This past few days I've been working on recording some of my collection to FLAC and ripping some CD's. During that process, whilst I've got my music on in the background I've been looking at updating tag lists and links on my mixes over on Soundcloud and I noticed that I hadn't posted this to the blog.
This mix is from December 2016 and was the last time I'd been asked to do a guest mix, until last week that is - more details on that down the line. It was put together for Woodzee's Chillout Sessions show on Box Frequency which is sadly no longer with us. I don't think it's my greatest mix, nor do I think it's my worst ever. I don't plan my mixes in any way, I have a rough idea of what I want to do in my mind, I hit the record button and what comes out at the end is what I post online. Perhaps that's the reason nobody has been asking for guest mixes 😂.
Anyway, this was aired on Christmas Day of 2016 and it was a welcome break from all that goes on at that time of year. If you prefer to use Mixcloud you can find it [HERE], or you can find it on Hearhis where there is also a download option over [HERE].
March was a little quieter on here than I'd intended. It's been another turbulent and hectic month (and April is the same too) dealing with care and health related issues around my Mum, and as is often the case there's been no end of hassle because things in our health service just don't seem to click together as well as you'd hope. Aside from her usual issues related to her M.S, she also has to contend with a kidney stone and many problems that have come along with it, including a serious and risky operation that has now been postponed twice. I'm not going to post too much more on it just now, but suffice to say, it's been challenging for her and for myself and my other half who have to juggle so much in dealing with everything on her behalf.
I'd been intending on posting something a little more uptempo, probably House of some sorts, but I've found myself going through more and more ambient / chillout stuff of late, so that's what I'm sharing this time. I'd been thinking of putting together something that felt emotive and I think a lot of the tracks on this selection are just that, for one reason or another and I felt the cover tied in quite nicely to that theme. You'll find the linked up tracklist below, if you enjoy any of the tracks in the mix, support the artists and purchase their music.
Fingers crossed the rest of April is a bit gentler and kinder than last month was.
I've collected music for most of my life, from cassettes to vinyl and cd's, and now also digital. I'm at a point where I think it would be wise to thin out my collection to make way for (and help fund) new additions. When I recently set about redesigning the blog I did so with this in the back of mind, and you will find a dedicated tab under the header graphic which will take you directly to my Discogs store. You can also click [HERE]. I'll post a few pictures amongst this post to give an idea of what is most recently and currently listed as well as a playlist of some things in the store currently at the bottom of the post.
I used to buy and sell vinyl for many years and was an early adopter of Ebay, having a store there for several years. I enjoyed the process of picking up collections from auctions, pulling out what I wanted for myself and selling the rest on, either individually or in bulk. As time progressed selling on Ebay became less enjoyable as it started ramping up its pricing and making things more difficult with swathes of red tape. I closed my Ebay store around the same time as Discogs opened their Marketplace.
I had used Discogs (and contributed to it regularly under a previous i.d.) as a reference and cataloguing tool, which was great. I was never overly convinced it would make a great venue for sales because I always felt it would struggle to find the right balance of being the music database that it was initially set up to be and a venue for sales. I do think the original concept has become a bi-product of the marketplace, but it obviously works very well in that sense, and despite the obvious price gouging that goes on (or sharks as some call it) it does reflect the supply and demand aspect of any marketplace and provide a reliable place to match up the buyer and seller.
So far I have listed a bundle of 7" and 10", but have a few hundred 12"s, LP's and CD's to list. If anyone reading this has listened to my mixes over the years then you will have a fair idea of how wide ranging the selection that will be for sale will be. It will range from downtempo to techno, soul to acid, house to funk, ambient to rock. I'm trying to add a few each day, so keep an eye out. In terms of pricing, I am going to try and be very competitive with the current and previous pricing of items that are graded similarly. I really don't like the way some vinyl pricing has gone, and how it is driven, but at the same time I can't afford to not take into account other prices. Many of my records will have lost value, so the ones that seem to have gone up will compensate that. That said, for the most part, I'll look to be the cheapest (at the time of listing) of similarly graded items.
