I met Tim through Sanderson Dear, who get deejayed on Soundwave a few months ago (listen to Sanderson’s mix here). As is my want, I asked Sanderon who he thought would share a mix on Soundwave and he highly recommended Tim.
As it happens, both Tim and I are fellow devotees of the Excursions in Ambience compilation album series (listen to my Excursions in Ambience compilation retrospective here). That may explain why Tim’s mix, which features songs completely new to me, feels so familiar. It’s a delight to share Tim’s mix with you.
Tim has words about his mix below.
Join us next week when our guest deejay will be Raziel Panic.
My 2021 album Excursion was a release born through influence. It was inspired by improvised live electronics, a deep love of electronic music from the 1990’s, and even the compilation series Excursions in Ambience, of which the album was named after. I wanted to revisit those influences for this mix, crafting a similar sonic tapestry, through a different lens. I’ve included the inspiring music that influenced me to start making music, as well as some new works that elicit that same emotional frequency. Enjoy the journey.
I follow all the guest deejays on Twitter (check my SOUNDWAVE list here), and the Hypnagogue Podcast kept turning up on Kirk Markarian’s Twitter feed. I trust Kirk’s taste in music, so I listened to a few episodes of Hypnagoge. I loved everything I heard and invited John to guest deejay on SOUNDWAVE.
John’s mix is everything you’d expect in a SOUNDWAVE mix, but what especially delighted mas his selected dub tracks.
I’ve been a fan of dub since last century.
I first became aware of dub when I read William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer. In the novel, Case, our protagonist, finds himself in a Jamaican space colony called Zion.
Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.
I was intrigued by that mysterious description. Shortly afterwards I came across the 21st Century Dub album on ROIR. I was hooked and became a dub devotee. I even adopted the persona of a character called King Dub. I’d speak with an Jamaican patois, and combined with some echo and pitch-shifting, I became a deejay from the deepest realm of dub spinning tracks from everyone from Ras Michael and The Sons of Negus to The Orb.
When I launched SOUNDWAVE I assumed there would be a lot of dub. The genre is a natural fit for the format of those show. I’ve been disappointed that dub has been a blind spot and I’m relieved that John is the first guest deejay to include dub tracks in the mix. Hopefully he won’t be the last.
Join us next week when our guest deejay will be Roedelius. Check out his livestream concert here.
John Shanahan
The Hypnagogue Podcast began over a decade ago as an offshoot of the Hypnagogue Reviews site, which I ran from 2003 until 2017, when I decided I didn’t have anything worth saying anymore. Now the music does the eclectic talking for me every two weeks, built from the amazing range of music sent my way.
I laid down this Soundwave mix as I do my own show—picking an interesting place to start and following a stream of semi-conscsiousness through my library to see what associations arise. So we kick off with haunting sound-sculptor Joe Frawley and move with the piano into the sparse, emotional spaces of Memory Bell. The Detroit76, a Matt Borghi side project, shifts us smoothly into beat-driven groove territory, segueing into tasty licks from Austin funk-dub duo Canartic, which melts neatly into into vintage Cyberchump. Forest Robots offer a bridge by way of plucked-string tones in a wash of electronica, and Corciolli & Emmanuele Baldini use it to escort us further intro electro-acoustic territory. That put me in mind of the modern chamber music of Domingues and Kane, after which we flick the switch to Tim Story’s brand of electronic chamber music. At the end, the ride finishes courtesy of the person who brought my show to Joseph’s attention in the first place, Neuro…No Neuro, aka Kirk Markarian.
Frank Riggio’s Empreinte Initiale EP