Movement Through Thought
Created 2021-02-18. You can skip to the list of posts below.
Movement Through Thought ("MTT") is a radio show and a series of DJ Mixes. It's everything I know about electronic music (and music in general) after collecting for ~25 years, documented in one-hour chunks.
New mixes are released to djcev.com and to mixcloud every Thursday evening. A podcast-style RSS feed of downloadable episodes is available. Each time a new mix is uploaded, an old one drops off this website per my policy. Keep this in mind, especially if you're using an RSS reader, as old download links in your local cache may no longer be available.
The recording is typically done in one take, often on the day of release. None are perfect (there's always some kind of mistake) and I wouldn't say I'm good at this, but I like the process and the result. It makes me happy and helps keep me sane.
The show is named after a song by Resident Alien, the B-side of Florida Electro Artists Volume Two, one of my favorites.
These mixes are all made up of music written by other people, of course. Please see my decksclaimer, modelled after the Blogariddims decksclaimer, for a few words on that topic.
Year 1 (2017-03 thru 2018-03)
The show began as a live broadcast on aNONradio in March of 2017. The first few weren't much more than tests, improvised mixes with no clear direction. After a few months I settled into the same pattern Megaphysics and I followed at the arcade: warm music in the summer, bass in August, spooky music in October, cold distant music in the winter. A tradition that more-or-less continues to this day. Numbers 013, 026, 043, 048, and 052 were particularly good and/or notable.
Year 2 (2018-03 thru 2019-03)
The show continued on aNONradio in year 2, this time with the addition of a very cheap ($5) microphone. I started doing brief unscripted vocal intros and outros for the show (calling out the timeslot and schedule, shouting out live listeners at the end, etc.). Good episodes from this period include 055, 063, 071, 078, 090, 095, and 100.
Year 3 (2019-03 thru 2020-03)
Year 3 the show continued on aNONradio, but moved back half an hour in the schedule. Somewhere in this span of time I started reading the tracklist aloud at the end of the program. Looking quickly at the list of year 3 episodes numbers 119, 127, 128, 141, 147, 152, and 156 stand out.
Year 4 (2020-03 thru 2021-03)
2020 was a hell of a year.
After a number of problems with aNONradio's server I started uploading my shows to mixcloud. Those server problems combined with some behind-the-scenes drama led me to realize that aNONradio was a place I no longer wanted to be. So, in September, after number 187, I registered this domain then paid for and moved to a shared hosting service. I'd like to get back on a radio station again, but for now distributing mixes here is good enough. From year 4 I like 158, 179, 183, and 200 the most.
Year 5 (2021-03 thru 2022-03)
This was the first full year to be published directly to djcev.com and mixcloud. The format stayed the same, though I did start to repeat tracks more often. I'm still not great on-mic; that's something to work on in the future. Looking over the list I like a lot of the mixes from this year, with numbers 216, 233, 241, 252, and 258 being especially memorable as I'm writing this.
I'd still like to get back on the radio somewhere; maybe that'll be my goal for year 6.
Year 6 (2022-03 thru 2023-03)
A good but stressful 12 months. In this time I switched to mixing with a barebones DVS system, I stopped uploading to Mixcloud after a policy change there, and I hit a pretty gnarly patch of burnout late in the year. I never did get back on a radio station either; should start thinking about that again.
Looking over the list quickly some mixes that stand out to me from this period include 268, 271, 287, and 304 (of course).