This workout is guaranteed to tone flabby muscles and reduce cellulite.

Tracklist

1. Work it intro
2. A Guy Called Gerald – Voodoo Ray
3. Butler Kiev – Rewind Selecta
4. Salt n’ Pepa – Push It
5. Flying Kylies – Can’t Get Money Out of My Head
6. Ace of Clubs – ?
7. LFO – Track 4
8. Aphex Twin – Windowlicker

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Tracklist

1. MERCK MR ‘BROTHUMSTATES REMIX’
2. SILICONE SCALLY ‘INTERLOCK’
3. TWO LONE SWORDSMEN ‘THE BUNKER’
4. T. RAUMSCHMIERE ‘NIETENBOLZEN’
5. V.L.A.D. ‘BIG CITY RUINS’
6. LARS MOD ‘BROT’
7. FROST JOCKEY ‘UMELECTRO’
8. DECAL ‘THIS IS LAW’
9. TWO LONE SWORDSMEN ‘SOLO STRIKE’
10. MULTIPLEX ‘BVsC’
11. SQUAREPUSHER ‘MY RED HOT CAR (GIRL)’
12. CURSOR MINOR ‘SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL’
13. DREXCIYA ‘BUBBLE METROPOLIS’
14. PHONECIA ‘ODD JOBS’ (ECTOMORPH & GODFATHER REMIX)
15. PERCEPTION ‘MIRAGE’
16. µ-ZIQ ‘SWAN VESTA’

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Tracklist

1. Modeselektor – Dustin Der Kleene
2. Autechre – Goz Quarter
3. Q-tip – Breathe and stop
4. DJ Shadow – The Numbers Song (Cut Chemist Remix)
5. Autechre – Inhake 2
6. Superdense Child – Project Arthur
7. Luke Vibert – Acid 2000
8. Lackluster – 31/10/99
9. Gimmik – Rythmns Der Standt
10. Crunch – Vexem
11. Pleite – Pleite
12. Toytronic – untitled
13. Intricate – Octavian
14. Frost Jockey – Spitoon
15. Egyptian lover – The Lover

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Some tunes I wanted to put into mixes but couldn’t make them fit.

Tracklist

1. Mummy Fortuna’s Theatre Company
2. Digitonal
3. Weaver001
4. Multiplex
5. Autechre
6. Transformer Di Roboter
7. Gescom
8. Isan
9. Stone 3 – Proze available as DELTA 9 download
10. Mummy Fortuna’s Theature Company
11. Kushti
12. Plaid
13. Leila
14. Lexaunculpt

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Turbo charged robotic electro, fuel injected with ghettotech and a touch of bling.

Tracklist

1. Dalek Intro
2. Gique – Device Rider
3. Anti-Pop Consortium – Ghostlawns (Mike Ladd mix)
4. David Holmes – Shake Ya Brain
5. Miss Kittin and The Hacker – 1982
6. Aphex Twin – Wet Tip Hen Ax
7. Carl A Finlow – Conflict
8. Man Parrish – Hip Hop Be Bop (Bass Junkie mix)
9. Electri-k- – Valencia
10. Bis – Hurt
11. Overdose – Shake That Booty
12. Digitek – TeK-no 4×4
13. Drexciya – Digital Tsunami
14. 313 Bass Mechanics – Pass Out
15. DJ Deeon – Get Your Duke On
16. Kansas City Prophets – Ignition
17. Decal – T*Shock
18. Rude Solo – MFS
19. Squarepusher – untitled
20. Carl A Finlow – Anomoly
21. Radioactive Man – Gone forever

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Tracklist

1. Delarosa & Asora ‘Wooden Toe’
2. The Herbaliser ’40 Winks’
3. Abstract Rude ‘My Experience’ (instrumental)
4. The Beatles ‘Come Together’
5. Gemini Twins ‘Asylum’
6. Anti-Pop Consortium ‘Disorientation’
7. The Automator ‘King of NY’
8. Aphex Twin ‘Alberto Balsam’
9. DJ Krush feat. Deflon Sallahr ‘Ground’
10. Prefuse 73 ‘Nuno’
11. Swollen Members ‘Counterparts’
12. Push Buttuon Objects ‘Nonexistant’ (Keyed in by Gescom)
13. Boards of Canada ‘Amo Bishop Roden’
14. Tek 9 ‘Teknology’
15. Prefuse 73 ‘Radio Attack’
16. Deltron 3030 ‘Mastermind’
17. Gescom ‘Keynell’
18. Plaid ‘Gel Lab’

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Sparkle’s first ever mix CD from 2001, a two parter, part 2 = electro.

