So long, and thanks for all the fish

Share

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened

Dr Seuss

This has been on the cards for a few years now – ever since I started to develop hyperacusis in my left ear, accompanying the tinnitus in both sides, I knew that it probably meant the beginning of the end to my DJing at events / parties. Recently, I have been trying to find a way that I could continue to play at home and record sets for posting online, but while practicing for playing at DJ Neuroflex’s 50th birthday party, it has become clear that even this isn’t viable – the increase in both my tinnitus and sensitivity to percussive noises has been significant, and I don’t want to continue down that path. I want to still be able to enjoy music and movies and conversation as I progress into (late) middle-age. To that end, I thought it fitting that the gig I played last Friday (27th September 2024) for my old friend Neuroflex would officially mark my retirement as a DJ. Andy (Neuroflex) is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and indeed I think my second ever gig in public was with him sometime in the late 90s, in the basement of Dr. Drakes where I also went on to co-run Triple Bass. I like a book-ended narrative!

It’s been an awesome ride, and even though it’s been a few years since I played out regularly, I still thought a few retro gigs might be fun to do, but I reckon a clear and clean break is best for me and my ears. I’m going to let my Soundcloud lapse at it’s next renewal date in 2025, but my website will stay live. My records will also be going at some point in the near future – not sure yet if I am going to keep some of them or just let them all go – that’s a decision for later.

There’s a whole bunch of events and people I have played with and for that I want to thank for making my time as a DJ memorable and fun – suffice to say I will probably miss someone – sorry if I have, but the memories of the heyday are a little fuzzy round the edges!

Darryl, Fred, Neil, Chewy and all the party people at Triple Bass. Some of the best times in my life spent in that hole in the ground

Davy, Andy (Biostasis) – our versus nights were always messy and fun

Dan, Bri, Sean (Dan-Sin) – we captured lightning in a bottle for a while there lads

Pearsall, Phil, Rob (Rampage) – the Wee Red Bar will always be the place I remember being able to rinse it, no holds barred

Cuffy (Subculture) – always a great trip over to NI, and one of the first places I got to play pure techno sets

Graeme, Pat (EUK) – without your forum, I don’t think I would have had half the opportunities I did

Nigel, Fuzzy (Ivy) – some of the best nights you could wish to play at

Bruce, Alan (Joy & Drum) – laughed my ass off most nights we played together

Piers, Dan, Chris, Richard, Ian (The London folks – Milk, Zoology, Redtrip) – thanks for taking a chance on a chancer from Aberdeen

HQ Amsterdam  – still feels surreal I played here at 1am-3am so early on in my DJing life

All the other DJs and dancers I met, played alongside and chatted nonsense with on many occasions including, but not limited to – Al (Cyber Scotsman), Egg, Max Alientrax, Hammay, Keyte, Tez, Bass Monkey, …

Last, but definitely not least –  Laura, Craig & The Marischal Street Massive.

Share

DJ Skelp – Live at Triple Bass Oct 2000 (party mix)

Share

A few weeks ago a whole bunch of cassettes from my early forays into the world of DJing found their way back to me. In amongst them was a live recording that was made of (nearly all) of my set that I played on 27th October 2000, at the first birthday party of a pre-club night that I co-ran in Aberdeen for a few years – Triple Bass. Listening to it triggered a whole bunch of memories – well, maybe I’ll use the singular rather than the plural, as it really is just one big memory – trying to separate things into ‘this happened that night, and that happened on this night’ is nigh-on impossible! 

Triple Bass was born in late 1999, essentially as an extension of the flat that I shared with 2 others at that time. We were all at university as mature(ish) students, and all had come to be DJs of various sub-genres of dance music through different routes. There was a free-party veteran who was into minimal techno and electro, a raver from the early 90s who loved trance and breaks, and a thrash metalhead who had discovered gabba / hardcore and then hardhouse. There was a heady mix of music emanating from our basement flat in those days!

