important releases and so-called future old-skool classics. I’ll also support certain labels by buying all their new releases in plastic to have a complete catalogue and collection of their music.

OK, that’s it about vinyl. What about mp3’s then? The amount of music mentioned above would easily fulfill the needs of my upcoming DJ-sets. But buying the music only for keeping the dancefloor pleased doesn’t lead anywhere (Miika wrote well about that already earlier). There are SO many better-than-average but far-from-classic tracks in online shops and it would be a pity to leave them there just because they are released only in digital format. And there are even more tracks which aren’t meant for dance floor but which you just happen to love. For the sake of keeping your sense of true music alive, it’s even necessary to buy tracks which you probably wouldn’t end up playing live. I don’t mean bad tracks, but tracks which are just interesting, but definitely not danceable. Would there be any better format for that than digital?

Hopefully this sums this up – for now.. :)