So, I finally got through Jan's mix on a slightly hungover Saturday afternoon spent ironing, tidying up, cooking and general living room pottering.
Assessing this mix is interesting because it is based on an actual event, and as with many live sets, what makes sense at home and what made sense at the time are not necessarily the same. Case in point: I found the opening half hour of this a bit of an odd one. After a very lovely opener, you proceeded to get into a party-ish and somewhat goofy vibe very quickly, leaving me at times feeling like I'd wandered into an abandoned Avalanches demo. My conclusion at this point was that the bar in question must have been fairly lively, but before much longer you got into some lovely mellow Chicago-ish tackle from D'Marc Cantu and Jeremiah R and the mood suddenly became a whole lot deeper and more introspective. At this point the mix transformed into a much more conventional dance music set and built up in a fairly linear manner for the next two hours or so. When you went back into some disco and funk after that it made much more sense, as the mood had been steadily building up for quite a while.
Again, without being there, it's hard to judge exactly why you went with that opening half hour or how well it did the intended job. For me, however, this mix starts properly around The Lodge, and anything prior to that can be safely discarded (in particular I couldn't stand that "Plastico" track, Latin music in general being a total musical blind spot for me). Once that's out of the way, however, there's plenty of great music to be found in here, riding a nice balance between variation and cohesion. I particularly enjoyed the way you wrapped it up with the last two tracks. Not everything was to my taste, but that's an almost inevitable byproduct of an eclectic set.
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Mixes:
> Back To Deep [Deep Trippy House]
> Terra Nova [Modern Progressive Trance]
> Rough & Ready [Modern Trance]
>A Different Energy [Good Modern Trance]
> The Edale Mix [Panoramic Beats]
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