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