The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald

"The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald" is one of Canada's most well-known folk songs of the past few decades, written and performed by Gordon Lightfoot. It was written about a cargo ship that sunk in Lake Superior on November 10th of 1975. I'm sitting here waiting for the local forestry office to open, and I was reminded of the song a few times this week, so I thought I'd write a little bit about it.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was often referred to as "Big Fitz." It was an ore carrier that sailed on Lake Superior for seventeen years before it sank, and set haul records for six of those seventeen years. Due to its size, it was also sometimes referred to as the "Titanic of the Great Lakes." How fitting.

  

Grant Williams, a financial analyst, wrote about the ship a few weeks ago in one of his newsletters. Here's what he had to say:

Big Fitz ... was the Great Lakes freighter that carried taconite from Duluth to the iron works in the then-thriving Detroit, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio.

When she was launched in 1958, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest boat on the Great Lakes. 729 feet long with a 75ft beam and a 25 foot draft, she could carry 26,000 DWT in her 33' 4”deep hold. Powered by a Coal fired Westinghouse Electric Corporation steam turbine 2 cylinder, she had a top speed of 14 knots and carried a crew of 29.

On November 9, 1975, Big Fitz was loaded with 26,116 tons of taconite iron ore pellets in Superior, Wisconsin and embarked on what would tragically turn out to be her final voyage - a routine crossing of Lake Superior, bound for a steel mill in Detroit, Michigan.

The next day, November 10th, Big Fitz found herself caught in the midst of a massive winter storm, with 35 ft waves and hurricane force winds. Captain Ernest McSorely, a 44-year veteran, made contact with the Avafor, a nearby ship, and reported that he had encountered “one of the worst seas he had ever been in”.

A couple of hours later, with Big Fitz roughly 17 miles from the relative safety of Whitefish Bay at the northeastern tip of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, another ship made contact and was told that the Titanic of The Great Lakes was holding her own. Then something strange happened ... the Fitzgerald disappeared from radar screens.

(Incidentally, Grant was comparing the Euro to the Edmund Fitzgerald).


Let's listen to the song:




Many Canadians know a lot of the lines to the song by heart. Let's look at a few of them. As with most folk tales, some are rooted in fact and some use a bit of artistic license:

With a load of iron ore, twenty-six thousand tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.

This seems to be pretty accurate, if the other comment about carrying 26,116 tons of pellets is true.

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck and said fellas it's too rough to feed ya.

Well, since there was no communication with the ship in this kind of detail, who knows what the old cook said. And incidentally, it was a "new cook" - the regular cook was sick and missed the voyage.

Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms, when they left fully loaded for Cleveland.

Not quite accurate; they were headed for Detroit at the time.

The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay, if they'd put fifteen more miles behind her.

The ship sank only seventeen miles away from the safety of Whitefish Bay.

The captain wired in he had water comin' in, and the good ship and crew was in peril.

Actually, there was no indication that there was any trouble until the ship disappeared off the radar screens.


Another reason why I was thinking about this song recently is because we were studying it in one of my music production classes at Berklee this week. The key is interesting, because it's written in B Dorian rather than A Major. Dorian keys are minor keys which sound moody and gloomy. Basically, for Dorian, you drop the third and seventh degrees of the scale by a half-tone each, so it's like a B Major but with a D natural and an A natural. It's hard to hold the intent of the key in a Dorian, so you have to use the tonic frequently (the B chord at the beginning and end of each verse), to counter the tendency to resolve to A major.

That's all for today, I'm running out of time and I've got to run because BCTS is about to open. You can learn more trivia about the song in this wikapedia article, if you're interested.

I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia.  Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production?  If so, visit:

djbolivia.ca/training

If you happen to enjoy techno tracks, most of my tracks are available as free downloads from this link:

djbolivia.ca/tracks

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support!  I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

    YouTube:  youtube.com/djbolivia

    SoundCloud:  soundcloud.com/djbolivia

    Blogger:  djbolivia.blogspot.com

    Main Site:  www.djbolivia.ca

Mix: Bolivia, "Live on the Akademik Ioffe"

And finally, here's the third set that I played a few weeks ago. Again, a different style: this one is a little under three hours of tech-house, recorded in the ship's lounge on the RV Akademik Ioffe scientific expedition ship.

