NewSc2

Where do I go after drinking quite possibly the best beer ever created (Pliny the Younger, #2 in the world) and the most expensive liquor I’ve ever had? (Pierre Ferrand Cognac, Distilled in 1914)

That’s right, nowhere.

I’ve discovered a few things in the past several weeks of debauchery: 1) Alcohol can cause you to say dumb things (it can also make you feel happy sometimes). 2) Your liver is on the right side of your body (which doesn’t explain the aches I get on the left side of my abdomen). 3) I don’t think I’m a huge fan of cognacs.

Russian River’s Pliny the Younger triple IPA and Consecration sour ale were released a couple weeks ago, and have been hitting some of the local beer bars recently. I prepared myself for the ride, but I’d already been semi-binge drinking over the past several weeks anyway.

Both beers were ridiculously delicious, and totally worth the $9-13/pint I paid for the dozen or so pints I had.

Hi-Time Wine Cellar held a cognac tasting yesterday in Irvine. The h’ors d’evours (I hope I spelled that right) were actually very good. Frequent trips to the lunch table, a couple feet from our table, kept things in check.

Thirteen cognacs were served, ranging from around $100 to “$1500″ for a cognac distilled by French women in 1914 while their husbands were fighting the war. I say “$1500″ because the Pierre Ferrand rep wasn’t exactly sure how much they were going for (”$1000 or $1500″), and Hi-Time had one bottle left for $600. Anyway, it was extremely good, but the two snobs gentlemen across from us were obviously enjoying it more than I was. They ended up buying the bottle.

Fortunately, I’ve only put on one or two extra pounds over the past couple months, so my body’s at least kept it together. I can’t say I’ve been extremely productive, though, so I’m taking a break off the C2H5OH for a couple weeks to let things settle down.

Nothing much else to update in the life of Tony — the past several days have been lazy and enjoyable. I turned on my drum machines a couple days ago and went through some patterns I saved over Christmas. I haven’t felt like DJing lately, but I’m still listening to huge amounts of new music (at least a few hundred tracks and 5-6 hours of sets) each week. Maybe turning the knobs and pushing the buttons will keep me going.

It’s geeky, I know. See the post below.

I spent the weekend working at the LA Pen Show, so I decided to give myself a little gift.

I bought my first ever luxury pen purchase (a Visconti fountain pen), a bottle of purple Montblanc ink, and a few Rhodia notepads. The ink looks great, and the pen is very pretty, but the nib is (imo) not as good as our Taccia nibs — it writes too wet. Hopefully it’ll break in after a couple fills.

@ The LA Pen Show

The nights are cold, and the days rainy, but spring training is here and the Angels just picked up Bobby Abreu (older MLB player = steroids?).

I’ve really never been a huge fan of the game of baseball (I’m more of an NBA guy), but going to the games always felt like a summer thing to do. Long nights will always be kinder to my circadian rhythms, but the beach beckons.

Wow, I just used 3 “but” sentences in a row. Strunk & White are rolling in their graves. I better quit while I’m ahead.

I was supposed to read up on FM synthesis tonight, but it’s already 2:20am…

I’ve been spending the last couple hours going back in time, browsing through some old blog posts and emails. It might just be psychological, but my recent posts seem more fluid than the older ones.

Journal entries used to take a few proofreads before I became comfortable enough to publish them. Lately, though, my first drafts have come out fairly well-edited. Not all of them, of course, but I’ve seen a few good examples here and there.

Posts still get edited, but the time spent on each one is a little less than before. Slaving through that extra hour of re-writing and re-wording sentences seems to have paid off. Useless words like “really”, “pretty”, “sorta”, etc., don’t pop up in my sentences as often, and I feel like I have a better command of writing techniques.

I still have a problem with using “I” too much in my communication — I need to learn to talk about the issue directly, and not dumping me (as the subject) into it. I overuse phrases like “I think”, “I feel”, and “I guess.” Maybe it’s a self-confidence thing? Then again, there’ll always be issues out there that I’m uncertain about, and I like prefacing my points with a cop-out like “I think.”

While I’m here, I guess I should continue onto some life updates. It’s almost mid-February, and 2009’s been fairly hectic — emotionally, physically, and intellectually. (Girls, liver, work, and music)

The economic downturn is definitely here. I’ve had to revise my company’s 2009 sales projections a couple times, and never in the happy direction.

I thought my company was in a decent position to weather any dips; a lot of our competitors apparently went through historic lows in 2H 2008 (we, on the other hand, did very well). Other pen brands are now in the middle of jettisoning off overstocked items, though, so we’ve suddenly had to compete with closeout items across the board.

My company’s done a pretty good job at keeping expenses low, so I’m not that worried — yet. But I’ve been thinking about cutting my salary to shave off even more expenses, and maybe going back to a 4-day work week for a few months. The proper way out of this sales slump probably isn’t less work, but I think could use the extra day off.

I took Mondays off last summer, and most were meditative (some were a total waste of time). It was nice to come out of a weekend and have a full day to go to the HB Library, or the beach, and read. I’ve been falling behind on photography and web design, and those are skills that I could use to benefit my company. I guess I’ll give it some serious thought when I review numbers at the end of this month.

