Nocturne Tapes

a series of mixtapes, compilations and recordings inspired by, or to be listened to during, the night.   curated by

[nocturnetapes-blog]

NT.6 Konx-om-Pax

Nocturne

The sixth edition of our Nocturne serious comes from the intriguing Konx-om-Pax. When he’s not throwing old school raves in a bowling club, the Glasgow-based visual artist and electronic musician finds himself working on lush visual projects for artists such as Hudson Mohawke, Lone, Oneohtrix Point Never and Wiley as well as labels like Hyperdub and LuckyMe.

His musical influences range from the post-punk rawness of Fugazi to the electronic swing of Detroit Techno; sounds which are absorbed by and recontextualised in his own unique, productions.

On his Nocturne Tape, this notoriously nocturnal creature gives us an insight into the music that drives him in the early hours; a time when he works, parties, sleeps and works some more.

Talk to us about your tape.

I tried to have a mix that was across the board genre wise and spanned a few decades, from early synthesiser music and music concrete to current electronic favs. It's a fairly ambient effort that works well before bedtime, it's sent me to sleep a few times and encouraged cool dreams

How, where and at what time was the tape made?

It's my first attempt using ableton so I could layer up tracks more than usual. I recorded it in my bedroom late one Tuesday evening when I should have probably been working on my new record

What is your relationship with the night? How has it been reflected in the tape?

I mainly produce music at night on my own. It's a very private and personal time, I like being in a quiet zone with just the cat to keep me company. There's nothing much more sacred to me than when I've created a piece of music in the middle of the night and no one else on the planet has heard it yet. If it's good I lie in bed listening to it on loop till I pass out

Do you approach each composition differently or do you have a system in place for your production?

My only vague rule is to try and not repeat myself stylistically, for example if I finish an ambient piece the next thing i'd want to work on would have drums in it etc. I generally start with a melody, I like short phrases that sound cool when looped and could go on forever without becoming boring. I'm always in search of a catchy infectious riff that gets stuck in my head for days, I know i've got something that works if i can't stop listening to it on loop.

Does the nighttime have the same influence on your visual art as it does with your music?

Yes, probably down to all the late nights working on 3d animations, its generally very time consuming and means i'm always working late waiting on shit to render, taking naps on the studio floor sometimes. Animation requires a lot of attention to detail and I find being alone in the studio late at night helps me get on with it. Its funny I noticed recently that when you work past midnight the next 5 or 6 hours seem to disappear really quickly because there's less distractions and i'm half asleep.

What are your big projects for the rest of the year?

Finishing off a new record for Planet Mu which should be coming out later this summer. I'm back working with Lone, sorting out his album art work and planning visuals for his new live set. We've got preliminary plans in place for a world tour which is really exciting. I should be Djing occasionally too, great opportunity to test out my new tracks all over the shop.

Also available on Mixcloud.

Photography: Kirstin Kerr

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NT.5 Shaun Vitamins

Ups and Downs

Our very own Shaun Vitamins takes his turn at exposing his nocturnal self with a mix of dreamy, romantic hip-hop, murky acid, and dark, focused electro

What is your relationship with the night?

I'm a very nocturnal person, anyone who has had to work with me will be familiar with my patterns of hyper productive all-nighters followed by 20 hours of deep sleep. I love the lack of distractions and the solitude of it, I love cycling down empty roads with only bin lorries and the Morton’s roll van for company, I love the nuclear glow of 24hr shops and petrol stations.

Talk us through the mix.

I recorded a section of this mix about a year ago, then left it over Summer and returned to it in the Autumn. This has produced two distinct parts to the mix. The first section is woozier with Flying Lotus, J Dilla and Aphex Twin all blurring in and out of each other. The second section is more house and techno orientated, with an eerie dark melancholy to it. The whole thing seems to work as a condensed version of my all-nighters; it's sleepy and hazy then dark and electric.

How did you approach the process of selecting the tracks that ended up in the final version of the mix?

