School Of Seven Bells

Mach V @ Back To Mine, 20110629 - Back once again like a marmalade plaster

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Yes well, hmm. But that's no way to start a blog post following two months of absence - more on the "Yes well, hmm" later

HELLO! How the devil are you? Good I hope? We last spoke just as our major home improvement project was kicking off - moving the wall between our bedroom and bathroom by half a metre, completely rebuilding and installing the bathroom from scratch and installing a new wall of wardrobes in our bedroom to hide all our clutter away and we finished it off last weekend. Phew. It's nice to get everything back in it's place or more accurately into it's new homes and the house is looking great and functioning marvelously. My quite frankly awesome Mother In Law is still with us until next Tuesday when she sadly leaves us to return to her home when the stars at night, are clear and bright, but Miko took her to Paris last week which meant I could get back behind the decks and play out this set for you all.

Which brings me back to the "Yes well, hmm" at the beginning of this post. It wasn't great. I've just upgraded my DJ software to Torq 2.0 and, well the transition hasn't gone smoothly. For some reason one of the decks sounds absolutely awful, like one deck is outputting audio at 320kpbs and the other is outputting audio at 92kbps and trying to fix this problem while djing didn't prove that successful. My work around was to mix on two decks and as soon as the mix was complete, then copy the bad sounding deck over to the good sounding deck. This worked in the most part however remembering to reset the second good sounding deck to the settings on the bad sounding deck wasn't as successful as I'd like so you'll hear a bit of rather funky sounding phase and slidely swipes in the mix and my apologies for that. Have also done a bit of "post" on the recording to try and make it sound better than it did live, namely I've spliced a cleaner version of Pogo Music's "Upular" (ty Helle!) over the version played out as it sounded terrible and I hadn't worked out my solution at that point. Sadly Bibio's "Pretentious" I couldn't fix, but as Bibio's production features quite a bit of fancy lo fi work it didn't suffer too much. Sorry Bibio, if you're listening. Hopefully you'll forgive me, over time. Here's the rest of the...

Tracklisting

Hammock - No Agenda (Instrumental)
Bibio - Pretentious
Dub Tractor - Faster (album version)
Pogo Music - Upular
School of Seven Bells - Babelonia (Sepalcure remix)
Bola - Squib (Nuclear)
Specta Cierra - I'm Totally Not Looking At Her
8Bitch - Me & U
Grizzly J - Rainbow Fire
Hyetal - Neon Speech
George Fitzgerald - We Bilateral
Sepalcure - Taking You Back
Mount Kimbie - Maybes (James Blake remix)
NDV - Night and Day
Joyo - Jels
Battles Feat. Matias Aguayo - Ice Cream



BTM20110629 by machv

3 posts in one - 2 BTMs & one live mix (and a story about cables)

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


Live at Monday Hates You 20110321 by machv


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)

BTM20110323 by machv

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


BTM20110330 by machv