About Music For Small Audiences

From a very young age, I’ve taken great joy in listening to music and sharing it with friends. Science has proven what many of us already know – that listening to a special song at the right moment can trigger the brain’s reward mechanisms just as powerfully as any other source. For me, a profoundly pleasurable musical experience – the sort of big moment that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and a warm feel-good flush wash over your body – is truly transcendent.

Music can of course also serve just as powerful a purpose when it sits in the background, setting the mood and framing a broader experience. Consider how the soundtrack to a movie provides emotional guidance for a scene, or how music at a moderate volume in a lounge or living room creates ambience to underpin spirited conversation or quiet contemplation.

My aim with this podcast is to alternately present music capable of creating both of these types of moments. As such, it is best enjoyed with a proper sound system or good quality headphones and an active imagination.

As for my motivations, well, I’ve always been a fan of musical ‘show and tell’, from handing out mixed tapes in high school and swapping CD-R compilations in university, through to my time behind the counter at record shop Vinyl Warning (now Store DJ), as a music journalist, and through playing radio shows and DJ sets at bars, nightclubs, house parties, get togethers, weddings, engagement parties, fashion shows and warehouse parties. In the noughties I held weekly and monthly residencies in nightclubs in Melbourne and Calgary alongside some extraordinarily talented progressive and underground house DJs, as well as numerous support gigs for touring internationals. During that time I learned a lot about how good music affects both groups and individuals at many different levels.

Some of my strongest friendships have been forged through sharing and experiencing music, but as we get older we seem to spread ourselves out both geographically and in terms of our priorities. The easy days of getting a group of friends together to play and talk tunes for hours on end have become fewer and further between.

And so, in a virtual sense, that’s what this podcast is. It’s a chance to present some of the music that I like both old and new, mixed live by hand and presented as the sort of set I’d play in a casual environment on a good sound system to a small audience of good friends.

From a technical perspective, I’m presently mixing on a Native Instruments Kontrol S4 MK3 + X1 MK2, a Stanton ST150 with an Ortofon Arkiv elliptical cart, a Roland TR8, a Cyclone Analogic TT303 and a just arrived Roland S1. External gear is kept in check by an FMR Audio RNC compressor, and in sync by an Audiowerkstatt MIDI clock shifter.

Source material is mostly FLAC and vinyl with an occasional bit of Soundcloud or similar MP3 skulduggery as needed. Most of the episodes have a bit of creative flourish (original edits, remixes, reworks etc) within. Tracks are presented at their original BPM and pitch (unless there is a very specific reason otherwise), with keylock etc off as much as possible. The mixes are recorded limiter-free, and are mastered very gently with as much respect to the original dynamics as possible (even at the expense of a few dB – that’s what volume knobs are for). This means what you hear in the final mix for each episode is what each track’s producers and engineers intended things to sound like, and will not fatigue the ears after extended close-quarters listening. At every point in the process from the phono preamps to the MP3 encoder settings, the focus is on retaining the sonic integrity and musicality of the tracks presented with no gimmicks. It is 100% talk free, with no IDs, voiceovers or commentary.

It’s called Music For Small Audiences, and if you’re reading this, then I made it for you. You can find it on the iTunes store here. Alternatively you can stream or download each episode right from this website just by clicking on each episode from the front page. The first hundred episodes are also on Mixcloud (does anyone still use Mixcloud?). If you’re an iPhone/iOS person, I personally use and love Overcast as a podcast app.

New episodes are generally uploaded once every 6-8 weeks, and vary in length.