This set is interesting because this is the first time that I've ever recorded and made a live set available that I did with Ableton Live. And actually, although I've been doing my radio shows lately with Ableton, this is only the second live show that I've ever done on a laptop (the first was in Vegas in 2008 for DefCon 16, but I didn't record that and put it online). However, because I couldn't carry a full set of DJ equipment in my luggage for the trip, I ended up using Ableton for all three sets, instead of mixing on vinyl or CD's.
A little background about the trip: this was not a traditional cruise. It was a smaller ship, an "expedition ship," not a cruise ship. A large group of us had been planning this for a few years, thanks to the efforts of a good friend of mine (Pinguino) from Los Angeles. I met Pinguino several years ago in Seattle when I was playing at an illicit rave under an interstate overpass. We were talking about places that we'd like to travel, and I mentioned Antarctica. She told me her name, and said that she loved penguins and also wanted to visit there. Fast forward a year or two, and she emailed me and asked if I wanted to be an official DJ for an expedition trip. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. By the way, the profile photo that I currently have on my Facebook fan page and MySpace page was taken by Pinguino that night under the bridge - she's a professional photographer among other careers.
So anyway, almost one fifth of the passengers on the trip were part of our special group. Lots of DefCon people, lots of photography/film professionals, lots of really fun IT people. Although I could have played in the lounge every single night of the trip, I really wanted to focus more on the trip than partying, so I planned to focus on doing only three main sets.
This was the first set, from November 22nd. This was our third night on the ship, almost all the way through the Drake Passage, so we were getting into calmer waters and nobody was really too seasick anymore. I had wanted to do a Drum & Bass set at some point, because I hadn't done one in years, and the group that I was travelling with was definitely receptive. The Drake seemed to be an appropriate place for it. Chaotic, just like jungle music. Let me put things into perspective: the Drake Sea is known as the roughest sea in the world. When we were entering it, the Captain slowed down so we wouldn't hit a Beaufort Category 11 storm full-on. If you look up the details on a category 11 storm, you'll see why. Waves approaching fifty feet! Our ship was less than twenty feet from the waterline to the main deck. You can see the problem. Incidentally, even when we were crossing in "calmer" conditions shortly afterward, we had some waves approaching about twenty feet, and the spray was hitting my cabin porthole one night (main deck, third story of six). Also, the photo above was taken in the lee of the Cape Horn, in calm seas, before we actually got out into the Drake proper.
So in the midst of all this, on the night before we officially arrived in Antarctica, Pinguino came to me and said, "It's time, we're ready to party." The ship's crew let us use the main lecture hall for the night, and after most of the others had a few beverages, I played this set.
This mix can be downloaded as part of an archive of all 28 of DJ Bolivia's available recordings of live shows, from the following Google Drive link:
The recordings are compressed as a RAR archive, which can be opened natively in Windows. If you're using a Mac, you can use a free utility to open the RAR (popular examples are "The Unarchiver" and the "UnRarX" app). The password to open the archive is simply 'bolivia' and the size of the download is 5.6 gigabytes. If you have problems downloading this archive from the above Google Drive link, you can email DJ Bolivia at djbolivia@gmail.com for an alternate download link.
Additional information about finding any of DJ Bolivia's older mixes can be found at this link:
Thanks for your interest in these old historical mixes!
I prefer to listen to drum & bass that is fairly jazzy, not the really hardcore stuff. This set progresses from some fairly relaxed tracks at around 165bpm, to eventually hit some pretty aggressive tracks at close to 175bpm. Personally, I prefer the first three quarters of the mix, although for a live set, the more aggressive tracks are more appropriate. My audience wasn't really a dance audience though, they were all just chilling and enjoying the music and the good company. To be honest, the last five minutes of this set is pretty hard stuff, and I wouldn't normally ever play this aggressively if I was making mixes for myself. Most of the tracks are pretty new stuff. Not much else to say. We had a good night, and went out to take a lot of photos of penguins a few hours later.
I'll have the second and third set available here on the blog in the next couple of days. Set number two, a progressive house set, is a little over an hour long and actually recorded while we were camping in Antarctica (possibly the first live recorded DJ set in history that was made available on the internet). Set three is a full three hours of tech-house, for a full-on party in the ship's lounge on "Titanic Night."
By the way, if anyone is curious, here are the track listings from this particular set:
01. Black Sun Empire & Jade, "Deadhouse" (Original Mix).
02. Chewy Lay, "Struggle" (Original Mix).
03. WPL, "Port Of Call" (Original Mix).
04. False Angel, "Redemption" (Aural Imbalance Remix).
05. Hot, "No Problem Dub" (Original Mix).
06. Smooth Stab & Aelyn, "These Words Between Us" (LofiSky Atmos Remix).
07. Command Strange, "Soul Booster" (Original Mix).
08. Command Strange, "Next Time" (Original Mix).
09. Kulprit, "Babylonian" (Original Mix).
10. Bad Weed, "Cherry Oh Jugglin" (Original Mix).
11. DJ Rusty, "System Failed" (Original Mix).
12. Wax Pusher, "Two Toke Pass" (Original Mix).
13. BComplex, "Reflections" (Original Mix).
14. Submorphics, "Revalation" (Original Mix).
15. NW2, "Pink Socks" (DJ Pleasure Remix).
16. Mutated Forms, "Shapes And Colours" (Original Mix).
17. Danny The Wildchild, "Die Clown" (Original Mix).
18. Grandad, "The Door" (Original Mix).
19. DJ Sly & MC Bassman, "Stone Cold" (Original Mix).
20. Black Sun Empire, "Extraction" (Original Mix).
21. V8, "Digital Damnation" (Original Mix).
22. Rockwell, "DJ Friendly Unit Shifter" (Original Mix).
23. DJ AlfE, "Born Bad" (Original Mix).
24. Sawgood, "No" (Ozma Remix).
25. Od, "The Fly" (Original Mix).
26. DJ Pleasure, "Venger" (2010 Mix).
27. Nanotek, "The Vengeful" (Original Mix).
28. Digital Era, "Dance Mother Fucker" (Original Mix).
29. Arsenic, "Start The War" (Original Mix).
(And since I was using Ableton, I had a lot of other random loops playing here and there throughout the mix).
Edit, December 9th: another cruise ship going to Antarctica just ran into major troubles when they lost an engine and had to return to Ushuaia. The video of that vessel (the Clelia II) shows just how insane the waters are down there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDTbopUYg20
If anyone reading this is a member of any Drum & Bass message boards where other people might enjoy listening to this mix, I'd really appreciate you sharing the link to this post. Here's the specific URL:
http://djbolivia.blogspot.com/2010/12/mix-bolivia-live-in-drake-passage.html
Also, you can click here to see my full photo galleries from the trip.
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replant.ca/environmental
