I just found my copy recently and watched it. A nice little piece of history from the guys that made the mix CD “cool” (yes I understand there were mixtapes)
please feel free to post your favorite of the GU series.
I was at the original GU019 Los Angeles. A wild 5 and half hours from Digweed, Jimmy Van M opened, a group of about 30 of us went, one of the best nights of my life.
Oakenfold New York is still at the top for me. From Jamie Myerson to the Ahprodite track he plays. Beautiful.
(I also miss the United DJs of America Series. Moonshine also had a decent series. Pete Tong used to fantastic CD mixes.)
"Like most big-name DJs, John Digweed has released a number of mix albums, and he’s keen to emphasise that there’s more to making such a compilation than meets the ear. "The hard work is the selection. Putting a mix CD together can take me three or four weeks, finding those 22 records or 11 records. You can get the thing done in the order that you want it, and then the record label says you can’t use the middle track, so you’re then in a position where you have to find something that is going to work inbetween two other records. It’s not an easy process.
"All the tracks I use on my mix albums are tracks I play out in the clubs, but obviously in a club I’ll be playing for five or six hours. So it’s about breaking it down to the best tracks, there’s certain tracks which sound great in a club, and there’s certain tracks that sound great in a club but also sound great at home or in the car, in those different listening environments. I want something that every time they hear it, they hear different things coming in because it’s put together in a way which is very crafted. When you’re in a club environment you’ll use certain records as bridges, you’ll have peaks and then you’ll hold them off for a little while, you can’t have them just going mad the whole time because they’ll wear themselves out over five hours. But obviously with a CD, it’s not about going mad, but you want the real quality ones, not the bridges.
“It’s all done off vinyl into Pro Tools. I work out exactly how I’m going to do it, so these are all the records, this is the order, these are where the mixes are. They’ll be certain records which may need an extra 16 or eight bars, and obviously if the record ends and you’re in the middle of the CD you’ve got a dead spot. So the reason it’s done in Pro Tools is so you can add on those extra bars and give it that smoothness. There’s always these people who are like ‘Oh, it’s not a live mix,’ but I don’t have to justify my mixing techniques to anyone. I’m quite capable of doing it, but I want this CD to be perfect. I’m sure when Oasis do their album they don’t do one take and go ‘Right, that’s it, you only got one go at it.’ They make it as well as they can, and when I’m doing an album I want it to be as good as I can make it. If that means using the technology, that’s fine.”
The two Tony De Vit mixes are two of my personal faves, 001 (Tel A Viv) & 005 (Tokyo). An awesome account of that era of hard house, and were largely responsible for getting me into that scene in a big way in the early 2000s. Still get played regularly in the car to this day.
Sasha’s Ibiza mix (013) is another personal favorite too - I remember hearing the 9 min mix of ‘Expander’ for the first time and wondering if dance music would ever get any better that!
Regarding the comments about mixing/producing them, some of my all-time favorite mixes are the ones that Oakenfold did for the 1999 essential mix world tour- particularly Havana Cuba, The Rojan Shanghai, Shadow Lounge Miami, and from Creamfields UK. All these mixes have the odd noticeable transition but I love listening out for those moments where you hear the records being nudged- it makes them more human to me.
That said, a great mix album is great regardless of how it’s been put together.
So many of those GU mixes are simply incredible, and how they were made should not colour our opinion of them; instead, to me, they opened my mind to the joys of a meticulously crafted ‘studio’ mix.