Over a good few months I was adding tracks to a playlist, I only added tracks at night and I only worked on the mix at night, not that this is unusual for me anyway. I tried not to have any genre restrictions or only add what would work together in a mix. I ended up with about 250 tracks in there - I only used 35 of them in the end so there's obviously a lot more stuff I'd have liked to fit in. The tracks that made it are the ones that I kept going back to at night, although I had to limit myself to 4 Aphex tunes.

You throw a few curveballs into your tape. Without giving too much away, what was your thinking behind this?

I'm not sure which ones are the curveballs, I guess most folk might not associate acid or electro tracks with 5am but for me it's a focused and vivid time, I get very zoned in and the precision and futurism of those sounds fits. There's also one of my own tunes in there (at the point where it starts to switch up) which is the first time I've put anything like that out in public.

How was the mix recorded?

The mix is made entirely in Ableton Live, when I play in a club turntables are my tool of choice for spontaneity. However, for a mixtape like this, I wanted to be able to re-edit; use studio grade reverb, filters and delays; have 3+ tracks at once; transpose… you get the idea. I think it’s ended up feeling like a more coherent composition for it. It also made it easy to work on it over such an extended period of time.

As the guy who envisioned the Nocturne Tapes project in the first place, are you impressed with the quality so far?

The quality of the tapes so far has been amazing. One of the reasons I didn't do anything with mine for so long was that the first ones were a pretty intimidating standard to match. I would have hoped for more tapes in the series by now but one of the problems with asking creative night owls to do something is that they tend to be a riot with deadlines. Going forward we’ve got a list of people we’re going to approach, some big, some lesser-known, I’m really looking forward to hearing what they come up with.

Also available on: Mixcloud & YouTube

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NT.4 DJ Hush

Transgressions in the Twilight Mode

Nocturne Tapes is back for a second run to help see you through these winter nights. We've asked some night-owl producers and DJs from Glasgow and beyond to convey their experience of the night-time in musical form.

Kicking things off is Alan Miller aka DJ Hush. We first got to know him when he ran the infamous RPZ weekly Thursday night downstairs in the Vic Bar, and we’re no strangers to his more recent Maxi Dance Pool parties in The Berkeley Suite.

His nocturnal credentials make him an essential addition to this series: he previously hosted a club called Night Dreams, featuring a ‘bizarre, jarring cosmic’ soundtrack, and he continues to be one of the best off-kilter warm-up selectors around.

Talk us through the mix

The idea that i had in mind was to create a journey through the myriad disturbances and epiphanies experienced during a night of extreme insomnia or sleeplessness:- the different moods passed though, jarring and sudden changes in atmosphere, erratic flashes of thought juxtaposed with contemplative interludes of calm, distressing and paranoia distortions of the self, a sluggish medicated consciousness, confusing impressions of time, loneliness & longing, the erotic charge of darkness, the soothing void of a come-down, degraded audio, disembodied voices, the burning embers of the synapses after ten hours of hard PARTY... ending finally and quietly at the release of suddenly being awake, of reaching morning.

How, where and at what time was this mix made?

The mix itself was compiled over about two weeks in my flat, and i worked on parts of it both during the day and late in the evenings, trying to channel that peculiar state of consciousness that exists in the sleepless and isolated moments of deep night. The mix was constructed in Ableton after long sessions playing elements live using turntables and my iPad. It is made up of CD ripped and downloaded material, a load of stuff burned from vinyl (various tracks, sound EFX, dialogue) as well as dialogue taken from a couple of VHS tapes and some documentary art material sourced from youtube. There is also a LOT of digital delay. The track listing changed as i settled into the rhythm i felt was right, consciously aiming to be as diverse as possible in my selection, but always trying to maintain some sort of coherent flow and working out how the segues and blends would work. I dropped out all the beat-mixed tracks pretty early on as they just didn't sound authentic - too regular, too rational. I wanted more sudden changes, jarring sweeps from one track or section of dialogue to another.

