• • • low end theory

Anonymous asked: What's your DJ mixtape process?

I went digging for that Fred Moten quotation last week because I remembered being bowled over about something he said about improvisation. The way I remembered it, or misremembered it as the case may be, went something like this: improvisation is the sometimes doggedly repetitious and sometimes the intensely playful process where you prepare yourself to be unprepared, in order to play among others. It’s putting in work that sometimes feels like work and sometimes like play in order to work on your capacity to play freely within certain constraints. The image this conjures up for me is one of John Coltrane waking up at six in the morning, every morning, and just playing scales for hours. Scales. There’s a lot of creative ways to play scales but when you’re playing scales you’re not playing notes as much as you’re training yourself on the relations between sounds. Scales are the codified articulation of sounds, one next to and after the other. Scales exist as a way of dealing with an infinity of combinations. Needless to say, I’m no Coltrane on the turntables. But my approach is improvisational.

When I make a mixtape, or when I do a gig, I rarely know what I’m going to play beforehand. Sure, I’ll know that at some point I am going to have to drop “My Neck, My Back,” and I’ll know that that sounds good thematically before that raunchy Team Sonar song or Lil’ Kim’s “How Many Licks,” and that it it mixes well with various other songs in the 99-105 beats per minute (BPM) range, but I’ll rarely commit to playing it beforehand if it doesn’t fit the mood, or if I think there are too many straight cisguys in the room who are probably going to have a different embodied relationship to the raunch than to the queers and queers of color that I’m used to spinning for.

I usually start by looking for two songs that seem to share something, whether that something is a theme or simply the fact that they sound really good next to each other, and I improvise from there. This involves some messing around until, for example, I find out that Robyn’s “None of Dem” somehow sounds pretty good over Prince’s opening moans in “Cream” I generally decide beforehand which BPM range I’m going to start in and plan to move into a different range at least once in the course of the mixtape. I try to drop my favorites at special moments. If you’ve ever seen me spin live, you know that you’re going to hear “Fuck the Pain Away” at some point in the night. I like spinning 90s stuff because if you’re somewhere around the same age as I am, that’s likely going to be the stuff that you were listening to at the point in your life when it was really important to know every lyric. I also think that a surprising amount of 90s popular hip hop and R&B, from New Jack Swing on, has survived that era well enough that you don’t have to have a 90s themed night in order to hear it and have it sound fresh.

Long story short, I don’t have much of a process in putting together a mixtape. The process is really getting to know and love the music well enough to improvise, and to get relatively (but not overly) confident that even when a song combination or a transition doesn’t sound as smooth as it might if you had planned it beforehand, you’re still getting to play music that you love and that you want other people to love as much as you do. So really, the essential ingredients that have gotten me this far have included the right equipment, a well-organized and extensive music collection, a lot of love, and a dash of well-placed nostalgia to top it off. I improvise from there.