#240825: dragxfunk grounded aftermath
⎋/~
I want to write about everything regarding the performance presenting material for the new album, now titledDRAGX̶FUNK, which happened this last thursday.
First of all, let me get to the positive: I'm very honoured to be able to play on this festival. Very few people are making things this way, where curious, progressive taste in music meets curious and passionate activist organizing. Grounded is a festival of critical thought and cutting edge club music.
I also think that my presentation was quite good (I want to say O.K.). I received very positive feedback from number of people. I feel it was structured in a way that it functioned quite well most of the time. Also, I had all material prepared the day before, and that's quite an achievement for me, who too often procrastinates to the very last minute and then delivers bad or at best mediocre result, because they ran out of time. Having all tracks ready and prepared for the performance was great. I was able to make additional choices on the day of performance, fix some mistakes and so more or less everything ran smoothly at the end. I was able to take time to fix my appearance.
However, a few things I need to work on and mistakes I need to learn from:
On a number of tracks mix was not as good as I wanted it to be. I exagerated with saturation in many places. This made some layers less clear and they were overlaping in conficting ways. Lubricate Me had very muddy low end where I felt (at least on the stage) that bassline completely overpowered bass-kicks. Mixing of all these tracks needs more time. I revisited an article that discusses ear-fatigue in mixing process and how ears (and brain!) change over time and with different levels when working on a track while it is in this process of mixing.
I'm not sure I liked to simply mix these track in a DJ fashion as a live presentation. However, I have only recently (few days ago) discovered the quantize function in MIXXX (software for DJing). Together with sync, saved cues, live effects, this presents an amazing opportunity to be much much faster in mixing in shorter additional tracks or loops. This means a lot more of 'supplementary' material can be prepared and effectively mixed in a live session. At the same time, a 'deeper', more hands-on way of working with beats and basslines and melodic material is what I desire. It's a big topic and I have some more ideas.
I have prepared special versions of tracks for this presentation with some additional beats and sounds and so on. This took me extra time, and I somewhat need to remember this, that such preparation does need a fair amount of extra time and energy. It seems obvious and nothing new but to a degree I'm a bit unhappy about it most probably because I'm not yet finished with the album. I know I need more time and energy and dedication now to finish the tracks both compositionally and in terms of mixing them. Additionally, that final presentation in december will again need focus and attention, including directing the show in some capacity. And this last week - it was additional work just for this one time showing.
So all that have left me feeling somehow unsatisfied.
I have allowed myself to rest a bit for a few days now and I hope I can go back to material tomorrow (Monday!) and make it work for the album. Essentially the timeline now consist a finish of the compositional stuff, finalize all the mixing in about 14 days, perhaps 3 weeks. I'm not sure if It then goes to mastering. In the meanwhile I hope we can arrive at final texts for the booklet, webcover, and send it to print, start the PR campaign and publish a pre-order.
The release date is now 5/december when we also perform it at Kamizdat Rentgen (and sell out all the booklets! ;-))
footnote
An article titled "How to Avoid Ear Fatigue while Mixing" at waves.com
One of the most maddening elements of mixing is that our brain is always actively trying to balance our hearing to the environment we are listening in. It is constantly adapting to make what we hear intelligible. This means it’s increasing our sensitivity to higher frequencies when the music sounds dull, and desensitizing them when the mix is bright or harsh. So the tendency will be to push more high frequencies as our senses dull; rinse and repeat this process over the course of a few hours and you can quickly see where this is going.
That's all for this week. I'll write again very soon!
As always, thank you for your generous support, patience, and being part of The Backstairs Tone journey. I hope next week treats you well! 💚
