Pretty sure there’s at least a few naughty among you, but here’s the annual giftmix just the same. Happy holidays and best in 2012, friends.

Tracks:

This City Is Killing Me – Dusty Brown
Seeing the Lines – Mr. Projectile
Futureworld – Com Truise
Unbank – Plaid
Daydream – Tycho
German Clap – Modeselektor
Spacial – Tevo Howard*
Rubin – Der Dritte Raum
Human Reason – Adam Beyer
Planisphere – Justice
Genkai (1) – Biosphere

* Chicago artist

This past weekend was our annual neighborhood party, Retro on Roscoe. It’s a all-out fest that ignites the blocks around it for 48 hours. As such, some friends of ours host an annual pre-party that spans all five of their contiguous backyards — something you don’t often see in the city.

I was asked to DJ the party whose theme this year was “Boogie Nights”, basically 70′s tunes infused with other tracks that carry forward the ethos from that era. The booth was a treehouse smack in the middle of the party which we outfitted tip-to-tail with music and lighting gear. I played from 8pm to 3am and, though I almost wet myself (with no backup until late), it was an astounding event.

I had a stripped-down setup (compared to, say, Christmas Party), but it was ample. Just the Macbook Pro running Ableton Live, a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol multichannel interface, and an Akai APC40 control surface. The Akai was perfect, a monome-esque grid with the knobs and sliders of a Novation SL Remote — though far sturdier.

I had hundreds of song fragments pre-loaded and warped — something that gave me almost unlimited flexibility to respond to the crowd without letting things drop. I even entertained requests from those brave enough to scale the nearly vertical steps.

I didn’t want to come down. Why? Let’s recap. I was in a kickass treehouse with another geek (Tom, on lights), a good friend, and a cooler of beer. We were controlling several hundred watts of music and commanding the best view of the space. Sure, we were one chain link’s failure away from death by falling steel, but if that’s how I was supposed to go, I wouldn’t complain.

A few have asked for a recording from the night. I’m still cleaning up most of it, but here’s an excerpt from when I think the most people were out in the yard dancing. (Specifically the slightly sped-up Diana Ross with a few claps and bloops layered on top was the pinnacle, if memory serves.)

[Download]

Full photoset here.

PS – I’m two-for-two luring Chicago’s finest with low frequencies. I suppose next Christmas we’ll go for the hat trick.

It’s out. Jesse’s posted his 2009 Inauguration Mix.

Superb track curation, tasty scratches, all mixed live like a guy who knows what the hell he’s doing.

My contribution? I am a spectral fraction of the crowd-cheering waveform from the Grant Park speech layered in. So, yeah, I’ll be demanding royalties.

Pull it down and turn it up.

A short note to let you know that I am pleased to be part of the 2009 incarnation of Out of 5, a weekly theme-based mix site put together by Andrew and nine of his pals. The mixes are only up for a week, so grab them while you can. (Alerts via toot, here.)

This week’s theme: songs about resurrection, coming back to life, returning, resurfacing. Perhaps a theme more suited to April and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, but we have to stay optimistic here in Chicago, spiritual home of seasonal affective disorder.

And yes, it took every shred of restraint not to submit the theme music to Return of the Living Dead, obviously.

Now just to kickstart breakbeatbox and we’ll be off to the races.

There are many ways to ruin Christmas. Crappy gifts, drunken co-workers, eye-searing sweaters, family itself. (Hollywood makes a mint on the mini-genre of mirth-to-misery.)

But I’d like to go deeper than that. I’d like to attempt to scar your subconscious. I want to slice into that corner of your childhood memories that is still very fond of Christmas music. Sure, you say you hate these tunes now, that the infernal jingling-bells-makes-a-song-Christmassy trick makes you want to gore your ear with a flaming yule brand.

But you lie. And I would like to help you confront that lie, to eradicate the joy.

Back in the 1990′s, in the final supernova of cassette tape usage before its demise at the hands of digital, my pal ASG made me a unique holiday mix: the kristMess tape. Much of it is thick atonal drum-and-bass, but the nugget at the center is the gift beneath the bow. My gift. To you.

O Come All Ye Faithful, excerpt, 2:13

V/VM, The V/VM Christmas Pudding

Feel free to use this liberally throughout the next week as circumstances dictate. If Ebenezer and the Grinch aren’t cutting it for you and holiday horror doesn’t set you back on the right path, just put this on loop and relax. Halloween is only ten months away.

See also: Carbone Dolce

Lately I have been loving a few truly innovative audio apps for the iPhone, none having to do with it being an iPod.

I had always thought that mobile audio creation software were frivolous party tricks. Hey, look at me, I can play Baby Got Back on my 3″-wide keyboard! But that’s changed.

A while back I wrote about an idea for including audio processing code in the header of MP3 files. The premise was that, in addition to creating a music track, the artist would provide parameters for real-time playback modification based on user input, randomness, or anything else. The song would never (or at least wouldn’t ever have to) be the same.

The team at RJDJ have taken this idea to the extreme. The free and pay RJDJ apps in the iTunes store both provide “scenes”, akin to music tracks, complete with artwork. These scenes are nothing but audio processing algorithms.

All input happens via the lavalier microphone on the iTunes earbuds. Basically the scenes take the ambient noise surrounding you and remix it. Some of the scenes do this subtly, some are more musical, but all of them make you the focal point of the remix — not so much a musician as a conductor. I’ve listened to the noise of the L train, walking down the street, and the cacophony of three kids at dinner time. It is completely entrancing. Location-based remixing.

So, to our list of traditional musical interfaces — stick hitting animal skin, horse hair pulled across wire — we add one’s physical movement through life’s soundscape.

Here’s a more musical scene based on my eastward walk through the city a few days ago*. Note especially the interpolation of me almost being hit by a cab crossing Michigan Ave. at 1:16 (red marker on map). The horn makes the piece, in my opinion, but the beauty of this particular scene is how the bleeps and bloops are modulated by the ambient street noise.

View Larger Map

Of course this map isn’t connected in any way to playback control, but with the iPhone’s GPS it seems like an obvious evolution of the RJDJ app. The possibilities are many. How about a View in Google Maps button in iTunes? Or a site that aggregates user-created tracks and plots them over one another on a map, a personal-social musical-spatial mashup. Dan Hill’s city of sound, indeed.

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There are some other apps of note too.

Bloom is a generative music app from none other than Brian Eno, working with Brian Chilvers. You initiate notes of music by touching the screen. Each note plays and interacts with other notes in expanding concentric circles, like dropping pebbles in a pond. As with scenes in RJDJ, the parameters of note interaction are constrained by “moods”. These are the algorithms that govern the evolution of the sounds you start off. Spore for music. (Not a coincidence that Eno did the music for Spore, of course.)

Ocarina is one of those apps that makes you love the creators for thinking of it. Basically Ocarina turns your iPhone into a high-tech flute. OK, you say, I can see touching the screen like you cover the holes of a woodwind, but where do you blow? Why, the microphone of course! They’ve turned the lack of a wind guard on the iPhone mic into a feature! Light exhalation makes less noise on the mic and produces a lower intensity of the current note combination, and conversely. It’s brilliant really.

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* There’s no easy way to export audio from RJDJ, but this handy tool allows you to parse the backup file that the iPhone generates on your machine. You can pluck out the .wav files right from the RJDJ folder.