Life continues at pace at Soft Towers... we're having some major building work at our home, walls being ripped out, bathrooms being destroyed and rebuilt, all of which is having a temporary impact on our quality of life. Our Music room/Miko's Office/Spare Bedroom/Womb Room (where Back to Mine is broadcast from ) is currently our temporary storage facility for our bedroom wadrobe meaning that for the next couple of weeks I physically can't get to the decks to play records for you all, and when all this work is finish, my frankly awesome mother-in-law is coming to stay for three weeks so this might be the last BTM for a while or at least the irregularity of this years broadcasts will probably continue for a while longer.
This set was fraught with technical issues so is shorter than usual; the first 30 minutes was full of hardware failures and software crashes, which I'm putting down to a distinct dislike between Torq (my DJ software) and, rather surprisingly, Chrome (my favourite browser). If I use Chrome before or during a DJ set, then Torq really starts to suffer. It beachballs and now even crashes outright, even if I shut down Chrome all together. There something lurking in the background, like an old TSR programme that Torq doesn't like. Anyway, after a reboot and some frustrated wails, it all managed to hang together for the last 60 minutes or so. Here's the...
Tracklisting
Seams - Platz
Mogwai - Monaco Grand Prix
Booka Shade - Regenerate
Actress - Let's Fly
Aphex Twin - XMD 5a
Martin Buttrich - Well Done (Serafin remix)
Posthuman - Lander (Global Good remix)
Noraj Cue - Release Me
Tok Tok vs. Soffy O. - Missy Queen (Mitte Karaoke remix)
9B0 - Sad Cat (Flack.su remix)
My lovely Macbook Pro has been acting a bit erratic, recently and one of the concerns I had about was the decreasing amount of space on my hard drive so after reading ExtremeTech's awesome step-by-step guide numerous times and popped down to maplins and bought myself a new 2.5" 320BG sata drive and some torx screwdrivers and set about some minor laptop surgery. The fact that I'm now writing this blog post on said machine is testament to the good people at ExtremeTech and their awesomely well written guide, but why it's taken so long for me to update my blog is down to the odd behaviour of Maxtor.
I use Time Machine (as all good Mac people do) because it works and is amazingly easy to use - it's even part of Mac Os X's installer package (since 10.5 onwards) so when you're doing what what I was doing it's real easy to restore your Mac to where it was before whatever has caused you to do the restore. I don't use Time Capsule because, well, I'm not made of money and to be honest any external drive will do, so I use a 1TB Maxtor usb external drive for Time Machine.
After I'd installed the new hard drive, I popped in the OsX 10.5 installer and chose "Restore sytem from Time Machine" option from the Utilities menu and it found the Time Machine and my last full back up and set it off running. And waited. 12 hours later it was still stating restoring (with the blue barber shop poll twirling away). "Never mind" I thought, "be patient; this is a system restore on the same machine you're restoring on to , using a CD restore boot - this might take a while. 24 hours later, still nothing. Still whirring away. "Be patient" I mantra'd. 48 hours later and I think my patience was misplaced, so I cancel the restore and think what could be causing the failure of the restore.
Just for shits and giggles I decided to swap out the unmarked cable that Maxtor supplied with drive for a Amazon Basics marked USB 2.0 cable and started again. In a few minutes we'd progressed passed the barber poll and on to a timed status bar that happily told me 4 hours, and lo! 4 hours later I've got my machine back. I'm in complete bafflement why Maxtor woudl supply an (apparantly) usb 1 cable with a usb2 1Tb drive and if you want a moral to take away from this it's: If in doubt - check your cables. :)
So here's what you've been missing: 3 sets, the first from the welcome return of MondayHatesYou, the one day a week Second Life club/website that's here to make that return to the grindstone a whole lot better for you. I opted for (no suprises here) a future garage set and I'm pretty happy how it turned out:
Tracklisting
Sepalcure - Inside
Sepalcure - Every Day of my life
Alcosta Blvd - Deep
