A wise man once said that the real purpose of setting a goal is what it makes you while you are pursuing it. We become our future selves through the challenges we encounter – which in many cases are the challenges we set up for ourselves. Per aspera ad astra et cetera, right? Sometimes being thrown in the deep end is the only way to fly, if you will excuse the mangled metaphor.
I have spent most of the past week feeling very much like I had been thrown in the deep end (mostly in a good way), and this mix was the Friday night decompression session that came at the end of it. As the name suggests, it is a dive into some of the deeper tracks I have been digging lately. However under the pump, out of your depth, or up the creek you find yourself, may this mix fill your ears with happy thoughts.
I have often thought aloud that I would rather be busy than bored. In that context, the past few weeks have been quite enjoyable. Work and school are both meters-pegged-to-the-red in terms of workload as I write this, but as I see it you are never too busy to celebrate successes when and where they come along. Episode 014 of Music For Small Audiences is the fruit of a little celebration, a Friday night in with a bottle of French bubbles and a box of new tunes. Deep and groovy with a positive vibe, this two-hour live mix is a soundtrack both for getting busy, and for celebrations well-earned through perseverance.
Some things in life get more interesting the further away you get from them. Other things move so quickly that if you blink you can miss them. Perspective is everything – and while we all view the world through our own unique lenses, I think most would agree that there is an exciting and ephemeral magic in getting up close and personal with a fast-moving thing, be it a bird, plane, or person. Fleeting moments strung together make a story – and as a recently reformed dynamic duo once observed, tricky time never slows. This mix is for those who use repetitive melodic music the way I do, to freeze time and crawl into a moment from a distance. It is called The Romance Of The Telescope, and it is Episode 013 of Music For Small Audiences.
Sometimes just a little bit is enough – and sometimes too much is OK too. It is true with hot sauce, and it is true with life. Episode 012 of Music For Small Audiences is deep and moody mix. It gets its name in part from my ability to sometimes go hard on capsaicin-based condiments, and in part from the string of very warm late summer days we enjoyed here in Melbourne during the week this mix was put together. It runs two hours and twelve minutes long, and if you have enjoyed my podcasts so far then you should be just fine settling in for a proper listen with this one.
And so it is that Episode 011 of Music For Small Audiences is upon us. Here we have a two-and-a-half hour mix of melodic grooves – at once both sparse and emotive, with an easy beginning, a bouncy middle, and a thought-provoking exit. In here you’ll hear a bit of progressive house, a little bit of the more mainstream stuff, and a whole lot of love.
Mixed live in Richmond, Australia in the heat of the southern summer.
This is Episode 010 of Music For Small Audiences. Here in Australia, we are in the middle of a long weekend, thanks to a statutory holiday called Australia Day. It is a long-running tradition that the radio station triple j counts down its “hottest 100” every Australia Day counting down the hundred biggest tunes of the year. With that in mind, to celebrate having made it to ten podcasts, I thought I would pull together a bit of a hit parade of my own. It’s not really a countdown, but a trip through some of the songs that have been putting a spring in my step over the past twelve months.
The inspiration for this mix can be traced to four events: a long week in Denmark for my good friend Dan’s 40th birthday in June, a Stampede week set at Habitat in Calgary in July, a marathon mix-up with superstar DJ Andrew Campbell (aka Soups) in early December, and a house party on New Years Eve celebrating Luke Porter’s return to Melbourne. Many of the songs in this mix featured in those sets, and it has been good fun putting them all into one place. Unlike my previous podcasts this mix has been crafted in Ableton Live, with some parts played live and others arranged by hand and tweaked until they sit just right. There is a lot going on, so if you have a good pair of headphones or quality speakers, dial it up, kick back and enjoy.
Summer is well and truly here in Melbourne, with today being the start of a forecast four day heat wave with temperatures in the 40C+ range. Here’s hoping my air conditioner can cope.
Episode 009 of Music For Small Audiences is called Don’t Forget The Vouchers, and it is a collection of beautiful melodies – some simple, and some complex.
For as long as I’ve been listening to music my preference has been for beat-driven melodies (as my family, who will readily recall my favourite marching band records note for note, will attest). To me, the vast majority of dance music has always seemed devoid of deeply emotive melody. Too much of it seems to lean either towards saccharine hooks and musical cliches, or towards bleeps, bloops, boring beats, and over-reliance on the build-up/breakdown tension/release cycle.
On this mix you’ll find a thorough exploration of many types of deep and emotive melodic moments. From the simple, such as a single note melody backed by suspended chords or hypnotic and evolving one-chord grooves, through to radio friendly vocal tracks and epic instrumental progressive trance, there’s a bit of something in here for everyone, with the big melodies and the small framed against each other across a two-and-a-bit hour mix. It was mixed live late last year.
Happy new year! The start of a new calendar year is always an exciting time. The past twelve months have been exceptionally pleasant for me, and hopefully they’ve been pretty good for you too. This is Episode 008 of Music For Small Audiences, and it’s called How Many Watts Is That Lightbulb? It’s just over two hours long, and it’s a largely instrumental mix of groove-driven progressive house and melodic techno, punctuated with regular deep dives down to the slow-and-low and a couple of very energetic high points. I like instrumental mixes – they give thoughts room to breathe.
May your thoughts breathe deeply and easily, and I hope you have a happy new year.