I had also recently been reminded of a few cassette compilations that i had made for friends years and years ago - and these compilations contained certain very analogue tricks: touching the record being recorded and warping the sound, cutting to random radio broadcasts, white noise or to dialogue from some cult movie - and i wanted to integrate some of those simple effects, reference a period in my life when all that i seemed to do was stay up all night and make tapes for mates.

What is your relationship with the nighttime? How does this manifest itself in the music?

My own relationship with nighttime is a problematic one. In addition to being a Night Person in the sense of running clubs, partying and DJing for close to 20 years, I have suffered from life-long insomnia, sometimes experiencing months of disturbed sleep and fatigue at a time. This can be a blessing when you're a DJ, but it fucks your daylight existence royally. As debilitating and depressing as this can be, bouts of insomnia have provided me with long and regular periods of time when i could delve, distractedly, into altered states of thought: i'd read, listen to particular types of music, brood over personal issues, absorbing theoretical and philosophical ideas in restless waves, gluing my eyes on films and documentaries through till morning, all in that heightened state of distraction that insomnia fosters. The mix is my attempt to articulate this to some extent. The selections are smeared into one-another, their edges indistinct, the dialogue cuts suddenly in conjuring up strange thoughts, slivers of music catch in delay stuttering like tracers across themselves, the moods flow and change without any apparent structure through mystic, organic, melodic, metallic textures, drifting towards the erotic and sensual, abstract and static, sounds simultaneously poetic and piercing, restless yet relaxing.

How does the music in this mix relate to the sort of stuff we'd normally hear you play out?

There is a distinct line of influence that runs through what i play for the dancefloor that springs from music i love that is resolutely NOT for dancing. I have always been a great enthusiast and practitioner of the "warm-up" - that point of the night when you begin to prepare people for what is to come, edging the crowd towards that first kick drum, teasing them with the more interesting fringes of your favourite eras, artists or genres. And I have never stopped enjoying the freedom that bar sets give you to really stretch out into the furthest corners of your tastes and record collection. Many of the facets of my dance tastes are here is some skewed form or other - NY art beat, kraut rock, progressive synths, middle eastern instrumentation, slow-mo synth funk, sleazy rock, 80's pop, 90's indie, the occult, digital punk, psych pop, future RnB, chillwave...

For over a decade i have contrasted the soundtrack of my club nights with a series of mixes that were the total flip side of what people would expect (my Weird Sounds In The Bathouse mixes) the very first of which i recorded on cassette back in 1999. This one cassette spun off into a series of mixes that i have been putting out, somewhat erratically, since then (i just laid down the plans for volumes 11 and 12 while touring the past two weeks). For a long time these were the only DJ mixes i did - i deliberately avoided doing club mixes, preferring to spread these weird listening selections around instead. These were resolutely only crazy warm up tracks, tracks that wouldn't fit into a dance set (in any traditional way at any rate), tracks that were dawdling around a cosmic tempo (or deliberately played at the wrong speed), rattling with cold synths and guitars or wacky foreign tracks that would probably be a bit too much even for a seasoned disco-phile.

The concept of a Nocturne mix seemed to appeal to you pretty strongly when we first announced it, why?

I was really excited when the Nocturne series was announced, the whole concept was a perfect fit for me - a literal DREAM of a mix project. I had run a short-lived event a couple of years before called Night Dreams, an idea that i had to devote a whole night to bizarre, jarring cosmic music - resolutely NOT for dancing but intended to be a challenging pre-midnight listen. I invited David Barbarossa to come along and partner me as he was the only other person i could think of who would be both adventurous enough and entirely happy playing a whole night of music intended to be unfamiliar and challenging. We both did some mixes for it, and though we couldn't keep the night alive (it was a bit of a heavy soundtrack for a lite night out) i kept up the idea with mixes, putting together increasingly bizarre selections - adding live synth effects and dialogue over some pretty out there music. The most recent i did was about a year or so ago with the tag line "temporal shift - sex-zone - meditation sensation". That description, i instantly thought, would make for a perfect inspiration for your series, so i am STOKED to be bringing in a mix, especially considering how great the other contributors have been so far.