Needless to say there were more than a few gatherings at this flat, and in order to save our already fractious relationships with our neighbours we decided that maybe we should move the noise somewhere else! We had been to a few events at a basement venue called Drakes Dungeon Bar (we felt at home underground) – this had 2 rooms, the larger of which had a stage, and would actually pay you to put on a night. Bonus! Right from the first night we put on it turned out to be a great idea – the combination of our different-but-related friends groups really gelled, and our once a month Friday events were always a blast. We also invited other DJs to play on our nights, and after a while hit on the idea that every month we would ask someone to play who had never played in public before, and let them decide what timeslot they wanted. This worked brilliantly, and it also meant that our parties were just that, parties – DJs could play whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted – sometimes we had gabba at 8pm, prog trance at midnight. This doesn’t sound like it should work, but in a bar setting (with a small space at front of stage for the dancey types) it did. Good times 🙂

There are many many stories to tell about these nights that ran once a month for over 2 years until Drakes closed in 2003, but they are for another time. There are also (thankfully!) not that many photographs in existence of these parties – it was before the camera on phones became ubiquitous.

This set from the first birthday party was one where I decided to take a sort of mini-journey through the type of electronica I liked when I was a teenager, through some techno (really as a glue to help me mix from one tune to another) and then on to partytime hardhouse. As you can probably appreciate, I was most definitely not sober when I played this, and some of the mixing is a bit sloppy to say the least – you can hear me getting to grips a bit more in the second half. I hope you enjoy this fun hour, and that you can listen to it with party ears as opposed to analytical ones!

The MP3 version can be downloaded by right clicking here and choosing ‘save as’. You can stream from Soundcloud below, and you can also download a lossless AIFF version from there, if HQ audio is your thing.

Tracks:

  1. M/A/R/R/S – Pump Up The Volume (original 12” mix)
  2. New Order – Blue Monday (original 12” mix)
  3. Dead Or Alive – You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) (Performance Mix)
  4. Adam Beyer & Joel Mull – Remainings II A
  5. S’Express – Hey Music Lover (Music Is My Life Mix)
  6. Unknown (Techno)
  7. Humanoid – Stakker Humanoid
  8. Unknown (Techno)
  9. D-Mob Featuring Gary Haisman  – We Call It Acieeed (The Living Beat Remix)
  10. The Cardigans – My Favourite Game (Vengaboys Remix)
  11. Phatt Bastard – And Da Drum Machine (Original Mix)
  12. Masters At Quirk – Technology
  13. BK – Funk Addiction
  14. Hyperlogic – Only Me (Stimulant DJs Remix)
Share

DJ Skelp – Flashback 3 (retro hardhouse mix)

Share
Right-Click image and ‘Save As’ to download Flashback 3 in 320Kbps MP3 format

Scroll down for Soundcloud and Mixcloud versions of Flashback 3

‘You have to kill all your darlings’ – William Faulkner

Now ol’ Billy there was talking about writing, and referencing removing your overused and favourite phrases and tropes to improve your output, but this maxim has been co-opted (and shortened to ‘Kill Your Darlings’) by artists of other creative disciplines to mean something slightly different and more specific to them. So I’m now doing the same for DJing. It’s my blog, I can do what I want!

‘You may have to kill your darlings’ – Chris Skelp

The full process of making the Flashback mixes is quite involved, and as I think I may have said before I am planning on a post dedicated to documenting that (sometime. maybe. possibly). The final stages of this are the really fun bits, where I decide what tracks are going in the set, in what order and get down to actual mixing. Sometimes this is relatively painless, but for this set it ended up being a little bit tortuous – I fairly quickly got the beginning and middle sections sorted, but I just couldn’t get an ending that I really liked and that fitted in with what was going on earlier. All of the tracks were favourites of mine, but the flow and the ‘vibe’ just wasn’t right. After a couple of weeks of to-ing and fro-ing, it dawned on me that there was 1 track that I was determined to play (OD404 remix of ‘Wanna Play House’) that was throwing the whole thing off. It’s a great track, and I absolutely love it, and whilst many others were tried and discarded, I kept trying to shoehorn this in. When I realised what was happening, I decide to ‘Kill My Darling’ and removed it from the playlist – and it worked! The other tracks I had chosen for the final section now made sense, and I was able to find an order that I really liked. A couple of takes (and tweaks) later, I had Flashback 3 recorded and ready to go. So here it is!

