OAKE - 489 - Electronic Explorations by Rob_Booth

OAKE are Berlin duo Eric Goldstein and Konstanze Bathseba Zippora,

01 - Werner Fritsch - Mein Herz ist Leer (Re-Edited throughout the whole mix) [Deuschlandradio Kultur/RB2016]
02 - Lost Few - Of Sculptured Ivy and Stone Flowers [Resistance/Restraint - Unreleased]
03 - Blessed Initiative - Out With the Old, In With the Newsflash [Subtext - SUB019]
04 - Lair - Ward 001 [Modular Mind - Unreleased]
05 - Chafik Chennouf - Ferroequinologie (Mondkopf Remix) [Opal Tapes - OPAL114]
06 - Jasss - Danza [Ideal Recordings - Ideal160]
07 - Wara´ - Najam Aishama [Urban Legend - UL003]
08 - Belief Defect - Fake Disciples [Raster - R-M178]
09 - Stave - Fought pt. 1 (Grebenstein Remix) [Aiia Recordings - AIIA004]
10 - OAKE - Abul (Samuel Kerridge Remix) [SNTS - Unreleased]
11 - ???? - ???? [Unreleased]
12 - DiNT - Hooker (OAKE Remix) [Horo - Unreleased]
13 - Jónsi & Alex - Boy 1904 [Parlophone (EU) & XL Recordings - XLLP-447 (US)]
14 - Eomac / Bedouin Trax - Prayer Pt. 1 [Bedouin Records - BDNX 001]
15 - Killawatt - Spinal Swarm (Eomac Version) [Osiris Music UK - OSMUK043EP]
16 - Jon Hassel - Blues Nile [Lovely Music Ltd. - LML 1021]
17 - Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Existence In The Unfurling [Western Vinyl - WV145]
18 - Abul Mogard - Tumbling Relentless Heaps [Ecstatic - ELP020]
19 - Pact Infernal - Talismans [Horo - HOROEX10]

Recording Podcasts, in my eyes, is in most cases something that only transports bits of a story - leaving out the full picture. If you record a DJ set at a club, you ideally will create a narrative that fits the people and the room you are playing for. However, listening back to that recording will leave this important detail out of the picture. Of course, you as the DJ and people that were there that night will "get it", but if you were not there you might be wondering why the DJ played that song, why s/he played softer or harder than usual - it is not clear.

Recording a mix at home comes with similar problems: Where do you want to take your listener? If you want to deliver a club set, it will not be an authentic recording in the end - I can not record a club set at home, with only my dog in the audience. The energy will never reach the energy a recording from an actual club night will be able to deliver.

For this Electronic Explorations podcast, I recorded two mixes in a way, in which I would play my DJ sets in a club. The results lacked the pressure, the urge and the spontaneous creativity I'd let myself be led by in a sweaty DJ booth. This led me to this conclusion and eventually, I decided to delete both of these recordings and start over.

So one night I went to bed and turned on the radio - Deutschland Radio Kultur, which is a German culture radio station. And they were broadcasting the audio drama "Mein Herz ist Leer" ("My heart is empty") by Werner Fritsch. A dark, possessive voice was reading stitched-together haikus and thereby telling a story of a struggling monk buried in sound-design by Miki Yui. I loved what this story did to me before falling asleep and I could not wait to get up in the morning to try to create a podcast around this story.

My idea was to keep the story alive and become its music supervisor, trying to choose tracks that I loved in 2017 and using them to tell the story, even if you do not understand the German narrator word by word, I was aiming to select sounds, that will, in combination with the ever-present voice of the narrator, drive the story just through the music. At the same time, I tried to create a listening experience that sits between soothing calmness and chilling shudder - just like some of the old Eastern European Christmas tales I've been listening to when I was a child.

I've done a mix like that before at Dommune in 2013, where I took an old Japanese horror story and used the music to drive the story itself. Technically I did it the same way here: Mixing with records and Traktor and using a sampler to launch the bits of the audiobook at the right times.