Jasmo had some good questions about the format wars on the comments concerning Orkidea’s new website. Aaand here are some answers.
So long, Myspace. Here’s the new VIRB profile.
Tune in to Bassoradio – this Wednesday. DJ Orion live on Misc Management show, 20:00-22:00 (CET+02).
Stream address: http://www.basso.fi/bassostreami.m3u or on FM (Helsinki city area) 102,8mhz (Welho cable network 105,9mhz).
Orion – Pace
The name says it all. Both in English and Italian.
60 minutes of bittersweet melodies, houseprogressive moody soundscapes.
Download it on the mixes section.
A short video from VisualiSointeja group first performance. Experimenting the combination of electronic music, classical music and interactive visuals.
Expect Youtube sound and picture quality(tm).
This week:
Wednesday: Orion live @ BassoRadio, Misc Management show 20:00-22:00 (CET+02). Tune in at www.basso.fi/radio
Thursday: New podcast on the way. 40min minimix of oldskool progressive/trance from Homegrove. Excellent stuff. Subscribe to the podcast here.
Saturday: Orion’s one hour mix on Radio Laserpoint, 21:00-22:00 (CET+02), guest mix on Fresh Waves, a show by Denis Vakulin. Tune in here.
Orion’s one hour guest mix on FriskyRadio, on Audio Mediocritas show, hosted by OlliS.
House / progressive.
Thursday, 18.01.2007, 21:00-23:00 (Finnish time, CET+02)
Link to the stream: http://www.friskyradio.com/frisky.m3u
Some profile updates on the Misc Management site.
This year BassoRadio is finally FM, on 102,8mHz. Misc Management show every second Wednesday 20.00-22.00. Tune in.
My latest epic trance remix/remake of old Stress Records track “Innerself – Gautama” will be aired tomorrow on Tiistain Tanssi-ilta @ YleX, the Finnish national radio one. Tune in tomorrow, tuesday 19.12.2006, between 21:00-22:30 (GMT+02).
Here’s a short clip: Innerself – Gautama (Orion’s Freefall remix)
I’ve been thinking of this a lot lately. After reading Moby’s blog I’ve noticed that there are just a huge amount of readers, all around the world. If you still add those who read the same posts from his MySpace blog, the actual amount of readers is vast.
Now, Moby has lots of opinions and he’s not afraid to tell them. Actually, his provocative way of writing makes people both angry and supportive. The blog entries create different emotions which might even cause actions. And if Moby’s writings cause actions, they work.
The more popular electronic music has become, the more I’ve been thinking why don’t clubs, organizations and DJs more openly stand behind certain values such as freedom of speech, environmental issues and anti-war movements? After all, the more popular the club or the DJ is, the more weight their opinions have.
Nowadays saying no to oil industry, being openly interested in climate change or supporting Amnesty, Greenpeace or other similar organizations is simply mediasexy. And I guess less people would dare to ask for a free entry to a club which would give part of their ticket price to support electric cars or prevent climate change – for example.
Ian Ossia visited Finland last weekend. Great gig, great music and I was more than delighted to find a short statement against the oil use from his Myspace-biography. Vast amount of people just simply need role models in order to change their opinions and – as cliché as it is – music can make the world better – why wouldn’t the professionals of music make it happen, too?
No matter if you’re a professional or simply a music lover, you could take the first step and check the Amnesty’s music driven campaign “Make Some Noise” and the barbwire headphone T-shirts, too.
These are small deeds, but in the long run they make the big wheel turn. Let’s push it.
The new epic trance mix, Orion – Roots, is now online. Get the mix & full tracklisting on the mixes site.
Enjoy :)
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.
I must admit that Kajaani event on the Desperate Housedeejays mini-tour really surprised me. There were about 400 people (which is a lot – we’re talking about North-East Finland here) and very enjoyable atmosphere. The night took off after 00:30AM and there was absolutely no need for playing obvious hits – in addition to house it was about breaks, oldskoolish quality trance and techno.
To mention some highlights, especially Brothers in Rhythm remix of Placebo’s Every Me Every You, Phunk-A-Delic’s Rockin’ and Mauro Picotto’s Coldfunk made Club96 go crazy.
Met some very nice new friends and generally people seemed just to be happy and smiling. Either it was a successful night in their opinion, too – or they were just drunk enough ;)
And still – this must have been the best b2b gig with Kaasi, the erickmorillo of Northern Finland. It just gets better every time :)
We got a nice amount of footage – a timelapse movie of the whole night, photos and videoclips. Online pretty soon, I hope.
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.. :)
Miika Kuisma has written his best blog post so far. A long mind flow “About creativity and being an artist” is well worth 7-10min which it’ll take to read through.
The setup “creativity vs money” which Miika introduces is very very valid in the world of event managers and promoters, too. Even though organizing events can’t be categorized as “art” too often, the same series of actions appear there as well: if you organize events in order to make your living and/or to get rich, you’ll end up losing the touch to your audience and waste the real fun in it.
If you rank income above creativity or fame above art, take a while and read the post.
If you totally missed the Radio KLF’s broadcast two nights ago, go and download the live recording from Supercool club from the mixes section. It’s 2,5 hours of electro house, progressive and trance.
Enjoy!