75 minutes of classic-era hardhouse, building through a few sub-genres (straight-up, bounce, trance, nrg) and upping the BPM throughout to a hard-but-uplifting finale.

You can download a 320Kbps MP3 version of the mix by right-clicking here and choosing ‘Save As’

If you want a high-definition audio, lossless version of the mix, you can download this from the Soundcloud link below. Or you can stream from there, and from Mixcloud – both links below

The full tracklist, and Discogs links for each of the tracks can be found by clicking here

Share

DJ Skelp – Flashback 2 (retro hardhouse mix)

Share

Right Click Here and ‘Save As’ to download Flashback 2 in 320kbps MP3

I am proud to present the second in the Flashbacks series, a 60 minute mix of harder-edged, driving and trancey tracks all from around 2000 – 2002.

Tracklist, with discogs links available by clicking here.

When I first started the process of creating this mix, I had no plan or theme in mind, and I just went through my collection dragging out vinyl that made me think ‘I used to really like this tune’. After I had digitised about 20 or so, I began sequencing them and doing some test mixes using 2 or 3 of the tunes. Slowly I started to realise that the tracks that I was really reacting to were the ones with big synth lines, and within those a lot of them were bootlegs and remixes of classic hard trance tunes. I went through my collection again, and pulled out a few more tracks that were of similar style, and a couple that I knew might be needed as a bridge between and/or break from the toxic euphoria and digitised these (I think I will do a post soon about the process I use for digitising, some of you might be interested)

A couple of runs at this mix later, where I threw out a few tracks that I really liked but thought they didn’t quite fit in to the set, this is the result. I’m quite proud of this one, I think that as a whole it really works well, and I decided to allow the epic tracks to really stretch out in the mix whilst trying to keep the energy level up – I believe I managed that, I would be interested what you guys think.

If you download the mix direct from here, it will be in a 320kps MP3 file. If you prefer a lossless AIFF version, you can grab that from Soundcloud. All of the tracks used in the mix were digitised without compression, so if you like hi-fi sound then the lossless should keep you happy!

I like sharing my mixes, and enjoy the process of creating them – it does take up quite a bit of time, so if you have enjoyed this, or any of my mixes in the past, I would love it if you showed your appreciation with a small donation to charity – I have set up a donation page at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/skelp for Simon Community Scotland, a non-religious charity providing outreach services to homeless people in Scotland – anything you can spare would be appreciated.

Share

DJ Skelp – Flashback 1 (retro hardhouse mix)

Share

Right Click Here and ‘Save As’ to download Flashback 1 in 320kbps MP3

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s I spent a lot of time, money and effort building a collection of hardhouse records and I was lucky enough at that time to get regular gigs playing them. I fell out of love with the hardhouse that was being released around 2006 or so, and gave my heart totally to techno. Since then my hardhouse vinyl has been ignored, and with my move into digital DJing I haven’t looked at them in years. This seemed a bit of a shame, and I had the idea to start digitising and cataloguing them – then I thought why not make some mixes at the same time?

This is the first in what I hope will be a long series of mixes, which I have dubbed Flashbacks. Flashback 1 is 17 tracks – most have an off-beat bass and it has an overall feelgood vibe. Like all my mixes I have tried to chart a course that builds throughout, and for this first in the series I have also tried to keep the tracks that would be considered as ‘overplayed classics’ to the minimum.

You can download an MP3 version of the mix with the links in this post, and there is also a lossless version available from my soundcloud page where you can also stream.

