It’s the Thursday night dance! On our first evening venturing Into the Wylde, who knows what manner of fantastical beings we will encounter… or we will be? Mix-and-match from whatever outfits you brought for the weekend to create mashup costumes, or wear something to represent your fandom(s), and come down and dance to a mix of dance tracks across eras, convention favorites, and all manner of mashups and oddities, all brought to you by DJ Wüdi!
Music
Music is a necessity. Though I focus mostly on alternative/industrial/EBM/electronic styles, my tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging.
Difficult Listening Hour 2024.03.17
A little darker and gothier, until it gets a little bouncier towards the end, with totally otherwise unconnected nods to St. Paddy’s Day at the open and close.
Difficult Listening Hour 2024.03.10
Honestly? Not my best effort. I blame the damn Daylight Saving Time hangover. These things happen! Still some good tracks in here, even if the order and blending isn’t top-rate.
Difficult Listening Hour 2024.03.03
Mostly goth/industrial/EBM-y stuff, but with a couple bits of mashup random silliness to break up the gloom.
Difficult Listening Hour 2024.01.28
The usual unplanned, random selection of whatever seems right in the moment.
Not a Spotify Wrap-up
Okay, so lots of people are posting their end-of-year Spotify wrap-ups showing off their listening habits. I don’t subscribe to Spotify (they don’t pay their artists nearly enough, and they have a history of supporting podcasters I have issues with, so they don’t get my money), but I do have Apple Music (who, really, should also pay their artists more, but they’re at least better than Spotify), and Apple does an end-of-year “replay” thing.
Of course, even this is a very small peek at my listening habits, because I really don’t use Apple Music all that much. I get it as part of a subscription bundle, and only really use it briefly in the mornings before work, or occasionally in the evenings before bed. Most of the time I listen to songs from my local collection.
That said, though, here’s what Apple says about the, oh, 10% (if that) of my music listening that it knows about….
Top Artists
549 total artists
- The Orb 137 minutes
- Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes
- Dolly Parton 128 minutes
- Orbital 124 minutes
- Underworld 89 minutes
- Bonobo 71 minutes
- Hooverphonic 69 minutes
- Imperative Reaction 64 minutes
- Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes
- Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes
- VNV Nation 50 minutes
- Seabound 50 minutes
- Front Line Assembly 46 minutes
- Rotersand 44 minutes
- Icon of Coil 44 minutes
I’m quite amused that Dolly landed so high on this list, particularly how out of place she looks. But her recent Rock Star album is great, and it has been getting a lot of plays since it came out. Worth it!
Top Songs
Again, I’ve listened to many of these tracks far more times this year than is represented here, and have listed to a lot of other stuff as well, probably far more than the 4-8 times shown in these screenshots. That said, it’s not really that bad of a sampler of what I listen to.
So…it’s a weird list, and only somewhat representative of my tastes. But hey, since I have a limited sample size to work from because I don’t stream much of what I listen to, it’s what we get.
Year 50 Day 207
Day 207: In a few months I’ll again be DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon 46, so to make sure I’m not entirely rusty when I set up that evening, it’s time for me to start practicing again. Whenever I do this, I broadcast to Twitch, and so this is what I look like when I’m streaming. Obviously, it’s very serious business.
I’m actually rather proud of the look I came up with some time ago, after a few rounds of tweaking and playing with ideas.
The “turntables” to either side of my head display the art for whatever track is playing (and they rotate as if they were physical turntables), and the audio waveforms behind my head are the waveforms of the playing tracks; deck A (the left side) on the top, and deck B below. Those elements are all pulled from the UI of DJay Pro, the DJ software I use.
The sci-fi cityscape behind me is actually a video clip. I have a small library of interesting looping video backgrounds that I can choose from.
The text in the bottom third is pulled from a text file that I keep open on my screen; as I’m mixing, I take a quick moment to update the text file with the name of whatever track I’m playing at the moment. I think there are ways to automatically pull that info from DJay, but I’ve never quite liked the look of the ones I’ve seen, and this works for me.
The caricature of me on the lower right was drawn for me a number of years ago by Sharii Chankhamma. In the original, I’m wearing an “NSFW” t-shirt; for streaming, I’ve created a small library of shirt designs that randomly update every 15 seconds.
Today’s mix is now available on my Mixcloud page if you’d like to give it a listen, along with many, many hours of other mixes I’ve uploaded in the past. And more will come — I may not do this every week, but I will need to make sure to get some more practice in over the coming months, so I’ll be popping up from time to time.
Difficult Listening Hour 2023.11.25
The usual seat-of-my pants randomness. Starts EBM-y, then gets goofy with some mashups, then darker oontz-oontz again to wind it up.
Why Don’t You Get A Job-La-Di, Cecilia? (Simon & Garfunkel vs. The Beatles vs. The Offspring)
This is one I’ve had bouncing around in my head for years, knowing it was ridiculous, but all three songs are so similar that I had to give it a shot. Now you get to suffer too! ;)
Download: DJ Wüdi – Why Don’t You Get A Job-La-Di, Cecilia? (2.7 MB .mp3)
Choose Your Mortal Kombat Figher (Ava Max vs. The Immortals)
Just a funny thought I had while listening to the new Barbie movie soundtrack album. I don’t do these very often, so the quality isn’t perfect, but hey! Not bad for a quick little off-the-top-of-my-head project.
Download: DJ Wüdi – Choose Your Mortal Kombat Fighter (4.2 MB .mp3)