My Mariah Carey "Fantasy" mix now improvedand hotter than a fireman in suspenders and a bra

Sorry, I couldn't resist this ridiculous photo, found whilst trawling through Google Images

When doing the Mariah Carey edit below I realised that a previous edit for her song Fantasy done last November could have been better quality. At the time I had gleaned the necessary mixes from a couple of different blogs and they were not encoded with a great bitrate.

A quick shout out for help on this page got me the top-quality mixes I needed very quickly from those nice folks at the Nineties Club CD Maxi Singles blog. Excellent! I immediately got to work recreating my edit...

You can read the original post all about it here. The download link there has been updated, but if you don't want to read the story behind it you can download my 20-minute mix of the Def Drums, Def Club and Sweet Dub mixes here (46MB).

I love this classic track (almost fifteen years old already!), and I'm pretty pleased with the re-edit. I'd also like to know the story behind that ridiculous photo (UPDATE: it's here).

My Barabara Tucker Fist fusion

Ah, 1994! That was the year. Heaps of classic garage tracks, plus Johnny Vicious and Armand Van Helden at their prime. Delicious.

This tracks was one of the first fusions I ever did, using no less than four mixes and lasting nearly 22 minutes. I like the way the mixes all had their own personality and yet flowed into each other well. Some purists might not appreciate Armand's stomping bit at the end, but I loved it then and I love it now. Reminds me of my sole visit to the Factory Bar in New York... (*sigh*)

Enjoy!

You can download my Fist Fusion of
Barbara Tucker "I Get Lifted" (42MB) here

Mariah Carey - Butterfly Reprise Fist Fusion

I have to admit to giving up on Mariah Carey sometime in the nineties. Her syrupy love songs got on my nerves, her being signed for a huge amount then dumped by one major company, and consequently being signed again by another left me cold. Rumours about her depression and diva tantrums bored me.

Looking back, it wasn't all bad though. In particular, her partnership with David Morales was often inspired. I've lost track of how many songs they worked together on and whilst Fantasy was one of my top favourites (my re-edit is here) together with Dreamlover, I hadn't actually heard Butterfly Reprise before today. Thanks to the great Finest Def Mix blog for that.

Morales often had Carey re-sing the vocals of her downtempo stuff in order to remix it at a house tempo. Butterfly Reprise was so far from the original 'Butterfly' that it was even given a slightly different name and it sounds very much like Mariah in the studio improvising over a loop for 30 minutes. There's not much to the 'song', but it's one of those dreamy grooves that - if you get into it - just can't last long enough. Some will say that the chord structure bears more than a passing resemblance to "Stay This Way" by the Brand New Heavies (that you can get here). Others might remark that the song is basically rhyming 'fly' with 'fly' throughout. Whatever. It's kinda sweet.

For my Fist fusion I combined the main house mix with part of the Def 'B' Fly mix and the original, giving a version that lasts over 16 minutes. I also repaired a dodgy edit that had been made at around 3'35" (perhaps at the mastering stage to shorten the song a bit?) and left a slight audible hole.

You can download my Fist fusion of
Mariah Carey - Butterfly Reprise (23MB) here

And for masochists, the video of the original weepy American housewife version is here with lots of scantily-clad Mariah looking wistfully out of windows at horses. Awful!

A note about rips and file formats

photo by Kyle Perschke used under cc licence

I don't think there's any point posting music if it's not at decent quality. 192 kbps mp3 files sound OK when listening on your computer, but for home listening the sound isn't great. Part of the idea behind this blog is rediscovering lost music, so for me quality is important.

Firstly - and a lot of people neglect this stage - I take care with the rip. I use a wonderful program called Max by Stephen Booth that can rip and convert in about 20 different file formats. More importantly, it uses cdparanoia error correction, which guarantees a bit-correct rip of the data (audio) on the CD without any analogue transfer (via a soundcard for example) giving an absolutely perfect cop of all the audio information (no skips, etc.). Max is also great for ripping old or damaged CDs as it is able - in most cases, and for a lot of 'lost causes' - to keep chugging away at scratched or oxidised data and finally get them ripped. It has come through for me in the face of ancient CDs more than a couple of times.

By the way, Stephen also has a CD Ripper called, er, Rip currently in private beta, and I'm interested to see what it will be like...

Secondly, file quality is very important. Whenever I pay for downloads on (my personal favourtie) junodownload, I always get them in FLAC format. FLAC is an open-source compressed file format, but unlike mp3 or even m4a it is lossless, meaning that even with a smaller file size there is zero reduction in quality. FLAC will never be as small as mp3 or m4a files, so I'll only be using it when one or two tracks are posted. Itunes can't read FLAC (Apple prefers its proprietary format Apple Lossless), but Songbird or VLC can. Of course, not many people use those two programs to listen to music (I certainly don't). Once again, Max can convert files between 20 different formats, so I would advise using it for converting to your favourite file format.