 



I was a little hesitant to put this set online. Technically speaking, this is the most chaotic of the three sets that I played. I did this in Ableton, but I had no ability to cue background tracks because I was using a borrowed laptop without a USB sound card (audio coming out of the headphone jack), and I had to mix everything visually based on the waveform files that Ableton showed me. I was also using a mouse, which was better than the scroll pad, but it still precluded me from playing with the EQ controls or doing really smooth fades. No effects either. So a lot of the mixes are more the start/stop type, and I just tried to time them well. The end result was that the first hour has some unconventional mixing at times, and the section from the twenty-five minute to thirty minute mark is something that I wish I could do over. But I've listened to the mix several times over the past few days, and also has a lot of good stuff in it.

To download any of my studio mixes or recordings of lives shows, visit:

djbolivia.ca/dropbox 

Then go into the folder called "Bolivia's DJ Mixes & Live Shows"

Thanks for your support!

Here are the track listings from this particular set:

01. Kozin Escodero Dessy, "Little Cafe" (Preview Mix).
02. Jerry Aseret, "Fever" (Dub Mix).
03. Falko Richtberg & Sebastian Wojkowski, "Salt & Bread" (Audiojacks Bottle & Spring Remix).
04. Larix, "To Defeat" (Original Mix).
05. Michael Woods, "Nitro" (Original Club Mix).
06. Toge, "Shiver" (Riot Remix).
07. Alexander Som, "Dirty Bonita" (Original Mix).
08. Christian Smith, "Automatic" (Original Mix).
09. Cristian Exploited, "Drunko" (Dirty Secretz Remix).
10. Timothy Allan, "Bring It Back" (Original Mix).
11. Umek, "Gatex 2010" (Original Mix).
12. Christian Smith, "East Village" (Original Mix).
13. Matthew Dekay & Lee Burridge, "Wongel" (Original Mix).
14. Da Fresh, "Once Again" (Original Mix).
15. Wender A, "Audio Therapy" (Original Mix).
16. Wender A, "Mothership In Sao Paulo" (Original Mix).
17. Bolivia, "Global Underground" (David Anthony Remix).
18. Thomas Penton & DJ Samer, "No Left Turn" (Kotoswitch Remix).
19. Geshe, "Question Mark" (Tech Mix).
20. Frank Garcia, "I Say To You" (Original Mix).
21. Diffuse Members, "Mikrofon" (Original Mix).
22. Lazy Jay, "After Dark" (Mystique & Amro Mix).
23. Stefano Noferini, "Mama" (Back Home Mix).
24. Sebjak, "Bigger" (Paul Thomas & Myke Smith Remix).
25. Manuel De La Mare & Marshall, "Blackbird" (Original Mix).
26. Piatto, "MC202" (Original Mix).
27. Technical Lovers, "Off The Cuff" (Original Mix).
28. Umek, "Gatex 2010" (Original Mix).

I also had a couple dozen other progressive house tracks and some house loops playing subtly in the background. Maybe not as subtly as in my last set, because quite often you can specifically tell what they are. Still, I considered them to be background filler material, so I didn't include them in the track listings above. In the future though, I'll probably try to concentrate more on loops and non-vocal segments rather than fuller tracks.

By the way, since the evening started out as a "tuxedo night" theme, I also played jazz for an hour and a half before I started this set, but I didn't bother recording that part of the evening.



If anyone reading this is a member of any 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-on-akademik-ioffe.html


Also, you can click here to see my full photo galleries from the trip.

I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia.  Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production?  If so, visit:

djbolivia.ca/training

If you happen to enjoy techno tracks, most of my tracks are available as free downloads from this link:

djbolivia.ca/tracks

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support!  I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

    YouTube:  youtube.com/djbolivia

    SoundCloud:  soundcloud.com/djbolivia

    Blogger:  djbolivia.blogspot.com

    Main Site:  www.djbolivia.ca

Mix: Bolivia, "Live in Antarctica 2010"

Ok, here's the second of the three shows that I played while I was travelling this past month, and it's the one that will undoubtedly be the most popular. This one is just over an hour long, and it's mostly my normal style of progressive house, with a tiny bit of trance, house, and tech-house all mixed in. Lots of vocals.

