07-05-'08 Dieselboy @ Substance D

Submitted by: DJTheJoker @ 03-09-2015 20:13

Length: 00:58:25

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One of my favorite conceptual mixes. Back in late 2007 I was on track to have a new mix cd out by mid 2008 and I was kind of scraping my brain for cool ideas. Then one night after seeing the film “A Scanner Darkly” I knew right then and there that I was going to call my mix “Substance D”. In the film there is a psychoactive drug known as “Substance D”. I figured, why not make it seem like my mix was a new kind of drug, an “audioceutical” that you take by listening to it? I wanted the label art and liner notes to appear to be futuristic drug packaging. Since the music was intended to excite the brain of the listener I decided that a glowing neon color scheme would be appropriate (something essentially the opposite of what most modern medicine packaging looks like). When it came time to make the mix I was struggling with what the first track was going to be. Then one night I literally had a dream that I was going to use the SPKTRM remix of Demo for the intro and voila! That is what I ended up using. It was really cool to be able to get remixes made of some outside the box artists like MSTRKRFT and Meat Beat Manifesto as well (thank you Jack Dangers btw). This mix was supposed to feature a tune by myself and Gridlok called MDMX (which eventually came out in 2014) but we weren’t able to finish it in time for this. For the intro voiceover I was determined to find the most clinical and neutral person I could find and I spent a few months trying to convince Will Lyman (of PBS Frontline) to do it. In the end he refused. So I ended up working with Tom Kane, who has done tons of work including being the announcer for the Academy Awards. He fucking nailed it. I asked my friend Jake (Ewun…now known as Kill The Noise) to add all of the necessary clicks and whirrs and FX you hear in the intro. The liner notes took me ages to work through. And when this was printed up I realized that the bright yellow text was almost impossible to read. The artwork once again was by the amazing Akira Takahashi. All in all a really fun and challenging project and something, in my mind, truly unique.