The tracks, with links to the Discogs entry for each one can be found by clicking here

If you enjoy this mix then please consider supporting the work that has gone into it by donating to Simon Community Scotland, a secular charity that supports homeless people with outreach and other vital services. You can donate quickly and easily at my Justgiving Page

Share

JD Pleks – Playing The Fool (techno mix)

Share

An 80 minute building (as always!) techno mix, recorded in April 2018 from some slightly older tracks I hadn’t quite found a place for in mixes made when I bought them. 75% of the tracks are lossless, so if you prefer a lossless version for download then grab it from my Soundcloud site. Link below the tracklist.

Right Click Here and ‘Save As’ to download Playing The Fool in 320kbps MP3

Tracks:

  1. AM – Id Ensemble
  2. Tannhäuser – Dodi Palese
  3. Win Some – Pan-Pot
  4. Tnoura – Sahaf
  5. Move a Little Closer – Nicole Moudaber
  6. Kienitz – Kobosil
  7. Five – Psyk
  8. Lotus – Toby Rost
  9. Semper Fi (Konrad (Italy) Remix) – Lutzenkirchen
  10. Burning Head – Hell Driver
  11. Good Face – Unidivixion
  12. Red Lights (Bart Skils Motor Speedway Rework) – Victor Ruiz
  13. Down – Sven Wittekind
  14. D-Factor (Torsten Kanzler Remix) – Drumloch
  15. Dement (David Temessi Remix) – Joe Kendut, Mario Feinstaub
  16. Automaton (Dual Fuel Remix) – KoZY, SelfServe
  17. Crazy Horse – V111
  18. Ruins of an Empire – Ethan Fawkes
  19. Mosquitor – T78
  20. Sphinx – Tenebra Aeterna

Share

JD Pleks – Observation Post (techno mix)

Share

Recorded in January 2018 from lossless sources, this is 70 minutes of fairly hard techno, recorded in one take for an ‘as live’ feel – use the Soundcloud download below to get the mix in lossless AIFF format. The download direct from my site is MP3.

Right Click Here and ‘Save As’ to download Observation Post in 320kbps MP3

Tracks:

  1. Rising Phoenix – Frank Kvitta
  2. Kings Of The Highway (The Extraverse Remix) – Stoked
  3. Look What Your Love Has Done To Me – Perc, Gazelle Twin
  4. Untitled – Jacob B, DJOKO
  5. Stay With Me (Perc Remix) – Amelie Lens
  6. Stella – Thomas Schumacher
  7. Grizzlor – T78
  8. Distorcion – Guillermo DR
  9. Narkotic – Steve Shaden
  10. Dark Contact – Carara
  11. Get Away (Roentgen Limiter Remix) – Joseph Dalik
  12. The Music – Claas Herrmann
  13. Chained to a Dead Camel (Perc Remix) – Clouds
  14. Reactor Shutdown – Prodx

Share

Guest Mix on Banging Techno Sets

Share

I have been listening to mixes on Banging Techno Sets SoundCloud page for a little while now, and enjoy the range of styles they have on their regular podcasts – always staying true to their name, but each DJ has their own slant on the genre. After recording Future Dissident I sent them over a link to it, and they asked me to send them an exclusive 1 hour mix for one of their podcasts – this made me happy!

I decided that any mix I sent to them would have to be good (of course!) and also with as dynamic a mixture of tunes as I could fit into the time available – after a couple of aborted attempts I struck on what I thought was the right playlist, and then set about putting them together – I had a great time making this mix, more fun than I have had in a while – something about making a mix for someone else’s page just works for me (see the guest mix I did for Sonicrampage for another example).

This mix is number 160 in the Banging Techno Sets catalogue, and is available on SoundCloud and YouTube

Thanks to Banging Techno Sets for asking me to guest on their podcast – if you enjoy my techno mixes, give some of the other great DJs on there a spin – you’ll definitely find things you like!