Also available on YouTube & Mixcloud

Photography - Kirstin Kerr

Tracklist

darkness comes in with the tide (excerpt) - DEREK JARMAN

lulling demons to sleep - LOVE CULT

volcanic journey - NATURE WORLD

mutant wisdom - RICHARD BONE

as the mind sleeps (excerpt) - THE ORGANISM

natürlich leibe - TRI ATMA & GYAN NISHABDA

high moon enters heaven - CLARA MONDSHINE

baby lets cruise - DWIGHT TWILLEY BAND

ill fated lovers go time-tripping - BONGWATER

90’s reflex - FUNKINEVEN & FATIMA

der kuß - JULIANE WERDING

sentimental journey (excerpt) - HARPERS BIZARRE

thinking about you - FRANK OCEAN

now those days are gone (pitch down excerpt) - BUCKS FIZZ

telephone song - LAURIE ANDERSON

etwas - MOEBIUS

Maria Abramovich dialogue #1

space for you - MARIA MINERVA

shabistan (sehtar & electronic) - DARIUSH DOLAT-SHAHI

Quran recitation - FAHD AL KANDERI

Kathy Acker Dialogue #1

the dead sea - LAPALUX

clockworks - LAURIE SPIEGEL

counting - THE CONET PROJECT

portal - JOHN CARPENTER

fortunes of scorpio (excerpt) - GUNTON & SKINNER

jameio - JOHN WIZARD

dream 1 - C

Kathy Acker Dialogue #2

pharaohs - TEARS FOR FEARS

feel it all around - WASHED OUT

steady - EDDIE & FREDDIE

"inch by inch" dialogue WILLIAM HIGGINS

up - ＤＯＮＴ/ BＥ/ 正方形

out of sync - KONX OM PAX

baia - MARTIN DENNY

shaytan - AYSHAY

the assignment (with dialogue) - JERRY GOLDSMITH

autobahn - BăLăNESCU QUARTET

quiet 6 - SHEILA CHANDRA

ninna nanna per adulti - ENNIO MORRICONE

goodnight - MOOG BEATLES

delia’s dream - DELIA DERBYSHIRE

wake up - ZAGER & EVAN

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NT.3 Duncan Harvey

Nocturne

The third instalment in our nocturne series comes from the sharpest red-headed man in Glasgow, Duncan Harvey (sorry Ben & Wardy). Never one to succumb to trends, Duncan has earned himself a reputation as one of the most versatile, tasteful selectors in the city with an arsenal of funk, soul, boogaloo, hip-hop, reggae and countless rarities that have found their way into his crate. Aside from bar residencies , these days you can catch him at Voodoo Voodoo, his recently launched Tuesday club night that has amassed a solid core of followers despite the early start the next day.

That’s why we wanted to find out the other side to Duncan and his record collection. How does this man sleep at night? If this tape is anything to go by, pretty damn well.

Talk us through the mix

I open with the Art Ensemble of Chicago's 'Proverbes (I)', a cut from their brilliant soundtrack for the French film 'Les Stances à Sophie'. Next is Romanian cimbalom player Tony Iordache's 'Balada Haiduceasca' which I think translates to something like 'The Ballad of the Outlaw'; it always reminds me of a beautiful woman I was a little bit crazy over, I guess she was something of an outlaw. Orchestre del la Paillote's 'Kadia Blues' is a haunting piece of Ghanaian Jazz and Menelik Wèsnatchèw's tender version of the traditional Ethiopian song 'Tezeta' is one I put on a night time mix for myself about 8 years ago. Then we have a cut from Duke Ellington and Bill Strayhorn's interpretation of Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker Suite', listen to the incredible shift in the vibe of this tune, Sam Woodyard nailing it on drums.

I like to be quite literal with my interpretation of concepts hence the inclusion of the pioneering Artie Shaw's track 'Nightmare', for me it perfectly sums up the term 'nocturne', it's dark and sinister; noir. Similarly Basil Kirchin's 'Primitive London 2' is taken from his soundtrack for a documentary showing 60s London's debauched side; sex trade, drugs, counter culture shenanigans.

