There’s some old stuff, some new stuff and some stuff that falls firmly in between. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I did making it. Make sure to catch The Cycle Sessions each Friday at 1pm Eastern on DI.fm’s Drum & Bass channel.

Oh, and if you want the tracklist, it’s here.

That said, here are the last two (right click, save as):

Cycle Sessions 003

Cycle Sessions 004

Now, let’s talk business. I’ve gotten in touch with Rom, the channel director for DI.fm‘s Drum & Bass channel. I explained what was going on with equipment problems and a hectic work schedule, and apologized for my absence. Rom says he’s glad to have me back, so this Friday there’s a new mix for you!

I’ve also made an equipment change. I’ve been wrestling a lot with using a controller to DJ. Something about it just doesn’t feel right and I want to bring vinyl back into my sets. In order to do that though, I needed to use a different setup. So here’s the proposed setup:

• 2x Technics 1200
• Allen & Heath Xone:DX
• Serato Itch

Now I hear you. “But Brad, Serato Itch is a controller-driven program!” Yes, it is. But here’s the thing. The Xone:DX allows a flexibility that I didn’t have with the Traktor Kontrol S4/S2. Every channel on the DX can have an external source plugged in to it, and you can then use a “Thru” option to play vinyl through any of the channels. I’m giving this a run, and we’ll see how it turns out.

I still think Native Instruments makes some of the best pieces of kit in the world. I still think Traktor is amazing piece of software. Right now, I just want to try some other options, so we’ll see how well it works.

So thanks for sticking in there, folks. I’m almost back to 100% and I hope we can get things up and running fully speed very soon!

This week I got the chance to dig into some newer tracks, but revisited some old favorites too. It’s more along the lines of what I envision to be the eventual sound of The Cycle Sessions, but it’s still not quite right just yet. It’s somehow missing that “live” feeling, and I want to fix that. I’ll figure that out over the coming weeks, I’m sure.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy listening to it. If you have tunes that you want to send for consideration, make sure to hit up CycleDubs on AIM, or you can send them to me via SoundCloud as well.

After deciding (foolishly?) that I was done with Internet radio, I took a break for the past few months. In short, I had to really figure out what it was that I wanted to do with The Cycle, where it needed to go both from a production standpoint and from a hosting standpoint and I had to figure out exactly where my head was at with it.

Finally it became clear. Since 1999, Digitally Imported has been fighting the good fight when it comes to Internet radio and I knew that I wanted to be a part of that. The stations, which are curated by program directors who are truly passionate about the different styles of music which they represent, run the gamut from Gabber all the way through Synthpop and there are even a couple of Drum & Bass ones.

In short, I knew that DI.fm was going to be my new home.

So I spoke with my good friend Ben-XO and he put me in touch with the right people. After a bit of back and forth with Rom Heavven, the new Program Director for DI’s Drum & Bass channel, the first episode of The Cycle Sessions went live yesterday.

The Cycle Sessions represents, to me, a return to the roots of why I love Drum & Bass. It’s the ability to weave together something cohesive from a number of independent parts, some of which were never meant to meet each other. It’s a return to the style of DJ’ing that I love, where I worry less about what’s the newest and the hottest and I focus more on providing the best listening experience that I can muster.

So with that in mind, here’s 001 in the series. It’s a smaller mix, only timing in at 1 hour, but it’s meant to give a good overview of what you’ll be seeing as time moves on. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

Ben XO and I are chatting back and forth today, on Facebook and he laughed a bit about Global Gathering, saying that Last.fm shows it to be a high-percentage match for his tastes. It’s about a 90% match for mine, as well.

So with that, I invite you to listen along with me to my work soundtrack for the day. Last.fm has graciously put together artists that will be there, as well as some that won’t be but perhaps should. If you have the Last.fm player, you can listen here.

Steve Hill – Tripoli Tracks Classic Mix, via http://masif.org/

First, I won’t be doing a show on an Internet radio station anymore. When I left BassDrive and joined the folks at DnB Radio, I thought I had narrowed down the problem. The more I try to do a show, though, the more I realize that I’m constrained and I don’t want to be.

It’s difficult to get up and be motivated to do a show at 8am on a Wednesday, but I chose that time myself. I can’t blame that on anyone else. What I can say, though, is that audiences have expectations and those expectations can become more harmful than good. People have a certain sound that they expect from my shows, and that limits my ability to branch out as much as I’d like without losing listeners, ultimately damaging the station.

I also feel that, right now, there are exponentially fewer dnb tracks being produced that I’d actually want to play. It’s cyclic, and it will change, but that’s the fact of the matter as it stands today. The tracks that I want, I’m not able to get. Either they’re not being signed so I can’t buy them, or I don’t have a working relationship with the producer in order to get the track prior to release.

I’m going to be working harder on the latter of those two problems, re-establishing contacts that I once had and networking in order to be able to bring more incredible music to the forefront, where it deserves to be. To those of you who have been sending me music, thank you. I’m humbled and constantly impressed by the quality that hits my desktop.

So what’s next? Here’s my direction:

I’m still playing. I might stop when I’m dead, but I’m not even sure of that. So rest assured that I’m still dropping beats and experimenting with new directions for my own work. I just won’t be playing on a “radio” station anymore.

There are a lot of outlets, such as MixCloud, Dubset and the like, where I can upload sets and have them heard by people in a more convenient manner. I also think that the potential reach of these sites is considerably larger, which puts the music in front of more people. At the end of the day, that’s what DJ’ing is all about — helping people to hear amazing music where they otherwise might have not.

The Cycle will continue as a weekly show, but I won’t be doing it live (except perhaps on Ustream). I want to do more justice to the music than I’ve been able to do before. Doing a live show at 8am on a Wednesday just isn’t conducive to that.

I’m also going to start a new show, called Flow. It’s going to be genre-agnostic, simply filled with the best stuff that I’ve found in the previous week. Sometimes it will be old Breakbeat cuts, other times maybe it will be the best new House track I’ve heard. Regardless, it’s foolish to think that there’s no merit to anything other than a single genre of music, and I’m a fool for having thought so for so long.

Thank you to each and every one of you who have listened to me over the years. It’s not the end, it’s just a different version of a beginning. Stay tuned. There’s more to come soon.

Have a track for me? You can find me a number of ways, but the best ones are via AIM at CycleDubs or you can toss something in my SoundCloud Dropbox. For now, here’s this week’s show. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the episodes as soon as they happen.

Cheers!