SoleSides

Things have just begun....

Hello people,
In celebration of three years solesides boards, I welcome you all to the solesides.com blog. This is the space for me to speak my mind. And I'm going to do that when I need to, when I want to.
I'm proud of solesides.com - In no way I ever thought the site was going to be this big, this popular and this respected. I thank you all for this.

How did things start?
I grew up listening to jazz, blues, funk... perhaps obvious artists like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, The Meters, The Neville Brothers, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Yellowman, Culture, Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler, Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker, Ted Hawkins, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, James Brown... just to name a few.

Because of this, I was interested in music more than the average boy and soon, I noticed that I didn't find any satisfaction in anything that was played on daytime radio or television.

I needed more, so I started exploring music during nighttime radio. I discovered some radioshows that played music that was new to me. No matter if I liked it or not, I listened and started absorbing stuff.
Soon, it was quite clear that hiphop had my main interest. But also all kinds of drum&bass, dance, beats-stuff. I started recognising samples from music I've always listened to as a kid and found out that I wasn't the only teenage boy on earth that had this taste in- and knew a lot about music.

Somewhere in 1996, a radioshow played a track called 'Midnight In A Perfect World' quite a lot. It was a track by DJ Shadow. I already heard earlier tracks from him, so the name was not new to me. But Midnight... was different. It got me hooked. I recorded that track on cassette tape and didn't stop listening to it. A respected radiostation also had the album 'Endtroducing' on top of their so called 'hitlist' (later, it appeared that it also was in their 1997 list, so Endtroducing… was the first and only album to be two years in that list)

So there it was january 3 1997...it was a friday and I had a day off. Went to my local record store to buy Endtroducing.... they didn't have it..... Thankfully, it was still early that day so I decided to hop on the train and travel to a nearby city to get Endtroducing... that afternoon I listened to the album and I was stunned. Didn't know what was happening to me. This was weird. I’m sure y'all have read similar stories like this, but yes...Endtroducing was really something I've never heard before. I can say 'the rest is history' but I want to tell more to give you more insight in how much I respect DJ Shadow, all artists on the Quannum label and more.

On the internet, I started searching for anything DJ Shadow and bumped into a site hosted and maintained by Michael Roeder, this site later became http://www.endtroducing.com/. This site had links to online DJ Shadow articles, pictures, soundclips, discography, gigography… just about anything. Also, it was updated quite frequently. No idea how Michael did it, but he made sure that endtroducing.com was THE site to check for anything new on the man. What a great job he did.

Of course, I had also discovered that DJ Shadow was part of the SoleSides label, with artists Lateef, Lyrics Born (=Latyrx) and Blackalicious (Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel). It may be obvious that I bought anything that I could get my hands on and was impressed. This was the hiphop I liked and had been searching for forever.

As time passed by, endtroducing.com announced the in/flux mailinglist. This was a mailinglist for DJ Shadow fans to talk. Not only about Shadow’s or related music, but anything in general. I subscribed on day one. And so did a lot of people. From the beginning, I knew the people on this list were special…they knew so much about music in general, it really amazed me. One of them was John Book (let’s combine all solesides.com visitors’ knowledge and we still don’t know as much about music as John Book), who hosted the djshadow samples pages after they had to be taken down.

The DJ Shadow samples pages began in The In/Flux mailinglist. People combined their knowledge of Shadow’s music and made a huge list of tracks that Shadow has sampled for his own music. For a short time, there was a link to this pages on the endtroducing.com mainpage, but this was taken down just to protect DJ Shadow. In no way people on the list wanted him to get problems with sample-issues (law-suits, etc etc). To continue this mighty project, the decision was made to change the url for the pages each week, and post the new address to the in/flux mailinglist. It worked.

To all (good) things comes an end and this was also the case with the in/flux list. People left the list for various reasons. John-Book got the offer to continue the djshadow pages under his john-book.com domain and so he did. He started a new djshadow samples group using yahoo.com. This was actually pretty nice, because it offered space to upload and download. People started to share tracks as used by DJ Shadow for his own music. How awesome to see so many people over the world with the same interests doing this kind of things.

