So three of my most highly anticipated albums of this year (so far) has been released. The A-Trak Obey Mixtape is outstanding. The combination of hiphop, electro, ghetto, club and indie never sounded so good.
I found the FabricLive 33 by Spank Rock a bit confusing. I was expecting much more.. like their show that I saw at the Metro at the begining of the year. Instead it appeared to be a mish-mash of the best-of electro tracks of the year(s) gone by with some old school funk thrown in for good measure. With a couple more listens, it seemed to sit well within the work crew without offending too many people. XXXchange explains why its had to be:
"...the licensing is a huge process that has a big influence on how the mix ends up. with Fabric it worked like this:
first you make a wish list of stuff, then they try and license all that stuff. about half of the requests will get turned down and another quarter will come with specific instructions (more on this later). so, if you've tried to make any kind of coherent statement with the tracks you've picked on the first round you're gonna need to compensate for all the holes on the second round of wish-listing.
to avoid unnecessary arguments and confusion I took over nearly the entire selection / licensing process on our side of things. that's probably why this mix ended up being a more electro stuff /obvious hits and less rap / obscure rock stuff than our previous mixes, just 'cause that's the way my taste runs.
some of the stuff that got turned down was really suprising, we tried to get two seperate tracks by MU but apparently they deny everything on general principal. "cola bottle baby" got turned down and all kinds of other obscure shit got turned down...people who you'd figure would be clamoring over each other to get that licensing money...! justin timberlake of course got turned down but, rick ross got approved. go figure...
"owner of a lonely heart" got approved. but we weren't allowed to re-edit it in any way so, i had to hire Tyler Pope to come in and re-play the guitar parts for that and the justin timberlake song. we also had to make a fake version of MU's "Paris Hilton" which happens underneath the "technologic" acapella. in the end, the easiest companies to work with were the smaller, more dance oriented ones like, ed rec, institubes and, gigolo, who are actually familiar with the Fabric mix cd series.
this one is way more stretched out than the rest of our mixes, in terms of letting each track actually play for a while etc...
fabric requires you to fill 70 minutes with only about 25 tracks licensed, which means each track has to play for about 2 and a half minutes. this format, I feel, is a little bit outdated and is probably better suited to doing a compliation cd rather than a mix cd. However, since it's impossible for fabric (or scion, or whoever) to make any money off these cd's if there's more than 25 tracks lisenced, we're all stuck trying to fill that space with that amount of songs. so it's nice to pick 12"s that have the acapellas and bonus beats and all that other good shit to play around with...
so, while finishing the mix, I forgot about the 70 minute length requirement ( the other dudes were on tour by this time) and, I turned in a 54 minute one. so, they made me go back and re-do it but, were nice enough to license a few more tracks (over their normal limit) to help me fill it out. in the end we figured out how to make it work but left the experience ready to do another "fun" ( apparently now also illegal) mixtape as soon as possible"
That that pretty much explained it for me. With a couple more listens, I'm finding some new twists within the mix and its actually pretty special.
