March
2007
On New Ventures
I’ve always believed that DJing was an under appreciated artform. From my perspective, it’s not much different from what authors do–you’re communicating with an audience, telling them a story, taking them on a voyage if one may be so bold. For awhile now I’d been using my blog (over at LJ) effectively as a pseudo DJ blog. The problem was that text just isn’t the most appropriate medium for a DJ to talk his or her craft.
Which is why I’m here typing this away. I had started my blog as a way basically for me to rant and rave, but more importantly, as an avenue for me to practice my writing. Hell, in another life, I was once primarily known and employed for my ability to communicate in the written word (I now am employed primarily to sit in darkened rooms staring at lines of cryptic jargon, curly braces and semi colons). So the hopes is to finally create that “DJ blog” that I’d envisioned–to use it as an outlet for my creative expression–this time in the cuts and beats of a DJ rather than in the written word of the author.
So here’s the goals for this place:
- Post regularly–at least a mix a week
- Practice and improvement are the goals– I post what I create, even in its crudest forms, so that I have something to look back on and critique with. If folks dig it and get to bop their heads or shake their asses a bit, all the better. But that’s just a bonus, not the aim.
- Drop mixes from all your musical loves. Hip hop. R&B. Indy backpacker shit. 70s funk. Neosoul. 80s candy pop. New wave. Everything is open game.
- Enlist the aide of the network of DJ friends I’ve accumulated over the years to drop the occasional guest set.
- Try to teach a thing or two. Demystify the craft to the general population so that the appreciation for really good DJs is genuine. (Good DJs, not a scrub like me)
I’ll be publishing this as an episodic podcast. For the more Internet savvy of you that already know how to deal with podcasts, ’nuff said. For those of you new to podcasts this basically means one of two things. One, you can either just visit this webpage as you do any other blog and just click and download my mixes as you wish. Or, secondly, you can use specialized software to “subscribe” to my show and have it automatically download my episodes each time I post up a new mix.
Most of you probably already have a podcast capable application and may not recognize it–iTunes. Go to Advanced > Subscribe To Podcast and enter the URL of my RSS feed (http://bakasan.podbean.com/feed) and you’re good to go. Whenever you open up iTunes you can force it to go check up on your podcast subscriptions and if it detects that I’ve posted anything new, it’ll go ahead and download it for you… where you can then listen to it on your pc, synch it to your ipod, etc etc. Subscribe:
Viewing/Managing your playlist inside of iTunes
If you’d prefer a more specialized app, I highly recommend Juicer, available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.
I hope you enjoy some of the stuff I toss out, even if they’re “gems” in the rough. Oh. Uh. Any talented graphics artists want to help me make this look less, uh… stark and ghetto? 
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