The short introduction to Shailendra Singh's 'Calzachem Suck' opens the way for a stylistic shift in the mix. The wonderfully diverse Various Production show their delicate side with 'Took', followed by Polish born, Glasgow based Ela Orleans' 'Nocturne', (a track whose name I only read after deciding to put it on the mix), her album 'Tumult In Clouds' on Clan Destine Records is a delight. 'Ritournelle' by Colleen is a track that reminds me of working on a collaborative mix with Chris Storey (The Awkward Son's of Patrick Stewart) whose musical influence on me is second to none. This mix is dedicated to him. Like much religious music the acapella 'Babylon', sung by Mountain Man, fills me with emotion despite it's content, I don't know if these three ladies do actually yearn for Jerusalem, and I don't really care, but their complex melodies melt me. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy is one of the best live performer's I've ever seen, I've included 'Madeline-Mary' from what is essentially his own nocturne tape, 'I See a Darkness'. Chuck Brown's out-of-this-world sound on 'Out of the Darkness' is a Soul number whose feel belies the optimism contained in the lyrics, I like this contradiction. I end the mix with two tracks which mean a lot to me. Billie Holiday doing what she does best and tearing my heart asunder in 'I'll Never Be The Same', just the sort of thing you need in the dead of night, and the more hopeful 'Here I Go Just Dreamin' Away' by Cab Calloway for yet more literal interpretations of the Nocturne Tape.

How, where and at what time was this mix made?

This mix was made over a period of just over 7 months. It has had many different incarnations but what you hear today started to really take shape about 4 or 5 months ago. I worked on it by day and night, mainly by night, always in my living room. It was put together using Audacity.

The tracks come from various sources, 78s, vinyl, CDs, mp3s.

What is your relationship with the nighttime? How does this manifest itself in the music?

The old blues adage, 'night time is the right time' rings true for me, what it is the right time for I am still trying to figure out. I work, play, eat, drink, be merry, be sad, always taking it too far. I stay up working till the sun rises, I cook whole meals at 4am, I party to excess and look within myself to parts of my mind I should really only inspect in the rational light of day.

This mix is the soundtrack to a night wrought with emotions, irrational, overblown, exacerbated by the darkness. It contains pessimism and optimism, sadness and joy in unequal measure.

You are known for having a wide and diverse music collection. What’s your process for finding new stuff?

I think how I research music is reflected in the diversity of what I enjoy, I take inspiration from all angles. Generally there is one thing (a gig, a mix, a record that turns up whilst digging, a song in a movie soundtrack) or person (a friend, a DJ, someone working in a record store (Monorail Music!!!), a stranger asking me for a request) that twigs me onto a sound which I then pursue through online research, by asking people who might know or by guess work. I research the way you research anything, I break it down; what country is it from, what year, what scene, who produced it, who plays bass, what label is it on, what the fuck is that awesome instrument and why have I never heard anything like it before...? Over time this has resulted in me finding a wide and very occasionally attaining a deep knowledge of a lot of types of music.

Is medium important to you? Would you chose a 7” over an mp3?

Yes and no. I do enjoy having hard copies of the music I love, I buy shellac 78s, vinyl, CDs and tapes, but it's all just sound. If I can get an mp3 that sounds as sweet then it's all good, often the mp3s I get are better quality than the battered old records I find. However, at its best, for a lot of the music I play, the sound of vinyl is superior and, crucially, digging for vinyl and other old formats means you can find music that hasn't been recorded otherwise. But digging is hard, time consuming and lonely; I'm a work-a-day DJ, so I buy mp3s, play them out and people swing their hips exactly the same as if it were a mint first pressing. I also worry about indulging needlessly in my materialist urges, sometimes I buy music I have on mp3 on vinyl because I 'need' the art, the label, the black disc! In particular I'm a total sucker for labels on 78s, they contain these tiny, often hilarious, descriptions of the music. Nothing fills me with more joy than finding a 10” with the words 'Hawaiian Guitars' written on it.