Another project coming from the in/flux mailinglist was the in/flux mixoff (the following is copied from the 1st mixoff website);
Sometime during the fall of 1997, an 18-year-old Swedish kid named Viktor posted to In/Flux, a mailing list organized around discussing the music of sampling pioneer, DJ Shadow, as well as related vinyl-hunting/sampling miscellany. He asked a question. The question involved asking people on the list if they wanted to swap samples they had found during their respective vinyl excavations. Now, nobody really wants to spend hours (years, even) with their fingers in moldy crates simply to hand over their most precious sonic discoveries to some teenage Swede on the internet. At first, nobody really wanted to give the loot away at all. Then someone suggested we exchange samples we loved, but hadn't yet been able to do anything musically interesting with. Note the 'yet'. Then someone suggested we see who can make the best beat out of the samples.People being what they are, they always want to outdo the next guy.

This is how it started.Someone made rules up. Someone offered to manage the process. We decided on a voting system that acknowledged various aspects of the finished tracks (e.g. best beat, most creative use of samples, etc.) Then we did it. It worked. Worked so well, in fact, we surprised ourselves. Suddenly people realized that there was something very powerful and compelling about collaborating / competing musically via the net. You could exercise your styles in front of an audience that, while in many ways anonymous, was a legitimate jury of your peers. You *know* they know their shit. And when they tell you how dope you are (if at all), you'll believe it. Most of all, it felt a lot like a return to some kind of grassroots of communal music making: you take pieces of your cultural environment, reshape it for your local audience, and then flex your shit at the block party and see if it's any good.People like John-Book (who is still making music under the name ‘Crut’) and Diplodicus (now known as Diplo, who released his debut album ‘Florida’ on Ninjatune/Bigdada last year) all worked on the project and made stunning tracks that would later all be on the first Mixoff record.

I did not contribute to the influx mixoff, but I felt there was a need for another website on DJ Shadow. The website had to give you an easy insight of who he was and mainly, it had to offer something different than endtroducing.com – in this way both sites were not ‘competing’ with each other like other non-official Shadow websites did. Michael Roeder respected and acknowledged that. He even gave compliments on the site after the first ‘face lift’ - Over the time, with the help of many enthousiastic people, I added more and more ingredients to the site. Loads and loads of pictures, loads of articles. Even Donald Winblad, who was on the influx mailinglist, offered me to host all the music-articles he had transcribed over the years. Because ‘solesides is a nice home for them’

More and more it became obvious that I did the right thing by starting a new website on anything DJ Shadow/ Solesides and Quannum. It had become inevitable that Michael Roeder had to pull the plug from endtroducing.com. This was at the time there was an official djshadow.com site in the works. I do still have his last words from the endtroducing.com update somewhere. I’ll post them as soon as possible.

Over the years, there was more and more online discussion about music. For me this was pretty interesting because it’s a nice way to share thoughts on music with like minded people. I’ve always felt the online world is very different from the real world. But because of the fact that radioshows with good music are hard to find nowadays, the online ‘digging for music’ has really helped me exploring the world of music and without online discussions, I’m sure I would have never heard the music of many artists I like so much right now.

Three years ago, I decided to add messageboards to solesides.com and within a short time, like-minded people were talking about music, sharing thoughts…everything…. Also when I was checking discussion groups on the soon-to-be-closed music site audiogalaxy.com, I saw a guy calling himself “Mr Jonez” saying to everyone to hop over to the Solesides boards because they had just started and looking very nice and promising. More and more people joined the boards and I saw things happening that I saw happening on the in/flux list as well. I saw great conversations on music by intelligent people. Again, not only Quannum/SoleSides related but just about everything. Soon, Mr Jonez and his online-pal Mr Graham were two important people on the boards. People were saying the solesides boards were the best boards on the web. I realized I created something special. Perhaps as special as the in/flux list.

