DJing the Rep Your Hood booth

this saturday (nov 3rd) is the cabbagetown chomp and stomp.  i'll be there along with the crew, the shirts, a cooler, the turntables and a bunch of other artists spinning music all day long.  if you haven't checked out the rep your hood site you can now do that.

also our friends at the village theatre are going to be there cooking chili right around the corner and we may get a visit from the guys from wasted potential brass band.  this is our third year doing this festival and it's always been a lot of fun..

if you can make it, come by our booth.  we'll be on powell st right at the intersection with wylie street.  get there early for easier parking and check out the new hoodies we're doing.

-jesster

Gerbers: Downtempo House Mix

my relationship with house music has been an interesting one.  Early in my DJing years i kinda avoided it.  At the time house music was strictly for the clubs and too electronic for my taste.  Eventually i landed a gig DJing at a sushi restaurant in midtown called "Cherry" on the weekends.  it was a pseudo-posh spot that got a decent crowd of people who usually made cherry their place to hang before they "went out."  there were some decent places to hang out just down crescent street.

the music i played there was pretty much all "electronica" which in this context means music without guitars, ranging from loungey stuff to house and all in between.  a typical night would start with a relatively slow tempo and a quiet volume... mostly background dinner music.  as the night went on the volume and tempo would pick up.

the cherry crowd really dug all that electronic music.. we'd keep it pretty smoothed out and it kinda fit the scene pretty well.  we called it "gerbers" 'cause it was like feeding the baby.  this was all before serato so we had real-life actual records that you had to buy at a store and bring to gig.

most of these records had pretty non-descript names for songs.  we got around that by taking a sharpie to the label on the vinyl and writing out a little code for what kind of electronic music that records contined..  pretty much went like this:

H = house
DT = downtempo
MT = midtempo
UPT = uptempo


eventually we decided that there were too many different kinds of house to blanket the whole genre with an "H" label... so we got creative:

BBH = broken beat house
DTH = down tempo house

the DTH was kinda always my personal favorite.  all the fun of house music without the overly fast tempo.. i'd say DTH would land you somewhere in the 105-115 bpm area.  although DTH is more of a feel thing than strictly a bpm thing.

over the years the gerbers kinda grew on me.  here's a little mix i put together of DTH gerbers.  the mix is for a dinner party for mercedes that GO! is producing.  this mix was actually made using ableton live.  the old me would've called that 'cheating' but it's how i felt like doing this.  there actually exist some mp3s that i ripped from vinyl because i couldn't find it anywhere else.

come check out my record collection some day and see all the "DTH" labels hand-written on the vinyl.... 
well, in all honesty, now listening to this mix again, it kinda starts MT and makes it's way to DTH and then towards the end is bordering on straight-up H...

DTH MIX