Though I am glad to be able to put my thoughts on medium down for all to see I have the vinyl debate all too often, there is a lot of vinyl snobbery in the DJ world, I find it dull, oh so dull, so unless you are a David Barbarossa or a Jannik Giesekam, don't talk to me about it.

Also available on YouTube & Mixcloud

Photography - Kirstin Kerr

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NT.2 Joxaren

Hypnosutredningen

The second tape in our series comes from veteran Swedish musician David Giese. While he’s been making music under a variety of guises since 1986 - from punk band Big Fish to the aptly titled metal group ‘Pure Pain’ to even a couple of jungle records - he’s best known for his contribution to the Scandinavian Skweee movement as Joxaren. He first appeared on our radar many moons ago after bringing his deformed, hyperactive beats to Ballers’ Social at the old Ivy in Glasgow and is one of the performers featured on our Skweee recording from last year’s Norberg festival. This is a guy who has a real passion for the music that he consumes and it shows in his varied, and at times times chilling, selection for this mix. But we’ll let him talk you through it himself...

Talk us through the mix

We begin in a Swedish nuclear plant in 1981, the first all-electronic single from Swedish synthpop pioneers Adolphson & Falk. The song is about a man guarding a reactor, every day watching a small flashing blue light that indicates everything is fine. After the eerie theremin-like ARP solo we move into a tender breakdown with Neubauten's "Armenia". Blixa whispers "Are the volcanoes still active? Please don't disappoint me!" The ominous atmosphere is gradually relieved by a 12 year old track from the originator of Skweee, Mr. Frans Carlquist, under the alias Påve. The title translates "Instead of war" and the track gets joined by the chanting South African pastor Foster Manganyi and his choir. After that there is an unreleased track from me with the good man Swedish Martin on guitar, a soothing night track I originally composed for a TV score. We then move on to some pitched-down desert blues from Mali's Tinariwen, remixed by Four Tet. While in half-tempo land, I took the chance to drop one of Mesak's new tracks that sounds so right at the wrong speed. An old and pretty unfocused Tangerine Dream track is then with a little effort bent into the beat, some interesting parts emerge. Then follows a set of individual tracks that capture some different night vibes, the 1987 track from WIRE-man Bruce Gilbert is something I used to play a lot last year to put my baby daughter to sleep. Zazou/Bikayé:s "Noir et Blanc" is one of my absolute favorite albums and this track can rarely be used on dancefloors so I took the opportunity to drop it here. The Makers and Neud Photo get to represent the USA with some suggestive soulful electronics, followed by some blissful meandering Ethio Jazz from the 60:s and finally a dose of German kraut-muzak to make you slumber.

How, where and at what time was this mix made?

I made it one late evening at home on my vinyl decks. The Joxaren track was edited into the mix afterwards.

What is your relationship with night time? How does this manifest itself in the music? Do the long nordic winter months affect this?

It's true, the winter is pretty much like one long night up here. I certainly think there is a special night-vibe in a lot of music, something about darkness, comfort and temporal mileage. I love to sleep, so I don't generally stay up if I don't have to, but I have still always loved the night. Swedish midsummer nights are magic.

Would you recommend any particular activity or surroundings whilst listening to this mix?

I would recommend a dark and cool setting, wearing something comfortable. Some parts are a bit scary, so don't walk alone in the woods or such.

Your tape hardly features any Skweee tracks yet the music you have chosen definitely seems fit within the overall Skweee aesthetic. Would you agree? If so, what do you think gives these tracks this character?

Well, in that case it's probably about the unexpected and the imperfect. A lot of this music happened in a clash between time eras, cultures and techniques which made it slightly out of control and therefore interesting. Like all good Skweee should be.

  Also available on YouTube & Mixcloud

Photography - Kirstin Kerr

[nocturnetapes-blog]

NT.1 JD Twitch

Insomnolence

JD Twitch takes us into the Interzone...

Talk us through the mix

I have a very long relationship with what gets called industrial music. A lot of artists who came out of that movement soon tired of making clanking noise and went on to make some of the most interesting, hypnotic (and listenable) music I've ever encountered. A high % of the music is by artists who are perhaps often more associated with "sturm und drang" than with mediative hypnotica. 

