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

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.

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