Mixamorphosis: Is Anybody Listening?

I have looked back at the posts I recently deleted, and can't quite believe I had not shared this mix on the blog!

In my previous 'reset' post, I made a point of saying I wasn't going to share personal info going forward, but this one has a back story that is perhaps worthy of sharing, and might help someone with a similar issue that I found myself in many years ago.

I'm not going to go into the details too deeply here. My teenage years and early 20's were challenging. Family breakdown, lack of support, lack of direction, difficulty finding a path in life and employment. I smoked pot, recreationally to begin with, but it ended up becoming a bit of a mental health crutch and from around '99 to '09, smoked quite heavily. At the time, I thought it was helping me by slowing down my thoughts and helping me keep them in check. Looking back I know it was doing me more harm than good and I wish I realised sooner. In 2009 I realised that it was actually triggering panic attacks, so I stopped. It wasn't easy, but it was the right thing to do and I'm glad that I did.

You might wonder why I'm sharing this. Well, until this mix, I had only every played my decks whilst I was smoking pot. Until this moment, I don't think I could imagine myself mixing without having that as a part of the process. Yet, to this day, I think this is one of my best mixes. That might be down to the story behind it as much as the mix itself, but I remember feeling really proud with it and to this day I still feel that way.

The second part of the back story is that in 2010 I came across a mix from James Lavelle (Mo Wax founder / Unkle member) on the Dazed Digital website and completely fell in love with it. I felt inspired to create a mix myself that had a similar vibe to it. I spent a couple of months finding tracks I felt I could use and this was the outcome, at the time using 2 x CDJ 1000 turntables and a DJM 600 mixer.

As I have always done, the tracklist is below which will link to various places you should find the music available to purchase. There are a few that are really hard to track down now, so you might need to do a bit more digging.