When several songs (a whole CD-single, for example) are posted, the tracks will be in AAC format (m4a) encoded at 256 kbps. This is the format used for files from the iTunes Store, and sound quality is comparable to (if not better than) a 320 kbps mp3 file but with a smaller file size. It's not quite audiophile, but it's getting there. For most people and systems, the sound quality will be indistinguishable from a CD.

mp3 will only be used in extreme cases, for example when posting re-edits of tracks I've dowloaded in that format from other blogs. I don't have anything against mp3 apart from the fact that it is now old and heavy compared to AAC (although some people say that the sound quality in AAC is less harsh compared to mp3). It's classicly the format used for best cross-platform compatability : not all portable audio devices can read AAC files, but more and more of them can. AAC is definitely a better format in my opinion.

I also make an effort with ID tags. These are used to store the artist and track name data. Some blogs don't add this, and although the file name contains some information, playing the track on your iPod will show "track 2 - artist unknown" or something similar. Not very helpful. I always fill in this info, and add the sleeve scan if possible.

I couldn't find a photo of an ID tag, so here's a photo of bangers and mash by Annie Mole used under cc licence.

Finally, for hosting I use mediafire. The service can be a bit kranky sometimes, but for a free service it's not half bad. I hate those sites like zshare that open two other windows with ads in them, make you wait 45 seconds, make you enter a captcha, etc. Sometimes the file names will be changed slightly to stop the tracks being found and deleted by 'rights owners' but frankly this has never happened to me: the stuff I'm posting is old, very specialised and no longer available. Also, posts will always mention where to buy a track if residual copies are still knocking around on amazon or ebay. Other sources for rare tracks are discogs, cdandlp and - occasionally - eil.

There you have it. Enjoy hope you enjoy the quality of the music and the the quality of the music, if you get what I mean...

Bel Canto - Rumour (1996) - Masters At Work remixes

I have to say, it took me a while to like these mixes by Masters At Work for Norwegian pop band Bel Canto, and I very much overlooked them for a while. Like, for ten years!

However time is great at helping your appreciate certain things, and I have finally come round to thinking that these mixes are actually rather fine: the MAW vocal version is pretty cool (although the vibrato in the voice makes it very clear that everything has been radically speeded up), the 'Tribe In Dub' mix is much more than just bonus beats, and even the downtempo mix (together with its instrumental version here) isn't that bad. Well worth rediscovering.

Download the Masters At Work mixes here (63 MB)

And if you like it, go buy it here! Yep, it's still available, and for as little as 93 cents. Cripes!

By the way, Bel Canto are still active to this day, and singer Anneli Drecker has notably collaborated recently with fellow Norwegians Röyksopp.

The Absolute - There Will Come A Day (1995)

A Mark Picchiotti project. Listening to the various remixes he was doing for people back in the early 90s I now have mixed feelings (sometimes relentless pumping is a little too much), although I loved them a lot back then, especially the disco influences.

This track came out via uber-cool label Tribal UK, much mourned when it folded, as all good labels seem doomed to. The track also came out through the US arm, albeit with a heinous sleeve designed by visually-impaired graphic artists (right), with Suzanne Palmer's giant head and flowery blouse on a rank green background. Ugh!

Luckily, the music was amazing; the fairly epic gospel house number was given some inspired remixes from Picchiotti himself. The results were pretty stunning then and well worth revisiting now.

When I say 'revisiting' I mean 'listening to again' because Mr. Pichiotti decided to re-release and remix the track again during the summer of 2007 on his Blueplate label. I find those seven new mixes, including a couple by ATFC completely awful.

Savour the original mixes here (73.5MB)
or grab my 16'34" Fist fusion of the
Black Lozenge / Half Tab mixes here (30MB)

Body 2 Body - Let's Get Intimate (1992)Not one but two Fist fusions!

First heard this on the wonderful Nineties Club CD Maxi Singles blog in late 2008 and immediately thought it was brilliant. With two of my favourite singers from ID Productions (Chantay Savage and Donnel Rush) and some excellent mixes from Steve 'Silk' Hurely and E-Smoove, I actually sang it practically non-stop for a week.

I'd seen on Discogs that there had been even more mixes available at the time, but eventually forgot about it. And yet, it kept popping back up on my iPod, and eventually I went back to the original post, saw that the CD-single was originally from Germany and had a look on amazon.de. There it was, still available, with more mixes, for just under 2€! Definitely a bargain. I bought it immediately.

When it arrived I listened to the extra mixes by Jamie Principle. First I though they were strange, then given a little time to let them sink in I thought they were actually quite brilliant. I was inspired to do some mucking about with my new find...

First, I mixed the Hurley and E-Smoove mixes together, trimming both of them down a bit; the Hurley mix is a little too long in my opinion, repeats itself a bit, and the E-Smoove mix had a few bars of nasty keyboards that I eliminated. The two mixes are very different and hide the fact that you are basically listening to the same song twice.

Then I also took the two Jamie Principle mixes, one of which was basically a bonus beats, and stuck them together to make a decent-length extended version. It is filthy, in a good way. I imagine this is what people danced to in opium dens in 1992.

Click here to download my two Fist Fusions of
"Let's Get Intimate" by Body 2 Body.

Hope you like them.