Julio Bashmore - Around
Kidkanevil - The floating world (Eliphino rmx)
FaltyDL - To London
Midland - Bring Joy
Pearson Sound - Wad
George Fitzgerald - Painted Jezebel
Chechen - Syberia
Addison Groove - Footcrab VIP
Four Tet - Love Cry (Joy Orbison remix)
Kasrave vs Joy Orbison
Kelly Dean - Contagious
DJ Madd - Arpz 3000
XXXY - Rain (Jack Sparrow rmx)
Jack Sparrow - Loveless
Julio Bashmore - Footsteppin'
Appleblim & Ramadanman - Sous le Sable
Then there's Back to Mine, 20110323 (which my mac was beachballing through, making actually djing really hard work hence me upgrading the hard drive). That Tanka EP you can get from here: http://tanka.bandcamp.com/album/patterns-break-ep
Tracklisting
Tanka - Step(s)
Nicolas Jaar - Spectors of the Future
Hammock - Stranded Under a Helpless Sky
Radiohead - Morning Mr Magpie
The Books - A Cold Freezing Night
Working for a Nuclear Free City - A black square with four yellow stars
Asa - Sweeter Things
Brackles & Shortstuff - Broken Harp
Alcost Blvd - DMZ Chill
Apox - Hokaido
Crucial Cuts - Time
Redifine - Love N Learn
Son!ka - Bright Light
Fujiya & Miyagi - Ventriloquizzing
Appleblim & Ramadanman - Sous le Sable
George Fitzgerald - Don't You (SCB remix)
Noraj Cue - Homesick
FaltyDL - St Marks (Cosmin TRG remix)
And lastly BTM20110330, which I'm proud to say doesn't feature any garage or dubstep at all; it's been a while that I've managed to do that. It probably won't last, but hey - it makes me happy. :)
Tracklisting
Mordant Music - Inn Ohm The Lake
Hammock - Birds Flying in Sequence
Yimino - Bintliptick
Hiatus - Save yourself
Jam Baxter - BarrelEyeSpookFish
Wagon Christ - King's Lynn
Wisp - Library Grey
Penfold Plum - Cagney Driver
Working for a Nuclear Free City - B.A.R.R.Y.
Radiohead - Bloom
Holy Fuck - Bontempi Latin
Fujiya & Miyagi - Cat Got Your Tongue
Chandarit Singh - Raga Bairagi
8Bitch - Astarte
Glasser - Tremel
School of Seven Bells - ILU
FaltyDL - All in the place
Daniel Masolo - Ritmo Especial
Yoshinori Sunahara - Unconscious Fragment
Gold Panda - Marriage (Baths remix)
The Field - Sun and Ice
(picture courtesy of The Venn & Strick infographic team)
So what's all this about a weekly show?? ;) Ok fair does - my apologies once again for the lack of musical updates, I've either been not well or having a RL take over, which has prevented me getting behind the decks for you, but I'm back now and next week sees me playing three times in in SL. Monday it's the return of "Monday Hates You" and features djs from four countries - UK, Italy, USA and Netherlands - all set in bringing joy to your Monday as much as they can - at 7:00pm GMT/12:00 SLT/PDT I'll be kicking proceedings off with some garage and melodic techno, at 8:30/1:30 the stream will switch over to Italy and the super sexy nudisco & electroclash stylings of Bibdui will be taking over the dance floor; at 10:00/3:00 we hit state side with Yuzien Born, who brings his awesome Breakbeat and Indie Dance tracks out to play. At 11:30/4:30 we travel to the realms of the magical, with a live performance from ^v Split Phase, a exciting house and techno act featuring the genius of Transient Zeluco, who's DJ sets at Suffugium on a Saturday night we unmissable for me. Lastly, but by no means least, at 1:00/6:00 The maestro of tech and tech house, Noraj Cue finishes off the evening, with warm smiles all round. Then on Wednesday will be Back to Mine (if I'm recovered enough by then!) and on Sunday 27th, 9:00pm it's time for the next delve into the world of acoustic and folk music, with another selection for The Bearding Hour.
But that's all for next week, you've still got digest this weeks podcast (oh that skream LP is from here ), so without further adieu, here's the
Tracklisting
Lost Idol - Organswell
Lost Idol - Full of Dust & Guitars
Nicolas Jaar - Space is the Only Noise If You Can See
Fujiya & Miyagi - OK
Radiohead - Codex
Yimino - Firen (reading edit)
Eskmo - Color Dropping
Gold Panda - Marriage (star slinger remix)
Echaskech - Redeploy
Jacques Green - Tell Me (kingdom edit)
George Fitzgerald - Painted Jezebel
Kavsrave vs Joy Orbison - Untightled
Pearson Sound - Wad
Cosmin TRG - See Other People (FaltyDl rmx)
Addison Groove - Footcrab VIP
Maddslinky - Ruled by YOur emotions
Trentemoller - Moan (noraj cue edit in my mind)
Skream - Intro
Skream - Commercial Sellout
Working for a nuclear free city - Autoblue
Nate Dogg (RIP) & Warren G - Regulate