This is Episode 007 of Music For Small Audiences. It’s a two hour and twelve minute mix, and it gets its name from the fact that, well, I like the idea of a girl with a bicycle. Bicycles are a unique form of transportation – fun and practical, they give you both independence and fitness. I like both of these traits in people. Hope you enjoy the mix!
Episode 006 of Music For Small Audiences is called Six Dishes Beats Four Decks. It’s a 90-minute mix of groovy tunes. The name comes from the acknowledgement that we are all good at different things, and from the understanding that anything we put our mind to and practice consistently, we will get at least passably good at. There are times – such as when I am hungry – that I wonder how much better I would eat if I put as much time in to learning to cook as I have in to learning to mix music together. Having seen someone juggle six dishes, I must say I am impressed. I have enough trouble BBQing a steak and pan-frying cheese at the same time.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that it takes on the order of 10,000 hours of proper effort in order to master a given area of expertise. Given how many hours each of us is allotted to spend here on earth in a single lifetime, I guess that means you can only get so good at so many things. Does that mean we should choose our hobbies carefully? Or merely that we are what we repeatedly do?
Episode 005 of Music for Small Audiences is called Free And Clear. It was recorded as a live set a few days ago, and the title and content reflect my mood this week, having finished a rather challenging semester of study. Now, with the southern summer rolling in, the days are getting longer and the sunsets pinker, and I am feeling the relief of not having to juggle work, study and personal priorities until the fall semester starts up in late February.
This mix is 83 minutes long in total. The first hour or so is deep and melodic progressive house. There are some big names in here, and some little ones, some new tunes and some old ones, with a bit of a twist at the end. Enjoy, and whatever you are up to, peace.
Episode 004 of Music For Small Audiences was mixed live a few weeks ago, during the first week of Daylight Savings Time here in Australia. With the arrival of Daylight Savings Time, the sun returns to the evenings, opening up a whole world of weekday evening options.
Spring in Melbourne being what it is, the weather changes quickly. ‘Four seasons in a day’ is a well-worn cliche that actually describes the variability pretty well. One of the more unusual weather phenomena we seem to see during the spring is rain falling while it is sunny. It is not something I am used to seeing, and I find it special every time it happens. This mix starts out with the sounds of rain, and works through four seasons of its own from house to ambient and back again, over the course of two hours and two minutes. I hope it brightens and brings a refreshing change to your day wherever you are.
This is Episode 003 of Music for Small Audiences. I have called it Fonda and the Five Minute Banana Bread. Fonda is a Mexican restaurant. Five minute banana bread is troublesome, because it doesn’t take long to make and tastes very, very good.
My intention in making these podcasts available was to showcase a broader side to my musical tastes. This mix covers a lot of ground in this regard, starting with laid-back electronica and working its way through some downtempo grooves of varying intensity for the first forty minutes or so, before settling into a deep groove that builds and bubbles away over the course of the ninety minutes that follows. It was mixed live.
Episode 002 of Music For Small Audiences is called “The Heater Is On Wheels”. It is just under two hours in length, and while it covers plenty of ground in terms of tempo and energy level, it’s underpinned throughout by warm and creatively tuned melodies and expressive grooves.
I have always enjoyed the interplay between electronic and acoustic instruments, and particularly the less-than-perfect timing and tuning that any ‘real’ instrument has as a result of its real-ness. To me, some of the real creativity in electronic music production is found in creatively modulating pitch and groove in a manner similar to that which one might expect to hear from an acoustic instrument. Rather than being stifled by rhythms locked down to millisecond-perfect grids and tuning left pitch-perfect to the exact cent, the songs in this mix breathe and wander, combining both the warmth of real instruments and the precision of modern technology. Mixed live on a cold southern spring evening, this mix should bring a warm change to your ears whatever your weather.
This is episode 001 of Music For Small Audiences. It is a live set recorded last month after a particularly nice weekend away on Australia’s southern coast, in a little town called Airey’s Inlet on the Great Ocean Road, about two hours west of Melbourne.
A wise man once said that the real purpose of setting a goal is what it makes you while you are pursuing it. We become our future selves through the challenges we encounter – which in many cases are the challenges we set up for ourselves. Per aspera ad astra et cetera, right? Sometimes being thrown in the deep end is the only way to fly, if you will excuse the mangled metaphor.
Sometimes just a little bit is enough – and sometimes too much is OK too. It is true with hot sauce, and it is true with life. Episode 012 of Music For Small Audiences is deep and moody mix. It gets its name in part from my ability to sometimes go hard on capsaicin-based condiments, and in part from the string of very warm late summer days we enjoyed here in Melbourne during the week this mix was put together. It runs two hours and twelve minutes long, and if you have enjoyed my podcasts so far then you should be just fine settling in for a proper listen with this one.
Happy new year! The start of a new calendar year is always an exciting time. The past twelve months have been exceptionally pleasant for me, and hopefully they’ve been pretty good for you too. This is Episode 008 of Music For Small Audiences, and it’s called How Many Watts Is That Lightbulb? It’s just over two hours long, and it’s a largely instrumental mix of groove-driven progressive house and melodic techno, punctuated with regular deep dives down to the slow-and-low and a couple of very energetic high points. I like instrumental mixes – they give thoughts room to breathe.
Episode 005 of Music for Small Audiences is called Free And Clear. It was recorded as a live set a few days ago, and the title and content reflect my mood this week, having finished a rather challenging semester of study. Now, with the southern summer rolling in, the days are getting longer and the sunsets pinker, and I am feeling the relief of not having to juggle work, study and personal priorities until the fall semester starts up in late February.
