After being invited to submit a retro mix for the Old Dogs, New Tricks programme on Strummer Radio, I thought back to my first experiences in the scene as inspiration. My first years of attending Goa-style parties in mid-90s Tokyo, where I first encountered this genre of electronic music, were formative influences of which many clear impressions remain.

As I went to regular events with an array of local and international DJs, I began to notice different approaches to crafting storylines and also to how tracks were sonically blended. While DJs using vinyl tended to go for kick-matching (though not always), I was also quite taken by the more atmospheric transitions of tracks, particularly at outdoor events. I recall an amazing Equinox event in the Autumn of 1995 where Kuni played the whole night and the impression was that a cloud of quantum information would enter the dance floor in the middle of the forest and when it had communicated its message, another would come in and take its place as the old one left, and there was a moment to catch your breath and adjust to the new data entering the space. At times during these events, one had the impression that the music was not music, it was geometrical design and information that was communicating in sonic form. There wasn’t the sense that the DJ was a ‘DJ’ playing ‘music’: rather, the DJ booth was like a cosmic radio tower with an antenna tuned into outer space, picking up signals and transmitting them to those gathered in this tribal gathering.

Each time I play a set, the type of storyline and style of tracks are different, and my approach to transitions depends on track selection and how things line up, though there are general parameters that I always aim for. As a result of my classical training, my emphasis when mixing has been to try to connect more than just the kick but to find matching patterns between tracks and to blend those to create a thread of continuity beyond the percussive elements, at times with kick-matching and at other times not. Usually, it’s a combination of the two, but keeping the rhythm consistent and aiming to have one track ‘hand over’ the space to the next one in a less conventional sense, like multiple speakers reading different chapters from a book that one absorbs through the set.

As I tuned into the more hypnotic and nighttime storyline that emerged as this set evolved, I was drawn to more of that atmospheric cloud-like mixing style, where one track dances with the next along harmonic, rhythmic, and upper-register elements as opposed to the bass-level kick. As I listened with headphones, I was able to let go of the technical focus of the ‘mixing’ of two ‘tracks’ and rekindle some of those early impressions of this music being more than just music but combinations of patterns gathered together and presented through sound waves, hearing things not in left-right, high-low mode but all-at-once, like voices coming both from the speakers and the centre of one’s head.

I believe that as we have gotten used to listening to this music at clubs and events over the years, many of us have adapted to a sense-based linear perception of what we’re hearing as opposed to a more embodied dimensional experience, and we can easily listen with a set of standards that can be mechanical rather than holistically musical. I know this has been the case for me, and listening at home can have its pitfalls, as you get used to hearing the music outside of the contextual space for which it was created, and on speakers whose size are inverse proportion to your body than what they would be at an event. But in the right outer and inner space, we can hear these sounds beyond the framework of the familiar and as an expression of something quite outside the ordinary.

All of us experienced some magic in our early years of attending these events – and sometimes since, too! – and it is my hope that these classic tracks in this storyline will enable some of those to be rekindled as they have for me.

The Tracklist:

The Infinity Project: Mystical Experiences

Technossomy: The Joker

Ololiuqui: Voltage 

Orichalcum: Alien Homes

Tufaan: Probe

Psychaos: Return Voyage

Juno Reactor: Komit

Doof: Double Dragons

Tristan: Perimeter

Hallucinogen: Fluoro Neuro Sponge

Tim Schuldt: Animatronic

Hallucinogen: Space Pussy

Sibilant: Screecher Creature

Tarsis: Atomic Children

X-Dream: Panic in Paradise

Kox Box: Space Traveller

Earth Nation: An Artificial Dream (Hallucinogen remix)