Other than that, music has been coming along. I thought 2009 would be more production oriented, but as you can tell from my last few blog posts, DJing has taken over. The last mix I did (the 166 min. one) turned out to be a pleasant surprise, and I’ve been listening to the 2nd hour of it daily. I made a few mistakes in the first hour that I wouldn’t mind fixing, but the second hour (75 min. to 135 min., to be exact) hits a nice groove.

That mix took a lot out of me, though. I try not to record the same songs for multiple mixes, and in that set I pretty much used all of the tracks I bought over the past couple months. I’m not really sure how circuit DJs can play the same songs throughout a tour. Heck, I can’t even fathom how rock bands can practice a song 500 times to perfection, and then play it 500 more throughout their careers, with the same lyrics, solos, fills, and chord progressions.

Maybe it’s the improviser in me thinking, but there’s a certain thrill in spending 3-4 minutes desperately searching for that perfect song to segue into, and seeing hearing it work, live. When I get too familiar with songs mixing begins to feel bland and prepared.

Hm, what else… I was going to sign up for an online techno production course in February but it was fully booked. I might consider it in March. I’m not sure why production’s taken such a back seat lately — I wrote some decent stuff throughout January. I think the lack of deadlines and physical reward has been tempering my interest. Hopefully a class, or at least some sort of tangible external influence, will keep me motivated.

Anyway, this entry has dragged on longer than it should. It’s 3:20am now (there goes my theory of fluid writing skills), and I should get to bed.

Forget about me trying to hold back from slaughtering this blog with mixes, cuz it’s probably going to continue. I’m going to call this one my Pliny the Elder mix. The last mix was my Pliny the Younger/Stone Russian Imperial Stout mix, and the mix before that was my Ruination/Old Rasputin/Orion mix. (Hint: those are the beers I drank before/during the mix)

I took some of your guys’s comments into consideration, and I had a long discussion with Sellers about DJ theory yesterday. A few things bothered me about my last sets. I really like them both — they’re not generic — but after listening to them a few times 1) they didn’t seem like they would work on a dance floor, 2) some rushed song changes — I would’ve liked to hear a few of those songs for more than a couple minutes, and 3) they sort of lacked a good general direction.

Points 2 and 3 seemed like they were there because my mixes were only about an hour long. I’m not sure if anyone could easily tell, but a few of my mixes weren’t perfect — songs would either end too early or come in too fast. I’m still trying to work on that, and I’m also trying to kill songs better by throwing them into the background and having the incoming song grab the listener.

Most of my songs are 7-10 min., and I’d cut most out around the 4 minute mark. So with this mix, I let songs breathe more (hopefully not by too much).

It’s a much longer mix, clocking in at 2 hours, 45 minutes, and it’s meant to be a club-style mix, bringing the night in with Deep House and going into Techno and Progressive.

The first 50 minutes are soft, inviting, and building, and after a brief (25 min.) melodic techno (trance?) transition, the meat of the mix gets to some grooving techno. It finishes off with 30 minutes of soothing progressive.

A few things I learned:
- Leaning over a laptop and mixer for 3+ hours is kinda hard on the legs. I can only imagine how it feels for those 8+ hour sets.
- A 2 hour, 45 min. mix takes a long time. Including some basic song organizing and setting up, I started around 11pm and didn’t finish till about 3am.
- Ableton’s song timer isn’t 100% accurate (it varies by BPM).
- 2 minutes left in a song = 30 seconds to set up your next song before the mood starts to die.
- Loop, loop, loop!
- Songs within a Beatport crate (i.e. bought at the same time) generally go better together than songs purchased a month, or even a few weeks prior.
- Need more dancy Deep House, need more groovy Techno.
- Cirez D is Eric Prydz aka Pryda. Did not know that. Played 2 of his songs in this mix =X
- 1 bottle of Pliny the Elder is good for about 2 hours of mixing.

Without further ado: (166 min.)
NewSc2-2009-02-07_(Long).mp3

Hate to slaughter the blog with sets, but here’s another new mix. It’s a deeper/chiller mix than the one below (probably cuz of the rain). Pretty dubby and slightly housy. I don’t have a tracklist handy, but off the top of my head I remember some Solomun & Stimming, Henrik Schwarz, 16 Bit Lolitas, John Digweed, and Ben Klock.

I got into this sort of dub techno phase about a month ago, after I listened to Lee Burridge’s RA podcast. I’ve since gotten back into more dancier stuff (a la the set below), but I wanted to capture this mood before it slipped outta my system.

P.S. Keep the feedback coming! Thanks to all of you who actually downloaded and listened to my last mix

Download and listen: (58 min)
NewSc2-2009-02-05 Deep Techno, Dub House

Just finished recording it. This is the first mix I’ve recorded in months, so I’m curious to see how it differs from my last few mixes. My songs have definitely gotten a lot darker, and my track selection has been heavily influenced by Berghain techno.

Download and have a listen: (62min.)
2009-02-01 Dark Techno Mix