Tracklist

1. blondie – heart of glass
2. a guy called gerald – voodoo ray
3. rhythm is rhythm – nude photo
4. plastikman – fuk
5. e-dancer – banjo (funk d’void remix)
6. lfo – track 4
7. aphex twin – windowlicker
8. future sound of london – papua new guinea
9. black dog – psycosyin
10. plaid – booc
11. drexciya – species of the pod
12. dmx krew – adrenaline flow

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Sparkle’s first ever mix CD from 2001, a two parter, part 1 = hop-hop.

Tracklist

1. psycho realm – pow wow
2. anti-pop consortium – driving in circles
3. the isolationist – settle down
4. boards of canada – telephasic workshop
5. ko-wrecktion technique & dj craze – 360°
6. dj krush – only the strong survive (two parts mix by forme)
7. ko-wrecktion technique – I can’t understand you
8. east flatbush project – tried by twelve
9. boards of canada – kid for today
10. prefuse 73 – 7th message
11. saul williams – twice the first time

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Glitchy and melodic ambiance

Tracklist

1. lb – angie
2. DUB tractor – marble
3. machine drum – wishbone be broken
4. east flatbush project – tried by 12 (autenchre remix)
5. lackluster – 18/10/99
6. richard devine – untitled
7. schneider TM – the light 3000
8. brothomstates – untitled
9. lexaunculpt – februarie
10. bochum welt – fortune green
11. mu-ziq – iesope
12. leila – feeling
13. radioactive man – goodnight morton
14. lexaunculpt – anburl
15. slag boom van loon – sutedja (four tet remix)
16. bola – whoblo

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Media info

Tracklist

1. STATIC DUB – BASHET
2. SUSUMU YOKOTA & ROTHKO – LIT BY MOONLIGHT
3. BOOM BIP – MANEQUIN HAND TRAPDOOR
4. SQUAREPUSHER – PORT RHOMBUS
5. JAMIE LIDELL – DADDY’S CAR (BOOM BIP REMIX)
6. MILES DAVIS – WILI
7. BASIC CHANNEL – RADIANCE
8. AUTECHRE – WHY R ARE WHY?
9. ATMOSPHERE – GOD’S BATHROOM FLOOR
10. LEILA – SODA STREAM
11. CHRIST – ABSOLOM
12. THE BEATLES – A DAY IN THE LIFE
13. PERSON – IN KARTON
14. DONALD BYRD – ESSENCE

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2010
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Tracklist

1. I/O – Claire
2. Aleph – Symphony of Sickness
3. David Holmes – My Mate Paul
4. Red Snapper – Image of You (Salt City Orchestra Remix)
5. David Holmes – Don’t Die Just Yet (MAX 404 remix)
6. Daft Punk – Musique
7. Ballistic Brothers – Blacker
8. Jimi Tenor – Take Me Baby
9. Gerald Mitchell – Soul Saver
10. NYC Live and Direct – Move Like This
11. The Other People Place – Let Me Be Me
12. Felix da Housecat (feat. Miss Kitten) – Madame Hollywood
13. Adult – Nausea
14. Vitalic – La Rock 01

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2009
Post a comment | Permalink to Sparkle – SparkleFire

delta-9.net has been around since 2001 (see how it’s evolved on archive.org). It was intended as a space for everyone who’d been involved in the early days to keep in touch, and to keep our community going. The message board was built one rainy bank holiday as an excuse to teach myself PHP. We started using the site to share mixes later that year. These turned out to be rather popular and we realised there was potential for the site to become a resource for the wider electronic music community.

With this in mind I developed the platform that supported the old site in PHP/MySQL. Not really a CMS – it managed a number of things: some types of content in full, meta-data for other types, user registration, permissions, message board, bulk mail, user-submitted listings. New modules were tacked on as the site evolved, everything worked and for the time it was great.

