As I tweeted last week, I’ve started digitizing old mixtapes. So here’s one of our faves, a DJ mix from about 1997 by Toronto’s DJ Brano, now split into Side A and Side B (for easier downloading). Whether Brano’s DJ career went anywhere or was a casualty of the high-turnover talent pool of Toronto’s fickle after-hours economy, I don’t know. What I do know is that this mix still kicks like a mule. I think we called this acid-happy-house-trance sound “progressive” then, but it’s a bit eclectic; it’s different from the “progressive” sounds of Deep Dish and the Global Underground series. (Eclectic selection is the scarce resource commanded by great DJs, but ironically it’s too often lost on a market tuned to bafflingly purist micro-niches.)
And the media trajectory’s its own story: here’s a DJ’s mix of vinyl records, mastered to a tape, mass produced on tape, dubbed on a double-cassette deck (anyone remember those?), digitized as an mp3, and uploaded to a file host. All so I can broadcast it (of all the played-out platforms!) from my iPod to the car stereo — which is where it used to get the most play, back when we had a car whose stereo played tapes (anyone remember those?).
PS: Anybody who can ID the first track and/or the track that mixes in at 46 minutes (it’s a happy number with piano and female vocals) will be thenceforth owed a huge favour to call in.