There are a few "songs" on the mix as the voices of John Balance, Holger Czukay, Robert Wyatt, Nick Cave and Arthur Russell (amongst others) have a distinctive character to their voice that perfectly fits the feel I was looking for. The mix takes in music from the early 1960s right up until the present day and I think it's maybe quite hard to figure out what tracks come from what time period. 

For me the best music has always been timeless and ageless and I don't really care whether music is current and hip or old, unknown or forgotten. I think the pace changes quite a lot over the course of the mix but also remains firmly in a certain headspace, if that makes sense?

How was this mix made? 

The mix was made using turntables with some tracks that aren't on vinyl being played from Ableton (I don't have and have never used a CDJ). There is zero beat mixing as there aren't really many beats. Everything is either layered or segued by key. There is a bit of echo and delay in places but very few fx were used although i did use some multi band compression to boost the bass frequencies a tad in places. 

The mix was done in the wee small hours (around 4 - 6am). Track selection was made entirely based on what sounded right for the headspace that that time often engenders and involved pulling out and listening to a large number of records at a similar time the night before. it's about two hours long but could have gone on way longer.

What is your relationship with night time? How does this manifest itself in the music?

I have always been a fairly nocturnal creature. It's hard to know if that's a result of what I do for a living but even before I started dj'ing I always liked the dead of night and would do university work very late at night if possible. I tend to get my best ideas well after midnight and rather than letting insomnia be a curse that drives me crazy, if I'm lying awake I'll get back up and do stuff. I think all the best music i have ever made was finished late at night and sometimes when i surface the next day I have little recall of how i actually did something. It's a little like the Interzone William S. Burroughs talks about where one enters an almost dreamlike state or a sort of trance. There is definitely a noticeable shift in temporal space after about 3am where the still of night and the dark, or the prequel to dawn creates a very different atmosphere for creativity, listening to music or reading. 

I've always sought out music that works best for my headspace at these times and that tends to be music without drums or at least without too regular a rhythmic structure, or if there is a rhythm, something that is quite trance-inducing. In recent years there has been a trend towards making music that specifically meets these requirements - i.e. hypnagogic pop or whatever it is called - but I find most of what I have heard a little too contrived.

Would you recommend any particular activity or surroundings whilst listening to this mix?

It is probably different for different listeners. For some, being in an altered state may assist, for others, simply the time of night might be enough. it might be music for trancing out to, for enjoying a psychedelic experience, for reading to, for thinking, falling asleep to, drifting in and out of consciousness or being intimate to. I'd also HIGHLY recommend NOT listening to it on shitty laptop speakers.

You're better known for playing music in clubs, but you've done a few mixes that are a little closer to this theme in the past, namely the Sleepwalk compilation and your mix for Fact (214). How does this one compare? 

I used to co-run a Sunday evening club in Glasgow in the early 90s that played a lot of what got called "ambient" music (a term I'm not entirely comfortable with). People would come and fall asleep or completely trance out, which in its own way was as satisfying as getting people dancing.  DJing can take many forms and for me a big part of it has always been about introducing people to music and types of music they might not otherwise encounter. I've have always felt there is more interesting music to listen to late at night after the dance impulse has died down than mellow (or not so mellow!) dance music. There comes a time when the 4/4 in whatever form becomes a little tiresome and not so conducive to the state of mind at that time, although from experience I'd say I'm in the minority on that front. Perhaps I just don't hang out with enough cosmic explorers? :)

A couple of the tracks on this mix are also on Sleepwalk  and the FACT mix but I think this mix delves deeper into the Interzone (and is way longer). Maybe "Sleepwalk" is a beginners guide to the Interzone, this is an intermediate guide and one day I'll do a mix of more extremely hypnotic, perhaps even disorientating music, strictly for the Interzone headstrong?

  Also available on Youtube & Mixcloud

Photography - Kirstin Kerr

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Into the Interzone 2200 BST 11 April 2013