Then, it became almost a dream when Isaac, label manager @ quannum emailed me asking if the new quannum.com website could link to the solesides boards in stead of having to have a separated quannum board. Of course that’s fine by me! The dream became even better when the Quannum artists came over to join the boards. Almost everyone on the Quannum label, as it is right now, has his own account. Gift Of Gab, Chief Xcel, Lyrics Born, Jumbo, RV/General Electrics and yes…even DJ Shadow. Every now and then they stop by and say at least ‘hello’ - Who knew this three years ago?

Oh, and did I already mention that I didn't know what was happening when Jeff Chang, co-founder of SoleSides and writer of the awesome, prize winning book on hiphop "Can't Stop Won't Stop" ( www.cantstopwontstop.com ) contacted me and actually THANKED me for keeping the SoleSides name alive? Reading his book during my holidays was an intense experience.

Not only the boards kept growing. With the help of many frequent visitors of solesides.com, the site has become the monster that it is right now. It’s so cool to see people contributing, saying nice things, helping other people out on getting and introducing them into new music. Y’all should realize how special it is, really.

There came a time that John Book decided to quit hosting the djshadow samples pages. He wanted to focus on his own music and other things in life. Therefore, he handed me over the full content of the djshadow samples pages to host them under the solesides.com domain. Again, it felt like a big honour to get the chance to do this. I started the solesides mailinglist with the purpose to combine the influx list as well as the djshadow samples pages. And up to now, it’s been great to do.

And after the final face-lift of http://www.solesides.com/ this January, it felt like I was only at the beginning of things. I seem to be getting right. I see other websites mentioning solesides.com, telling other people to check it out because of the content and overall vibe around it. What on earth did I create??

So, for me, the last ten years were pretty awesome music-wise. I also learned a lot from everyone on the influx mailing list, john book’s dj shadow samples list as well as my own creation, the solesides boards. It has been great seeing SoleSides becoming the Quannum label to what it is right now. It has been awesome being at a SoleSides reunion show, a Quannum world show, a Blackalicious gig as well as at the DJ Shadow live gig during his tour around his second album ‘The Private Press’ - I’m still getting hyped when I hear a new Quannum release is coming out soon. When I got the book on Endtroducing…. By Eliot Wilder, I read it non stop and finished it in no time. It still l feels like I’m a little fanboy when I read things about the upcoming DJ Shadow album, where Shadow himself says “Six Days was the oldest conceptual song on The Private Press, like maybe five years previous. It was actually originally a demo for Gift Of Gab, but never turned into anything. I completely reworked the entire song to make it what I thought it could be. Because it’s one of those demos that I just couldn’t get out of my head”
and:
“It’s not until now, with the album that I’m working on now, that I’m trying to do everything on my own again. I’ve done quite a few self-mixes, like the Dark Days soundtrack and a lot of the Quannum stuff I’ve done. I hear the same lack of professional touches on Dark Days, for example that I do in Endtroducing…. But I also hear a certain warmth and intimacy with the stuff that I don’t hear, perhaps, in the same way, on for example, The Private Press. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like the music as much, it just means that it’s perhaps more apropos for things not to sound perfect when it comes to my music because there’s nothing traditionally correct about the way I make music. Perhaps for it to be a little bit messed up is part of what drew people to Endtroducing… And I’m not sure, and only time will tell, but this next album I’m working on may not have the same kind of inept warmth, because I’ve learned a little something in 10 years, as long as it’s 100 percent from the heart and 100 percent of me.”


Another ten years of DJ Shadow, Quannum…let’s get it started. I’ll be here to witness it. Who’s to join me?

Related websites:
http://www.funkierthanthou.net/
http://buildanddestroy.blogspot.com/
http://www.john-book.com/
influx mixoff
- http://www.angelfire.com/ny/influxmixoff/entrants.html
- http://www.residualvibe.com/mixoff/

dj shadow samples / solesides mailinglist
- http://projects.solesides.com/

john book articles and reviews @ musicforamerica.org
- http://www.musicforamerica.org/node/92583

posted by Joost @ Monday, October 10, 2005 6 Comments