To the best of my knowledge (and Google's), this is the first DJ mix ever to have been recorded live in Antarctica (and put online). When I first found out about the trip two years ago, I thought to myself that it would be interesting to have a live show recorded there, to put on my website. After all, a lot of other DJ's can eventually hit shows on six of the seven continents, but Antarctica has to be a tough one. I then searched the net and couldn't actually find any. Of course, there has been lots of regular music recorded there, since a lot of the people at the various bases have instruments, so there is a lot of live jamming happening there all the time. And other people have written songs (including electronica tracks) that are Antarctica themed or that feature sound recordings there. But no DJ sets. I kind of quietly held my breath for the last two years, wondering if I might end up being the first. At the moment, I think I succeeded, which is kind of cool.




The challenges of doing a show down there are a bit unexpected. Doing a show on a ship that is anchored somewhere offshore is technically still "in Antarctica," but I wanted to go a step further. We had an overnight camping trip there, which I figured would provide the perfect opportunity. However, it wasn't as easy as it might seem.

Antarctica is almost entirely a pristine and rugged wilderness. I love it. As a heavy environmentalist, I was pretty concerned on the way down that I'd see tourist activity that would frustrate me. However, that was not the case. There is an organization called IAATO (the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators) which is comprised of about four dozen companies, and they are a self-regulating agency which ensures that tourism doesn't leave any impact on the continent. And the staff from our expedition (Quark) were extremely diligent, which I found to be extremely reassuring. Let me illustrate by going over a few of the rules we had to follow:

- Not allowed to disturb wildlife, ie. we weren't allowed to approach closer than 5 meters to any penguins, although the penguins generally don't seem too scared of humans. Penguins would often approach us a lot closer than that, but it had to be them coming to us, not us getting close to them.
- Not allowed to walk in trails that the penguins use.
- Not allowed to bring ANY food onto the shore. An example used to illustrate why this was a problem: a chocolate bar contains egg products. When they are manufactured, the candy isn't cooked to a high enough temperature to completely kill certain bacteria or pathogens in the eggs. This doesn't matter to humans, but this could introduce a fatal organism to a penguin or other bird which could wipe out an entire colony quite easily.
- Not allowed to bring ANY beverages onto the shore, except bottled water. Similar reasons as above. Talk about a "dry" event.
- Not allowed to leave human waste behind. That's right, we weren't allowed to pee in the snow. Human waste had to be brought back to the ship when we departed. An important consideration since we were there overnight!
- Our boots had to be disinfected and sterilized each time we got on or off the expedition ship. The risk there was that one of us would step in some penguin poop and it would get onto our boots and then be transferred to another colony, and somehow infect that second colony and wipe it out. Unfortunately, this rule is in effect because there have been some colonies wiped out that they think were because of this problem.
- Our expedition staff had to go use snowshoes and tramp out trails for the human visitors to use. If we stepped off a trail and went down through the snow to our waist (which definitely happened a few times to each of us), we had to fill the boot hole afterwards, so a penguin wouldn't fall into it and get trapped and die.
- Obviously, things like kleenex and plastic wrappers in our pockets had to be monitored carefully, so they didn't fall out and create litter.

I was really glad to see that all these kind of rules are in effect. But when thinking about doing a live show there, I also had to consider that there was no electricity, and amplified instruments were not allowed because the sound would really carry, and might confuse and upset the penguins.



So anyway, we spent a night camping overnight on the shore on November 25th, at a place called Paradise (Danco Island, but maybe it should be renamed Dance Island). There were thirty of us in the group, the maximum that Quark could get a permit for. We didn't have tents; we were just in sleeping bags, sleeping on the snow. I know that a lot of people immediately would think at this point that we were crazy. Perhaps, but to a Canadian, camping in the snow is not that strange (well, at least not to some of us). And a bunch of people in our group were definite techno fans, so I figured that there was a way to pull it off. I took the laptop and did a set with Ableton. Obviously, it was a pretty quiet set, for a pretty small but appreciative crowd. The laptop was no louder than human voices, but in the quiet, it was good enough for people to dance to. We didn't have any fancy lighting effects of course, but then again it was summer there, so the sun never sets. The only real problem was that my laptop is a few years old, and even though I charged it fully before we went to shore, I had less than an hour and a half of battery life. So the set is only slightly over an hour long.

