Sublime 90s rave mixtapes

When I was an adolescent, I was obsessed with Rave culture, but geographically removed from it. I moved to Chicago in 1995, at age 15. The first local radio station that came in on the car stereo was WNUR's Strictly Jungle show, the first Jungle radio show in North America. I was immediately blown away, and as soon as I got a feel for the Chicago scene, I went out and bought a 2-tape set by the DJs I heard that night. The mix was called https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAP1Z2ytYA"">Silk Cut II, by Snuggles and Slak. It is still one of the very best mixtapes I have ever heard.

It actually spoiled me on mixtapes, because the quality set the bar so high. As time went on, I collected a number of other tapes, and there were mixes that everyone in Chicago would play, tapes that I know by heart, and which have deep, sentimental value.

However, I knew then, in the back of my mind, and realize today, that a lot of these tapes -- even the ones that were technically very impressive -- weren't musically very impressive. Even the ones with amazing selections just weren't assembled like Silk Cut II, where the blends go on forever and are seamless, and every transition is musically 'correct' -- meaning the next song is either in the same key, in a relative minor/major, or moves to the next key in a way that the melody from the first track is still diatonically correct, musically.

The one exception was Miles Maeda, whose tapes I never owned, personally (for some reason) but whenever someone put a Miles tape on, it was clear that he understood music theory, either classically or just intuitively.

Miles Maeda has a lot or remastered tapes on http://milesmaedamixes.com/?page_id=602"">his website. Several of them are nearly flawless, like Star (side 1), Isness (side 2), At 7am Hovering, Done and Done, Easy (side 2), Painting (cassette version), Stand Right Walk Left, Gee Your Beats Sound Terrific (side 2), Us (side 2), and Sunshower.

There are tracks in there that I remember so vividly from parties, that I never really liked, that sound great in Miles' juxtapositions. So it got me wondering, who were the heavyweight DJs from this era? I don't just mean DJs who could throw down a tight set, or keep the crowd's energy level up, or had great selections. I mean DJs who had an ear for music theory and could sustain high quality, harmonic mixes.

If you were listening to a jazz quartet, and the horn player just went to the wrong key and was totally out-of-tune, everyone would cringe. But for some reason, a lot of people who were into DJ culture in the 90s had a forgiving ear for non-harmonic transitions. I could never get past it.

Sorry, I don't know what happened to my links. I was trying not to embed a youtube video, in case it eventually bogged down the thread. Anyway, here's Silk Cut II:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAP1Z2ytYA

I didn't have that Silk Cut tape but a friend def did, looks and sounds familiar. My favorite jungle tapes were by Phantom 45 or Danny the Wild Child.
Prob the first tape that I ever heard was New School Fusion Vol 2 by Terry Mullan. That was THE tape amongst my social group. Also was my intro to Daft Pink tho I didn't know it until quite a bit later.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp4pdj/hear-the-1995-midwest-mixtape-that-introduced-america-to-daft-punk

Speaking of Daft Punk, they did a live set in Chicago and the tape of it was a favorite of mine. I can't find it online but there's this:
https://www.spin.com/2013/05/daft-punk-oral-history-first-american-show-even-furthur-1996/
I don't think the tape was from that tho.

Another one I loved was 20\20 Vision by Justin Long. Especially the intro and 1st few tracks. Can anyone id the intro and/or 1st track??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX7ubsYCHh0

I still have some tapes but no tape player.

I'll listen and respond more later, but to your question, the intro is 'We Are One' by DJ Q. Funny, I recently made a mix that opened with the same record. I owned this one, too, but didn't spin it much because it's hard to use in the middle of a set. There's not drum track on it, just that loop of Instant Funk's 'Wide World Of Sports', and DJ Q reading his poem in his Glaswegian accent.

Cool thanks! You've solved a decades old personal mystery

Well, I do think this 20/20 mix proves my point, because there are some classic selections on here, and Justin Long was an important DJ for the place and time --- but objectively, this isn't well mixed. He plays that DJ Q record end to end -- all 8 minutes of it -- and mixes it into some minimal track that's in the wrong key.

Back then, Justin Long and Mark Almaria were considered the two great raver House DJs. Mark Almaria was a better DJ, though. I'm not dumping on the tape, because I have mixes like these that mean a lot to me. But after going through the Miles Maeda tapes, I realize I want to collect some more mixes on that level. Seriously, listen to those Miles tapes I listed. They're some next-level mixes.

I know I've heard Almaria's mixes before but never owned any so didn't form a connection. Couldn't tell you his style or anything. So yeah I'll def check those out.
And obv you're 100% correct on Justin Long and most other djs back then. Few years ago I revisited some mixes I loved back then and they were all pretty sloppy.
I assume you've heard Jeff Mills stuff? And Derrick Carter? Those are 2 that I pegged as being pretty musical. But can't say I've listened to any mix in a looping time.

