Merry MiX-mas! (and, um, cHappy cHaDJnukkah?)

'tis the season!

i DJed for three entirely different sorts of parties in the last week: a house dance party last saturday, a drag pageant after-party this saturday, and a congregational hanukkah party last night. all three were in west philly, all three were benefit events, and they were all a lot of fun and dancing, but otherwise very dissimilar vibes... and i played three quite different kinds of DJ sets.

at the house party, when my software DJ set up was effing up and i had to make-shift it with iTunes when it crashed every 15 minutes (oy oy oy stressache!!! but it worked out...) i played a fairly typical rossy mix of mid-to-up-tempo dance jams, electroni-pop flavored with some heavy soul mixed in and hip-hop sprinkles. left-field highlights incl. of montreal's "elegant caste," "i know what i know," "do wah diddy", and max tundra's batshit "orphaned." requests for kanye, fischerspooner, mgmt and 'retro.'

at miss west philly fabulous, the after-party kicked off in full-on diva-queen spectacle mode, with glitter raining from the ceiling fan as the winners of the pageant were crowned and trophied, and i played "you make me feel (mighty real)" > "hot stuff" > "gimme gimme gimme (a man after midnight)" > "hung up"... [some speaker/soundsystem issues but it got sorted soon enough.] i switched gears to hip-hop and booty beats before too long -- though not before i played don armando's second ave rhumba band's "i'm an indian too" and, of course, somebody had to come up to ask if it was by "an artist who identified as being of indigenous origin" or to that effect... [short answer: um...i'm not sure, i think they were mostly just latino and black... some interesting commentary on the issue here and here though...] tons of requests, more than i could keep up with, tho i tried: beyonce, rihanna, m.i.a., santogold, "no diggity," brothers johnson, kool and the gang, siouxsie/queen/u2 (none of which i had), young leek, busy signal, t.i., and j&mc to close it all out. i kept it pretty hip-hop/dancehall/bmore for a while (the bug, /rupture, ce'cile, rye rye!), but eventually i had to bring it back around to the diva anthems, starting with, i think, "please don't stop the music," then my two current favorite funky disco jams - eddie kendricks' "going up in smoke" and coke escovedo's brilliant, epochal "i wouldn't change a thing" - and then "i wanna dance with somebody" and cece p.'s "finally," into i think "sandcastle disco" woot woot! aw yeah.

and finally, at the hanukka hoo-hah (where i also served double-duty as accordionist for the klez band) i played completely different things from that. only one song overlap with what i played at either of the other parties. it was a sorta pan-ethnic (balkan/afrobeat/parisian/icelandic/bollywood/egyptian/malawian/motown) drums-and- horns-heavy globalized beat odyssey, ethno-techno, with some massive tunes courtesy of the currently unstoppable radioclit, and other travels, and some throwbacks, winding up back around with some old-school (for me) pop and 'lectro faves, and then another of my current obsessions (little boots' "stuck on repeat," which sounded kind of boring actually.) anyway, it was a lot of fun, and i finally got my setup working well enough that i was able to record the whole thing!!

so you can hear it!! - go here to download. it's mostly live; i just made some rough minor tweaks in garageband to nice it up a little bit.

here is the track list:
Kako Kolan Da Se Vijem - Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band
Quand Esct-Ce Qu'on Arrive - Balkan Beat Box
Broken Dreams - Basement Jaxx
Lets Get Wet (Louder Mix) - SoCalled
Bongo Song - Zongamin
One to One - Nomo
Roforofo Fight - Fela Kuti
First Down - Fatboy Slim
Fantatic 6 (Radioclit Remix) - Alphabeat
Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan - Matmos
Le Rhythme et La Cadence - Dimitri From Paris
There's More to Life Than This - Björk
Jimmy - M.I.A.
Tamenouni Enek - Mohamed Hamaki
Sister Betina - The Very Best
Cobrastyle (Radioclit Remix) - Teddybears
Circles - Soul Coughing
Take Me To The River - Talking Heads
Strange Overtones - David Byrne and Brian Eno
End of the Road - Gladys Knight and Pips
Psychedelic Shack - Temptations
Caveman Boogie - Lesette Wilson
Stuck on Repeat - Little Boots
Spare Parts Express - Orbital

my only regret is that i didn't manage to work in ricardo villalobos' fizheuer zieheuer, which would have been a more fitting comedown/finale. (listen to it there on youtube and interpolate it in in your mind.) the big huge honking standout is that radioclit alphabeat remix, which sounds absolutely nothing like the original (which i also love a fair amount) - i think all they took from it was the "whoo whoo!" - but may be the most happy-making piece of music i've heard all year. it just effervesces. sing it with me: ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah, ah! ah-ah-ah ah! ah! ah! (disco-disclosure: i bugged out to that same track, in the same space, on friday night, as spun by a certain dj ginkgo, a fellow with whom i shall have to have some words...)

so there you go, a little holiday present for you all... enjoy enjoy! and dance dance dance!

more to come too... all of this DJing has got me suddenly really-excited about 2008 music. fueling my fire these days, in particular - in addition to radioclit - are rye rye and yelle, two break-out upstarts (from baltimore and bretagne, respectively) who seem not to be getting the typical amount of love from the predictable places... not sure why that would be. many thanx to xtorrent too, which i've just gotten to start working again.

anyway, the plan now is full-speed-ahead on making a new years mix for '08 - i'd been feeling kinda iffy about it but now i'm pumped. my current thought is that i may also do a stand-alone, unmixed best of 2008, with some track overlap but intended more for listening than dancing per se. my top ten tracks list is coming into focus. (just gotta figure out how to integrate some recenter lovelies.) stay tooned for that.

and in any case, i fully hope to have a maxi-mix ready for revellers in plenty of time for new years - by next sunday, at the latest (and likeliest.) so get hyped for that too.