Because I was working on a laptop without even a controller, I had to do everything with the mousepad. To make sure that I got a good sounding set, I had to play extremely conservatively. Luckily, once files are properly warped in Ableton, a crab-eater seal could have probably produced a good sounding set. There are absolutely no effects in this set. I didn't even play with the EQ 3's. I just started and stopped tracks (overlapped, of course), and made basic volume changes (usually sharp changes, and there were only a few times that I tried to do smooth fades with the scroll pad). Also, I usually always kept a third tech-house track or house loops playing in the background at just under half volume, to give the set the continuity that I needed, and keep the sound full all the time. Ableton is amazing - between the "background track" trick, and using a basic DJ mastering plug-in to keep output in a tight range, this is actually a great sounding set. A lot of people are going to really enjoy it.

To download any of my studio mixes or recordings of lives shows, visit:

djbolivia.ca/dropbox 

Then go into the folder called "Bolivia's DJ Mixes & Live Shows"

Thanks for your support!

I started the set with one of my own tracks, "Global Underground (Alone In New York)." This particular remix is pretty trancy, and it was done by Gregg Morrish. If anyone wants to download it, you can grab it for free from my Dropbox Folder.

Here are the track listings from this particular set:

01. Bolivia, "Global Underground" (Gregg Morrish Remix).
02. Timo Garcia & Amber Jolene, "Lady Luck City Lights" (Solee Remix).
03. Green Velvet, "La La Land" (Pleasurekraft Sideshow Remix).
04. Ivan Gomez, "No Name" (Sisko Electrofanatik Remix).
05. Gabriel & Castellon, "Hit The Bottom" (Original Mix).
06. Jon Rundell, "Top Shelf" (Original Mix).
07. Hugo & Marshall, "Mortal Coil" (Original Mix).
08. Milkwish, "Gotta Be Moved" (Mario da Ragnio Remix).
09. Lewis Lastella, "Pumpz Up The Volume" (Original Mix).
10. Tarska, "Midnight" (Lee Nova Techmix).
11. DJ Crash & JAVE, "Ice Cream" (Original Mix).
12. Hernan Paredes, "Right Now" (Extended Mix).
13. Max Bett, "Mad Clinic" (Original Mix).
14. Angel Stoxx, "I Dropped My E On The Dancefloor" (Original Mix).
15. Luca M, "Grumpli" (Original Mix).

As mentioned, I had about a dozen other tech-house tracks and some house loops playing subtly in the background. For example, listen around the seven minute mark - you'll hear one track that I dropped out for about two seconds from 7:27 to 7:29 (I don't know why). I'm not listing them here, because I don't think any of them are readily identifiable.


Finally, just in case anyone wants to see something cool, Shadow set up his Canon on a tripod for the night, and set it to take a time-lapse sequence throughout the night. He turned it into a video and put it onto YouTube. It's neat because there was a penguin colony inland from us, and during the night, a lot of them came and started wandering through our camping area. The lens cap cover blew sideways during the night, but you can still see what happened throughout the night (including our ship circling around in the bay, and a very light snowstorm that blew through during the night). And you can also click here to see my full photo galleries from the trip.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkAHY3zjOGk

I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia.  Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production?  If so, visit:

djbolivia.ca/training

If you happen to enjoy techno tracks, most of my tracks are available as free downloads from this link:

djbolivia.ca/tracks

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support!  I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

    YouTube:  youtube.com/djbolivia

    SoundCloud:  soundcloud.com/djbolivia

    Blogger:  djbolivia.blogspot.com

    Main Site:  www.djbolivia.ca

Mix: Bolivia, "Live in the Drake Passage"

Here's the first of the three shows that I played while I was travelling this past month. This one is just over two hours long, and it's a drum & bass mix. The next two shows were progressive house and tech house, my normal style. It's been quite a while since I've done a drum & bass mix (probably five or six years), but even though I don't play it very often, I enjoy listening to it. This doesn't mean a permanent switch in style, although I would definitely play other live DnB sets if someone booked me specifically to play that kind of show.

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.

To download any of my studio mixes or recordings of lives shows, visit:

djbolivia.ca/dropbox 

Then go into the folder called "Bolivia's DJ Mixes & Live Shows"

Thanks for your support!

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).



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.

---------------------------------------

I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia.  Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production?  If so, visit:

djbolivia.ca/training

If you happen to enjoy techno tracks, most of my tracks are available as free downloads from this link:

djbolivia.ca/tracks

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support!  I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

    YouTube:  youtube.com/djbolivia

    SoundCloud:  soundcloud.com/djbolivia

    Blogger:  djbolivia.blogspot.com

    Main Site:  www.djbolivia.ca