My favorite Almaria tape was Let Yourself Go, But lunks is mixed better. Not Miles-tier, but he was a solid DJ.

I had a friend who would play a Derrick Carter mix that had Wu Tang's Gravel Pit on it. I think it was called 'Live at Rednofive'. It was pretty good. But even Cosmic Disco, which was a big, commercial release, has jarring transitions. The tracks are great and the mixing is blah.

DJ Casper's contribution to The Jungle Book is actually a very well done harmonic mix.

First post itt is wonderful. Bookmarked

In the days before realtime pitch shifting / timestretch was a thing (i.e. before Acid software in 1998), mixing by key for the dancefloor (as opposed to more freeform / chillout stuff) was very constraining in terms of selection. You'd need a huge bag of stuff to find things that fit the tempo, key and the vibe. After it became more feasible you'd end up with trance people doing rote trips around the circle of fifths ;-)

So it wasn't attempted or consistently achieved all that often, not outside pre-planned sets. For the most part Djs and dancers would embrace or at least live with the strange tonalities in mixes. This sound was already inherent in the way samples were used in early rave anyway.

There were of course the big kosmische ambient soups which intentially used key matching that Mixmaster Morris and a few others were doing from the early 90s. Later it became a thing with progressive trance types like Sasha.

Hot take - a vertiginous clash of keys can in itself be evocative of the sublime.

Some tracks will just never mesh, but I agree, weird clashes can be really fun and interesting.

There are only a couple cases where I would agree:

* If one or both tracks are atonal, or
* If one or both tracks are chromatic.

Either way, you can assume the mix is taking a non-melodic direction on purpose. Otherwise, any 'happy accident' has to actually harmonize, or it doesn't work. If the root of one track plays over the next track as the 7th of that track's root, it might be weird or unexpected but it either works or it doesn't.

I think I have a pretty good ear for music, but I've never had perfect pitch and as a DJ, you really can't, because almost nothing is going to be perfectly in key when you're changing the speed of the record. You just have to be able to hear whether the next record is in tune, within a reasonable amount of wiggle room, and that varies from person to person.

I have done mixes where the next record is just a little too sharp, or too flat, but my ear is forgiving, but then the next time I listen to it my ear is less forgiving and it sounds wrong. I suppose a lot of DJs nowadays use the pitch-shifting, but I don't. It alters the original record too much, I think, and also you need that wiggle room to get through the set. If you have track 4, that's in D#m (Ebm), and track 1 is C#m, and track 2 is just a little sharper than 1, and 3 a little flatter than 4, you can get there incrementally and it doesn't sound wrong.

Honestly, being off-beat, where you have two galloping kick drums out of phase, has always bothered me less than harmonic trainwrecks.

Oh, and I pitch-shifting predates 1998, though maybe Acid software popularized it. The earliest examples of pitch shifting I can think of are the Naughty Naughty series, and other hardcore white labels from around 1993. They were taking breakbeat hardcore and house classics and speeding them up to early Jungle / 4-beat speeds without changing the pitch.

Then, around maybe 1995, you started hearing the really time-stretched samples in Jungle, and later in Speed Garage.

Pitch shifting goes back at least to the 60s with the Eltro Information Rate Changer. In the late 70s Eventide Harmonizers had digital pitch shifting. These things were not available to a regular DJ to use in a mix. Pitch shifting and time stretch on samplers wasn't real time until maybe the Roland VarioOS? But even then given the limited memory still not much use for mixes.

Maybe there were earlier examples of accessible ways to mix tunes or longer sections of tunes in real time with pitch shifting, but not much before 1998 I don't think? Once CD-Js have it it's a standard thing.

It's a limitation that when taken away makes for a real step change in what's possible, for better or worse. I actually played around with a little program that would calculate tracks (in a database) that would be in similar keys given tempo adjustment but it wasn't much fun ;-)

You're right, time stretching goes way back. I looked up the EIRC machine you referenced, and they were using that for decades to change speed without pitch (think of the legalese at the end of radio commercials).

The examples I gave were of production, not mixing. The first pitch-shifted mixing I remember was from Radio Soulwax.

I use Mixx DJ software and it does an OK job detecting key, but it has its limitations:

1. It only detects initial key so that doesn't tell you anything if there are key changes;
2. A lot of 90s House music (what I spin) is non-diatonic, so there's no fixed scale and the key is less relevant;
3. If you follow the solos, melodies and chord progressions in House music, very little of it is actually in straight-up major or minor keys. It's usually in Dorian or Mixolydian mode (or sometimes Phrygian mode) and the key detector doesn't have a way to process this. So it'll detect G Mixolydian as C major;
4. It doesn't show you the key adjusted for speed. So you can't set everything to, say, 125bpm and see what the calculated (approximate) key would be.

