DOIN IT IN THE LIBRARY MIXTAPE (2021) by Mr Dirty Hairy

Talk about a labour of love mate.
It goes like this.
A few years ago in New Zealand whilst digging in the South Island (the city of Nelson) I came across a few boxes of library records.
For friends not familiar with “ library records “ these are records made for commercial and non commercial use in the 60s,70s, and 80s . During those times professional musicians would often earn their bread and butter
going into recording studios and composing music long and short for use in commercials on radio, TV and in theatre , etc. In modern day use this is often an often a rich source of samples or tracks for producer / DJ types.
Labels like KPM, Bruton and DeWolfe (non of which I’ve used here) are
So often considered the " diggers choice " and regularly command high prices in the realm of Discog / Ebay digging (especially if a well known Hip Hop track sampled from it )
But it doesn’t stop there.
Some smaller library labels will do sound FX records, passages of solo instrumentation and use this beautiful simplistic wording on the rear of the cover to describe each piece rather than having song names. (the mixtape cover I knocked up is some of that wording from the actual records I used )
So what I recovered in Nelson wasn’t necessarily a box of records I could remortgage the house with BUT it fit into my general digging for music patterns and record sniffs. This is not about rare records.
After I’d combed through samples for various projects I thought for a year on or off about how I could present these “ brief moments of funk flavoured or related goodness “
This week I woke up on Monday morning and said f*ck it lets try or at least start it. After 2 hair pulling days and being mentally vacant from my wife and kids for extended periods of time I decided I need to make this happen in a week or I’m gonna over think it too much.
I started by pulling out everything that moves me and just playing it over and over finding a batch or an order about how it might all work.
95% of these tracks are only 45 - 60 seconds long so I ended up editing ,extending, remixing, juggling and dropping things all over the place.
On the plus side if you are in the mix thinking “ this is shit, why did Hairy put this in ? Remember not long to go !
Initially a foundation mix was laid down first to get some sense or feel for the music, I recorded some separate takes of juggles and cuts which where over dubbed and then in classic DH mixtape fashion I sprinkled it with sauce and nuts
I called on a few dear friends to throw shout outs in there.
What can I tell you ? Its very cheesy , very brief, very wonky and I hope parts of it will make you laugh.
This isn’t supposed to be some cleaned up, polished mixtape of high technical calibre. I mean to me its about digging around for cheap records and find that gold within.
Its funky, fuzzy, its rocky, its spacey, its disco, its spiritual its crackly with latin its jazz in there and over all. Theres a lot of technology available today to time stretch and beat match but I keep it as honest as possible.
I want to extend thanks to all the musicians that played on these joints ( non of which are credited on any sleeve ) and for those brief moments of nice movement or feel.
The mixtape is sponsored by Turborect, Morgans Bra’s and Car’s , Zoomo Detergent ( Big up Christchurch’s very own Wuckud MC for his valuable contributions )
Extensions of recognition love and general good vibrations must go out to Grant Smithies and right at the end of the tape you hear his voice on National Radio in NZ dropping a nice words. These records came from your basement boss. Cheers bro ! Big shout out to my brother Jan Kincl for conservatively glazing over the mix and helping me to present it in tasteful way.
Anyway, love it, hate it, share it don’t share it. Whatever you do be happy and if you’ve been putting off something for years then. Get onto it.
It might take a while but it feels good.

BIG UP
Hairy