Nu Skool Breaks-ish...
Here's the deal on this one:
Go back to Nov/Dec, '98... At the time, I'd just gotten satisfied with
the art for a CD cover I had been working on for a week or so...
I'd received a couple of 12" E.P.'s in the mail from Rennie Pilgrem
around Sep/Oct '98... I'd met and become friends with him the March prior, at WMC...
...which all this is what prompted a mix to begin with...
After the artwork was done in December, '98, before Christmas,
I recorded the mix "Dark Matter." Named from
my impression I got from the tracks on the E.P. as a whole...
??
Well, Christmas happened... then New Years...
Also, my wife and I had just closed the purchase on a house
on the 1st. of January and were packing boxes for the move...
But something kept bugging the shit out of me about "Dark Matter"...
...and the matter was it was just too damn 'dark'... :-)
At least it was too dark for how I wanted to commemorate
the occasion and the new sounds coming in at that same time,
not just Rennie's E.P.
So... I went about thinking about how I might fix the situation without
totally scrapping the work I'd already done... and couldn't figure it out... being
a bit stressed, because I should have been packing boxes for the move,
but then the problem remains... When will I be setup next to do this and
would it mean anything to me then? Better go ahead and do the damn thing...
Frustrated.... I just said fuck it and picked up the first record that felt right... and
went on from there... About three or four records down, the familiar
felt like the right way to go... and was... so there' really
only about that many songs different between the two...
Well, cover art didn't used to be as easy on me as it is now, and
"Dark Matter" had already been done and printed...
Back then, I felt like you couldn't have a professional release
if all the pieces weren't in place to represent it as a professional release...
...and still do, though the pieces have changed somewhat...
Which makes it a much simpler process today...
After the "repair" of the potential mix...
In thinking what to name this one, basically, the new version of "Dark Matter",
I couldn't come up with anything.... So, mind being absent in many
cases during this thing... including the realization of the "real problem"...
The BIG Problem: I named a mix before I made it...
I suggest NOT doing that...
I was trying to make the music fit an idea... okay... but it didn't work...
AND, I'd already put too much effort into the thing before it actually was a thing...
Get it?
Absent mindedness, or just plain the mind being absent and only making
progress when I actually 'stopped' thinking so hard, all becoming a theme...
So, "Absence D'Esprit" kinda' landed on it...
And that's the way a mix should be named anyway...
Name it whatever...
Change the name anytime you like... No problem w/ that...
Just don't invest too much effort into the packaging until it feels right...
Absence D'Esprit is a French rendering of a similar idea... the term, in French,
was used around the first part of the 20th Century in the field of Psychology,
and refers to something like "without mind"... which could mean all kinds of things
related to how this mix came about, but specifically, means like "out of body" or
maybe a "Zen" like experience... i.e. auto-generated... without thinking... :-)
And there you have it...
What makes this mix "special" or whatever it is.... Is because the records
that Rennie sent me, which spurred the idea to make a mix...
were the "Nu Skool Breaks Samplers" 1 & 2...
The two songs that are on "Absence D'Esprit" from those E.P.'s,
i.e. the "samplers", were the first time the World had ever had
encountered the term, "Nu Skool Breaks"...
Because Rennie named the genre... and the "samplers" were his first offerings in that vein...
The rest of the tracks just "mixed" well with them...
And many now probably would be called Nu Skool Breaks, even in retrospect...
There's also some very early 'Hybrid' on this:
"Absence D'Esprit"
After I moved, I would have been correct in thinking that I wouldn't
want to mess with it again, b/c it took me 10 years to return to it and
do the art and actually "release" it... If that's what you want to call it...
and it's not technically "Nu Skool" but for 3 songs...
So I categorized it "Nu Skool" anyway...
:-)
Enjoy!
