By Aaron Schips
Welcome to the first of many installments of Bass Cake’s ‘Real Chill Sunday’. Like the coffee hours on your local radio station, Real Chill going to try and mellow things out a bit on your Sunday. I’m going to take a complete 180 from what weekday Bass Cake is doing, and use chiller music from old school DJ’s to create the electronic version of a coffeehouse.
These selections don’t fall into any particular EDM category and they don’t fall within a specific time frame because really, if a song sounded smooth and catchy in the early-late nineties, my bet is that it still does. I’ve tended towards more hip hoppy beats in this post, which I think can make your head bop but also allow you to function.
So sit back and relax; make a nice breakfast and try not to curse your hangover or the impending doom of a Monday. If you do succumb to temptation, remember to at least be chill about it. This is a coffee hour after all.
Mark Farina, “Mushroom Jazz Vol. 1”
Originally released on cassettes in ’92, Chicago DJ Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz series became so wildly popular that it was eventually released as a seven-part CD series. Every mix contains a wild array of musical elements, but Farina mixes them all together so well that it’s hard not to listen to it all in one go. Just remember that if you like this (which I really hope you do!), there are six more where it came from.
DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, “Brainfreeze Part 2”
I don’t think this grooves as hard as Mushroom Jazz. However, Part 2 of DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist’s two-part collaboration, Brainfreeze, is my favorite mix of all time. Crate digging their way through hundreds of samples (including an awesome treatment of 7/11’s “Do the Slurp” halfway through), Shadow and Chemist take you on a whirlwind adventure through time. They toss in a couple of their own hits for good measure (a Jurassic 5 track close to the end for Chemist, and two versions of The Number Song for Shadow), which add to the mix instead of watering it down. Half the fun is sitting and waiting to see where Brainfreeze takes you next; the other is enjoying DJing at its finest. Tracklist: http://www.discogs.com/DJ-Shadow-Cut-Chemist-Brainfreeze/release/69218
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I realized that there are tons of DJs who took one of my favorite Brainfreeze samples, California Soul, and did some awesome things with it. This song a pretty cool history actually, so if you get a moment hop on wiki and check it out. Below are two of my all-time favs; hope you enjoy!
The Wiseguys, “The Sound You Hear”
You probably know The Wiseguys from that annoying Ooh La La Starburst commercial, or the song “Start the Commotion.” THEY ARE SO MUCH MORE!!! One-half Theo Keating (Touche, Fake Blood, The Black Ghosts), one-half Paul Eve (Regal), The Wiseguys are responsible for making some of the funkiest, most danceable hip-hop music I have ever heard. If you like this, please check out the two albums these guys came out with. They’re absolutely unreal.
A Skillz, Remix of “California Soul”
A little more aggressive than The Wiseguys, but A.Skillz absolutely kills it with this song. It’s wild to think about how California Soul started as a Motown release by Ashford & Simpson in the late 60s, and then was covered by Marlena Shaw, whose cover ended up at the mercy of two prominent hip-hop DJs in the Nineties, and finally managed to weasel its way into contemporary dance music. (Diplo did a mix of this too, but it wasn’t up to snuff.) Get up and dance, you were probably sick of chilling anyway.
BASS CAKE 