Tracks

  1. Fastback – Hell Driver
  2. Choises – Letunlame
  3. No Worries – Sahaf
  4. Get Up – AnGy KoRe
  5. Exclusive Anthem (Hawk Remix) – DeepVoicee, Lewis Shephard
  6. Concrete – DigitalboyBdn
  7. Velow – Oruam Zior, Ruvick L
  8. Cubic Psycho Eighteen – Master Master
  9. Muriatik (Darmec Remix) – A.Paul
  10. Effet Papillon (Sopik Remix) – Tawa Girl
  11. Tope – LD962
  12. Rise of Darkness – GSR
  13. Not Amused (Silvano Scarpetta Remix) – LNO, ReneHell
  14. Aktion Mekanik Theme (Kobosil 44 Version) – Terence Fixmer
  15. Dark Moon – Tawa Girl
  16. Kaos – Giacomo Renzi
  17. Queen of Hearts (Charles Fenckler Remix) – Reform (IT)

Share

JD Pleks – Future Dissident (techno mix)

Share

Purism is a tedious game in any art form.

‘That’s not (insert very specific genre here)’ – I’ve been guilty of that myself on occasion. Probably will be again. Hypocrisy is a way of life.

This mix is 45 minutes of hard techno, with a couple of tracks thrown in that might piss off the techno puritans. So it goes.

Recorded in April 2017 from lossless sources – use the Soundcloud download below to get the mix in lossless AIFF format. The download direct from my site is MP3.

Right Click Here and ‘Save As’ to download Future Dissident in 320kbps MP3

Tracks:

  1. Intro
  2. Retrograde(Hell Driver Remix) – Darmec
  3. Substance – Steve Shaden
  4. Disco Roker – Lowerzone, DubCore
  5. 3481(A.PAUL Redub) – 100110110
  6. KRSS (Gene Karz, Lesia Karz Remix) – Jusai
  7. Contact – Felix Wehden
  8. Acid – Sergio Murcia
  9. Change(Axel Karakasis Remix) – Torsten Kanzler
  10. Global Waves – Dario Sorano
  11. Kick It – DJ Ogi
  12. Atompilzsammler(Fressfeind Remix) – Bjorn Zimmermann
  13. TH4 (Darpa Remix) – M.I.D.I.
  14. Digging – DJ Ogi
  15. No Words – Lowerzone, DubCore

Share

Down The Back Of The Sofa Vol. 1

Share

El Skelpo promotions present:

‘From Down The Back Of The Sofa’ Volume 1 – mixed by JD Pleks

A series of mixes made from tunes found down the back of the digital sofa – these could be forgotten  (and some not so forgotten) gems, tracks that are a bit quirky and didn’t fit in a promo set or those that were rejected from a set due to ‘musical differences’! There may also be the odd vinyl track thrown in as well if I feel the urge.

These may sometimes be a bit rougher round the edges than a promo set – the occasional shoe-horn may be applied to get everything to fit, but they should still be entertaining. Think more like a house party vibe than in the club – anything goes!

This first one is all Pleks – some house, some techno. Others may end up being collaborations between some or all of my alter-egos – who knows what the dusty crate digging will turn up!

You can download the mix in MP3 with the link below, or if you prefer it in lossless AIFF head over to my Soundcloud and download from there. You can also stream from there.


Hope you enjoy this one.

Right Click Here and ‘Save As’ to download Down The Back Of The Sofa Vol. 1 in 320kbps MP3

Tracks:

  1. Sister – Walker/Royce
  2. I Want You (Alan Fitzpatrick remix) – Trus’me
  3. Kukulcan – Cari Lekebusch
  4. Pangea – Dast
  5. Fusion Time (Josement Remix) – Luigi Monty
  6. Watching The Sunset I – Markus Suckut
  7. Human – Psyk
  8. Field Of Vision – Jeff Rushin
  9. Dead End (Michael Schwarz Remix) – Static Sense
  10. Nous Sommes MMM – MMM
  11. Daisycutter (Ayako Mori Remix) – DvX
  12. Lyse – Kobosil
  13. Warehouse Memories (Emmanuel AKNF Remix) – I Hate Models

Share