Volume 12 – October 24, 2004

1. Where Do I Begin (awayTEAM Mix) – Shirley Bassey and awayTEAM [5:36]
2. Bridge – Amon Tobin [5:56]
3. Land Of… – St. Germain [7:50]
4. Cups – Underworld [11:45]
5. The Child Is Gone – Fiona Apple [4:15]
6. Into My Arms – Tiffany Lynn Meyers [3:49]
7. If You Wear That Velvet Dress – U2 [5:15]
8. The Moon – John Cale [3:02]

Liner Notes:

Okay, not gonna lie, this is a weird one, and while I don’t have a very clear recollection of it, I think it was all about transitions, which is a favourite method of mine for building a set list. The idea is that you can play pretty much any style of music you want back to back, at any tempo, as long as the transitions between songs work (i.e., so long as the last ten or twenty seconds of one song doesn’t clash too strongly with the first ten or twenty seconds of the next). Sometimes you want a dramatic break between styles, but most of the time you don’t, especially if you want to start your set with a track that deploys pretty conventional break beats and end with a mellow tribute to Jack Kerouac by an experimental Welsh composer. I’ve never even heard of awayTEAM outside of the context of the Shirley Bassey remix album I lifted this track from (another artifact from my brief time as a music critic at The Imprint), but it let me start the set with something punchy with a jazz feel that would let me bleed into better-known jazz-influenced electronic acts while still grounding the set in the traditional instrumentation that shows up later. The transition between “Cups,” which is super mellow for most of its run time and gets frantic at the very end, and “The Child Is Gone” (my favourite Fiona Apple song) is the one place in this set where I used the abrupt jump, and it signals a shift to a more vocal-focused set of songs, but I’m willing to be that I used the end of “Cups” for a station break, which would have softened the transition and made the Fiona Apple track make more sense as a follow-up. This cover of Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms” is an unreleased demo track of Meyers’ (whose singing has a character not entirely unlike Apple’s, just with less liquidity and better enunciation) that features bright, somewhat abrasive acoustic guitar, and trails off in a way that almost exactly matches the opening of that one creepy lounge track from U2’s best late-career album. An imperfect set list, but one that still follows an internal logic.

The cover for this volume is a photo I took in the mid-’90s of the kitchen at the A&W in Dryden, where I worked for two years.