New era mix #3, 98 minutes
https://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/new-era-mix-3/
Originally this mix had a slightly different tracklist and ordering (and was called "new era mix #2"), but I was unhappy with it. After mapping out the mix a second time I re-recorded it completely. The style is very similar to the previous podcast, and uses songs from some of the same older-school compilations. It's a bit longer and more ambitious, I think.
I have never been into video reviews or reviewers, it's a trend that I never became attached to. It's the end of 2020, the most impossible and backwards year of our lifetimes, and my favourite music channel of the moment is David Hurwitz's on Youtube, it's an absolute treat.
I'm sure there are plenty of classical music reviewers who can communicate in this style, I am surely decades behind whatever the vanguard of classical criticism is these days. I just love watching a guy who talks about classical music the way my favourite pop and rock critics always did, with pithy and cynical putdowns of conductors and orchestras, cheeky enthusiasm for his faves, and delightful overuse of the word "cosmic" to describe powerful performances. He mixes a deep knowledge of the music with charismatic humour throughout, and effortlessly succeeds at the single most important task of a critic in any genre -- he makes me want to drop everything and listen to the music he's talking about.
And again I'm no expert, but I strongly disagree with him on the subject of a particular recording I have thought about quite a bit -- Furtwaengler's singular 1942 recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in Berlin with many top Nazis in attendance. Nearly everything Hurwitz says is true -- the recording is poor, and the performance has many noticeable flaws. Despite this, I still love it, as do many of the people who posted in the comments box. Hurwitz isn't a perfectionist and is happy to judge a piece more by "feel" if appropriate. He believes that if you strip away the context, it's not a recording that you would ever listen to more than once. But stripping away the context is impossible. The Nazis were there and nothing could be more important. I believe, as many do, that Furtwangler decided to make an emphatic point by presenting the blitzkrieg version of Beethoven's 9th, spitting in the face of the Nazis in attendance, and telling them to shove their war in a manner that very few in Germany could have hoped to get away with while living to tell about it.
New Controller, New Era Mix #1, 76 minutes
https://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/new-controller-new-era-mix-1/
It hardly needs to be said that 2020 was not a typical year. I was so out of touch with contemporary music that I won't be publishing a top ten albums of the year lists for the first time since the early 90's. I simply couldn't follow along with new releases with any enthusiasm this year. I was continuously updating a list of new albums that caught my interest, but never got around to listening to most of them. Having said that, Resident Advisor's best albums list overlaps quite well with many of my tastes (KMRU, DJ Python) and provided me with even more album recommendations that I really must listen to.
Two themes dominated the year for me. The first was the rekindling of my love for classical music, thanks to Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise". The second was buying my first piece of DJ hardware in nearly twenty years, a Roland DJ-505 Serato controller. Suddenly I feel like I've been transported out of the DJ'ing stone age and placed in front of a modern hardware/software combo that is indescribably better for translating my ideas into results. After three months, I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what this equipment can do.
It's taken longer than I expected to start posting mixes made with the controller, in part due to an ear problem that put me out of action so to speak for a few weeks. But finally I'm thrilled to post the first mix. It feels a bit like a work in progress where I'm still finding my way around the controller, but the new era has to start somewhere.