I recently went through all my old records and matched them up for a mix series, and it took ages to get everything in key, without time-stretching. And this was with software, which is why I'm so blown away that Miles Maeda was able to mix in key so flawlessly, with vinyl, in 1995. Amazing.

This is making me want to hear a mix that is entirely built around all dissonant transitions.

Ha, Take your pick!

Are any of these mixes specifically meant to be tonally dissonant or are they all just not key matched?

I certainly appreciate a mix that works harmonically (but not too rigidly like those mixes of very similar tracks that follow a progression of keys at the expense of inspired blends) and I'd like to hear more great examples, particularly from the early 90s.

This thread for some reason brought to mind the Sasha And Digweed Northern Exposure mix which I think of as being carefully planned to work harmonically. Not sure if it's purely a vinyl mix or if it was put together digitally. I like quite a few of the tunes they use on the first disc but can't get excited about it now tbh. I had a listen to the second one (which claims to be a vinyl mix) and predicatbly it's competent but very dull ;-)

A converse would be those Baldelli Cosmic mixes which make a virtue of extreme pitch changes and just sheer force of blend to make these woozy transitions 'work'. if you'r crowd is receptive...

* your ffs

Interesting thread, I'm always afraid of people with ears like this because I don't care about harmonic mixing at all, and I'm sure my mixes would drive you crazy.

I have a terrible ear for it, so I mostly rely on happy accidents, and if something reallllly clashes then I'll just forgo the long blend. But since a ton of dance music sits on one chord, once you cut out the bass it usually sounds fine to me unless it's like a half step or tritone apart. And it's also often easy enough to find mix-out sections with just drums or whatever.

All I really care about is the pocket, and it's hard enough to get good transitions that work rhythmically and thematically (especially if you're working at faster bpms or ripping through a lot of tracks)! I don't think I would have enough room in my brain to think about key even if I had the ear for it, but it's interesting to hear the other perspective.

very relatable. I don't think about keys at all, but I think I get things working well together harmonically, but I'm sure a sharper ear would tear it apart.

as long as it doesn't sound actively unpleasant I think it's fine to be a little off. I'd rather hear slight disharmonics than the "galloping horses" of two tracks falling out of synch, I'd rather hear no mixing than distractingly bad mixing.

I'm now making my way through Mark Farina's Mushroom Jazz series. I was reading an old rave magazine, circa 1996, and it referenced Mark Farina's 'legendary' Mushroom Jazz mixtape series. I was confused because Mushroom Jazz II came out in 1998. Turns out he had tons of tapes out before those commercial releases, and so far, his batting average is very high for harmonic mixing.

By the end of 1995, Mark Farina has 22 Mushroom Jazz tapes under his belt. You can find them on Soundcloud, Mixcloud and Youtube. Awesome series.

I’m with Jordan, I’m not particularly concerned about mixes being harmonic or not but it’s an interesting discussion, also to hear that house tracks make use of Dorian or Mixolydian modes gives me inspiration to try this out myself.

The first two Northern Exposure mixes are ones I still listen to regularly and my understanding is that if they were recorded similarly to Sasha and Digweed’s first Renaissance mix it was done in the studio with lots of post production rather than straight from vinyl

If you were listening to a jazz quartet, and the horn player just went to the wrong key and was totally out-of-tune, everyone would cringe. But for some reason, a lot of people who were into DJ culture in the 90s had a forgiving ear for non-harmonic transitions. I could never get past it.
― Publicradio (3×5), Friday, 20 August 2021 23:03 (one month ago)

Because the best electronic music is not about cordal progression but rhythmic motifs that you can bring in and out of the mix. It's very difficult to key mix if you're djing (battle style.) It can be done but it sounds off, insufficient friction. A jazz quartet obviously isn't faced with this problem due to their performance in that moment not being (pre)recorded.

Listen to this ratty mix from '93 and you'll get what I'm talking about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FRDHwP7m-c

There is no doubt to me that beats falling out of sync and gallopping is miles worse than than the dissonance of two tracks, that is unless it's house/trance/(modern) hardcore with those irritating digga-digga off beat basslines where key matching is essential. But pure maj or min keyed tracks always tend to lack hitech funk.

finally a post i can contribute to. rave tapes have been my obsession since the pandemic started, especially old school jungle stuff. here’s my favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neCbxGBsSf0

R.A.W is a great DJ from LA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6eARffMtRE

mixtape magic is a great channel for these old school tapes, highly recommended.