So what happened? Essentially, the site’s information architecture was dependent on having new content and this was difficult to sustain. I could see no future for music reviews, which had been an important area of content. Finding hosting for the mix downloads was a constant battle, we were consuming more bandwidth than we could continue to blag and couldn’t offer the high-bitrate audio people wanted. The CMS needed development to properly support the free tracks and live sets that artists were giving us. Much of the presentation layer dated from the 2001 site and was not exactly up to web standards. In summary, it needed a complete re-architecture.

Faced with hosting problems, not really knowing where the site should go editorially and not having time for the technical work, in 2005 we stopped maintaining the site.

It wasn’t until autumn 2009 that I gave into peer pressure and started thinking about a new site. I had ideas: more of an editorial voice, focus on audio and multimedia content, a community of contributors, enabling discussions around content rather than limited to a message board. Our hosting problems had already been solved by our good friends at Spannered, so that just left the implementation to think about.

Choosing a platform

Modifying the existing platform was just too much work (maybe more than starting from scratch), and having a bespoke CMS didn’t make sense any more. I decided to build the new site on WordPress which is a blogging engine. It gave me a lot of what I wanted for free: a user-friendly admin site, RSS (replacing bulk mail as the way we push updates out to users), user management, author profiles, search, import/export, easy installation and a large pool of free, third-party plugins (more about those later).

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Not quite. Many people will tell you that WordPress is a CMS – it’s not. It has no custom content types and terrible support for navigation, but where it fails the most is in having clear separation of content, function and presentation layers – they’re all mixed up together. The documentation is patchy, the default themes are packed with unsemantic mark-up and offer a terrible user experience. That said, this is my sixth WordPress site so I have a good idea how to beat it into submission. If I had gone with Drupal, or a more heavyweight system with advanced user/community support I would no doubt be facing a different and unfamiliar set of issues.

Tailoring WordPress

In order for this project not to take over my life I set myself some rules for the beta version:

• Don’t fight the system – build the site around WordPress, not the other way around
• Keep design work to a minimum
• Absolutely no plugin development*

If WordPress had a strap line it would be ‘everything’s a post’. Taking multiple content types and representing them in a system with just one (well, two if you count ‘page’ as different, but basically it’s a post) is a bit of a challenge. There’s an amazing plugin called Custom Field Template that makes this possible. It adds a form of custom fields to your post or page based on the category that it’s in, allowing you to define a set of meta-data for each type of post. IMHO Custom Field Template is the single most useful WordPress plugin in existence. It doesn’t, however, force required fields or do any validation, so extra logic is needed in the templates to account for this.

Other plugins worth mentioning are Ozh’ Better Feed (lets you put copyright notices and share functionality in your feed, deterring link farms from harvesting you content) and WP Page Numbers (replaces those horrible ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links with nicely coded pagination). I’ve used a number of other plugins but I’ve hacked them all, normally because the front-end HTML they spit out is so terrible. The sad truth is that the WordPress plugin database is full of crap.

Interface

There’s nothing ground-breaking about the theme in the current release – standards compliant mark-up, CSS layout, and category (rather than date or tag) based navigation, added author templates. There’s a lot of logic in the theme – but this can’t be helped with WordPress. What is unusual is that I haven’t used a single graphical asset, not even a logo, purely in order to get it out the door as quickly as possible. Our site look and feel was quite distinctive and I’ve done what I can to capture it with pure CSS, but don’t worry – I’ll be delivering something a bit more polished in a future release

*Plugin development

So I broke the third rule, but for the first plugin at least this was to save myself time. Content migration from the old site into WordPress was a big, ugly, cut and paste job. I brought across over 250 content items, a lot more than I had anticipated, even though I didn’t keep everything. I hit a big problem when I got to the event galleries, containing over 500 photos. WordPress’s inbuilt image management sucks and there was no way I was going to rebuild them by hand.

Using Flickr to manage our photos was an obvious choice – organisation through tags and a moderated group allowing other users to potentially contribute photos. None of the WordPress Flickr plugins I found fit the bill so I built one, knowing the reduction in migration time would more than pay back the development time, and I wanted an excuse to play with the Flickr API (which turns out to be a dream).

My Flickr plugin uses the WordPress shortcode API to insert an RSS friendly thumbnails gallery into a post and a JavaScript layer (JQuery is my JS library of choice for DHTML) transforms the thumbnails gallery into an image enlarger (I ditched the slideshow functionality for version 1), see it in action. I’m particularly pleased with this plugin for its simplicity and I may well pack it up and make it publicly available.

