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A few years ago, before the blog existed here on 33Jones, one of my intentions for the site was to feature mixes from some of the deejays that I had met during my time up in Boston. That never really worked out the way I had hoped - though I did get a chance to put up the greatest Reggae Dancehall mix of all time, courtesy of my big sis Lisa Mae - but I've always wanted to add a few more mixes to the current selection. Now three years later, my dude Mad Wax has blessed us with a tremendous, bass-filled mix that he put together back in 2000, featuring some old school electro by the legendary duo Dynamix II.
My knowledge of the electro genre is admittedly limited - it's an offshoot of hip hop, started in part by Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock, and it's where Dr. Dre got his start in the music biz as part of the World Class Wreckin' Cru; that's about the extent of what I know - so I asked Wax to drop some knowledge on us to go along with the mix. Here's what he had to say:
Back in the day, before I got into DJ'ing I was one of those cats with huge subwoofers in the back of my ride, a most pimpin' 1986 Nissan Stanza Wagon (yeah, I was pullin' all the honeys in it).
But the ride didn't matter, I was addicted to that boom, and I'd scour the local record stores for new bass releases (remember when they had a little record store in each mall?) - if you headed to the back of the room, they'd have this one little section of bass cassette tapes: Bass Wars, DJ Magic Mike, Techmaster PEB, Clay D. I was into Miami Bass something fierce, and it wasn't until about four years later, when I was shopping for vinyl for my weekly radio show in Austin, Texas, that I came across a fresh repress of Dynamix II cuts.
Dynamix II? I couldn't believe it - the shit I was bumpin' back in my high school days, nice and fresh and ready for my radio show on shiny 120 gram vinyl. I didn't get until just then that what I'd been listening to all those years was just a branch of electro music. To me all that shit was just bass music: a more electronic version of ghetto style DJs records coming out during that same time (shout to Mr. Mixx from 2 Live Crew).
Fast forward to the late '90s when me and the homie Lex Luthor launched the Vocode Project, a mix show site dedicated to electro music. Back then, bandwidth wasn't as readily available, and we were getting around this by doing megamixes of 20-30 minutes, and encoding at 128kbps (there's my apology for the crap bitrate homies). We were also hacking into real servers and broadcasting over the net, but thats a story for another time.
This Dynamix II mix is one of those megamixes - a nice compact furious set of electro bass by some of the most revered producers in the electro genre. In electro circles, DII is about as big as Bambaataa, Egyptian Lover, Drexciya and Aux 88. I have the original master of this somewhere on minidisc - when I can track it down, I'll get a nice 320K version and do some mastering work on the audio file - until then I hope you enjoy this little blast from the past. This mix includes tons of their classics from the 80s, plus some of the more techno electro bass they did in the 90s - I recall doing this and being in the mix constantly, looping beats from various cuts in and out, eq work etc... I just love these records. You can cop a DII greatest hit CD on iTunes and a couple of other sites [including Amazon], for those who want to show the love for electro bass from the masters!
I know a lot of you reading this are only interested in traditional hip hop, but even if you're not usually willing to venture into other genres it's worth checking out if only to get a taste of what people were listening to back in the day. There was a lot of crossover between hip hop and electro back in the 80's, both by the artists and the fans, and DII played a large role in that. Plus, there's a ton of bass in this mix, and that's always a good thing. If that still hasn't convinced you, here's a brief snippet of the mix (you can find a link to the full mix over here):
DJ Mad Wax - Bass Generator: Dynamix II Megamix (snippet)
Tracklist and link to the full mix after the jump.
5/13/2007 07:00:01 PM posted by Fresh