The nice thing about the wordpress shortcode API is that the RSS output is exactly the same as the web output, ensuring that people accessing the site using feed readers don’t miss out on content.  I developed another shortcode-based plugin for inserting into posts dynamic links to contributors, posts and pages. Getting audio downloads to work was quite involved and I wrote a plugin for that, again using shortcodes. Shortcodes were not ideal here, it would have been nicer to code audio meta-data and download buttons into the template, but again, I needed the RSS output. It would be really, really nice if feeds were templated in WP, but they’re not.

I also wrote a plugin to generate the breadcrumb trails – I’m annoyed that I had to do this but WordPress wouldn’t give me the output I wanted. This plugin was the biggest headache of the whole project thanks to WordPress’s incomplete, inconsistent taxonomy support.

What’s next

I still have a number of outstanding bugs and technical enhancements to work through, but the next phase will include designing a shiny, new interface. If you spot anything that needs attention, please contact us or post a comment.

However, I’m holding off on planning the next version until I have an idea how people are using the new site and where our content is going. Again, if you have any thoughts I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks

I didn’t do this on my own – thanks go to Heidi for design advice (none of which I’ve had time to implement yet), Rob for coding advice, Joseph at A Little Poison for WordPress help.

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2009
Post a comment | Permalink to Site relaunch: The tech stuff

This mix was broadcast on Ninjatune’s Solid Steel radio show on 9 December 2002 with a spoken word intro added by Strictly Kev. This version is the original without the intro, recorded in March 2002. It’s a Ninja influenced selection of abstract hip-hop with a glitchy electronic twist.

Tracklist

1. Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (Colombia)
2. Disflex6 – The Cliffs (Sub-level Epedemic)
3. Amon Tobin – Easy Muffin (Ninjatune)
4. Machine Drum – Wishbone Be Broken (Merck)
5. Push Button Objects – Lockligger (Schematic)
6. Hidden Library – (Unknown) (Hidden Library)
7. DJ Krush – Shin-sekai (Mowax)
8. Anti-pop Consortium – Driving In Circles (75 Arc)
9. Leila – Three (XL)
10. Boards Of Canada – Amo Bishop Roden (Warp)
11. Push Button Objects – Nonexistant (Gescom Mix) (Chocolate Industries)
12. Dangermouse and Jemini – Don’t Do Drugs (Lex)

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2009
Post a comment | Permalink to Sparkle – Solid Steel Mix

Tracklist

1. Dub Tractor – Clavinette
2. Static – Full Swing
3. plastikman – Psyk
4. Donnacha Costello – Isolate
5. Donnacha Costello – Melan
6. Phenix – Tomorrow Lost Yesterday
7. Phoenecia – Odd Jobs (Ectomorph and Godfather remix)
8. Kit Clayton – Nele
9. Chaos – Afrogermanic
10. Opiate – Insert
11. T.Raumschmiere – Roter Pülsch
12. Donnacha Costello – Dry Retch

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2009
Post a comment | Permalink to Sparkle – Minima

Diplo - Diplo Rhythm

Hot on the heels of Diplo’s debut LP, the peeps at Big Dada have had the good sense to give this a proper release – it’s been causing a stir on white label for a while.

The 12″ consists of an original instrumental track but Diplo and 3 vocal versions. The instrumental is a strange beast, it fits somewhere between hip-hop and dancehall with a hint of electro thrown in – if I’m not mistaken he’s sampled Egyptian Lover’s ‘Egypt Egypt’. There’s a rumbling bassline and snappy rhythm, which gives it dancefloor appeal, but the track makes lot more sense with vocals.

Definitely the catchiest version is ‘Newsflash’ – Sandra Melody’s fly dancehall vocal transforms it into a real booty-shaker. Not sure what she’s singing about – something about shopping – but it sounds wicked anyway!

‘Percão’ features more female vocals, this time from Pantera Os Danadinhos, rapping in an unidentified language. Her tight MCing brings out a bleepy robotic electro vibe in Diplo’s production – again, great stuff.

‘Baby’ is a bit disappointing, Vybz Cartel’s ragga lyrics are cheesy and derivative – it might as well be Shabba Ranks. Luckily the first two mixes make up for it – this is gonna be big.

Posted by %%author%% for DELTA 9, © 2004
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