Man, I’m so thankful for all the support received on the new single “Such A Shame”. Something has really resonated with people on this one and I reckon it’s largely down to it being an exceptionally written original song with an exceptional performance. Several weeks after release it’s still in the Traxsource Garage Top 10 with two of the available mixes still riding high. Check the videos below and you’ll find the links to download or stream.
Music
Seriously Slammin’ Deep Underground House!
So the brand new release is up now on exclusive Traxsource pre-order here – https://www.traxsource.com/title/1847124/such-a-shame-mixes It’s an original song featuring the incredible vocals/songwriting of Kayleigh Gibson and comes in 3 mixes covering Soulful House, Garage House and Deep House. Right now you can listen to edits from the full tracks up on the Traxsource player but I thought I’d drop the deep dub in full over at Soundcloud to get you in the mood for the full release on Friday.
Let me know what you think and which mix is your favourite. The Soulful House and Garage House mixes are hitting streaming platforms in radio edit form on Wed and you can pre-save those here – https://share.amuse.io/track/danny-j-lewis-such-a-shame-1
Paul McCartney. What?
So I was listening to a Louie Vega twitch session the other day and this super interesting dubby and trippy track came on with weird vocals that reminded me of someone that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The track went on for some time, about ten minutes and featured what sounded like reel to reel tape twisting and some wicked percussion. It felt organic, it felt contemporary and I loved it.
The Shock, the horror!
So as the track neared completion the Maestro calmly announced that it was Paul McCartney, an ‘electronic music pioneer’ and I was in complete and utter shock. Here was someone who had prior meant nothing to me (I’m sure I’ll get shot down for this) and similarly the Beatles. I simply have never felt they have a place in my life.
Secret Friend
Now Louie didn’t give out the name of the song, so I went on a mercifully short journey through the McCartney back catalogue on Spotify scanning a few seconds here and there across a variety of albums to find ‘Secret Friend’ – take a listen below and be completely blown away by this 1980 masterpiece!
The Final Single Of The Year!
Currently at number 8 in the @traxsource #garage chart is “Slipped Away”, my final release of 2021. It’s a bouncy, piano infused vocal hooky #garagehouse banger that comes in a jingle bell infused festive version as well as non-festive for the underground heads. Initial DJ charts from Jackman Jones, Tony Fuel and Michael Pieterse lead the pack with more to come. You can grab the DJ downloads exclusively from Traxsource or hit your favourite streaming platform for the radio edit using this link – https://bit.ly/DJLSlippedAway
A Special End Of Year Message
Watch the video below to hear the instrumental version of the single and some closing words from Danny.
The 90s Tapes Volume Two
After the huge success of Volume One I’ve got another batch of my DAT tape remasters up on Traxsource this week, link here – https://www.traxsource.com/title/1698426/the-90s-tapes-volume-2 It’s been a real emotional journey for me to revisit these and I’m so glad to be able to share them with you. It’s a diverse range that takes in Garage, Garage House, UK Garage, Peaktime House and more.
If you want to hear them in context in a DJ mix I also did a livestream on YouTube the other evening and it was great to share the tracks with an audience in in realtime, thanks to all who attended. I’ll be scheduling some new livestreams in coming weeks.
Traxsource Garage EOY Analytics 2021
So it’s that time of year again where the mighty Traxsource creates end of year stats for its Artists and Labels. It’s a fascinating thing to explore visually as we scroll through our socials and there are some huge achievements – congrats to all. Now whilst scrolling my mind was building up a dataset and dashboard and I just had to put something together which is incredibly compelling to explore.
You can find the link here – https://datastudio.google.com/s/sOuE7vbmKh0
Methodology & Build
Considering all of this was publicly available I hand crawled the Garage Top 100 and pulled the stats from each artist using the web app front end. I did make exceptions however, where an artist is predominantly NOT garage I removed them to avoid skewing the figures and if an artist had no stats they were of course not included. The overall ranking was a simple summing of all metrics which felt fair – I saw no point in weighting each as they all contribute to the ‘success’ overall of the artist.
I grabbed the artist URLs and noted some other information – those who did not have bio and artist texts (room for improvement basically). This data was compiled into a spreadsheet and then ingested into a Google Data Studio project where the Dashoard was built.
What has been incredibly interesting here for me is the education of who is doing what. It has introduced me to new names I hadn’t been paying attention to and will do from now on – especially because I’m starting to do live-streaming DJ mixes and need fresh tracks! I imagine this is going to be very thought provoking and discussion will no doubt be interesting over on the Traxsource Garage Group – I’ll answer questions if anyone has them over there 😉
How do you say it? The great Garage Debate
Firstly, congrats to the entire Garage community, we have a new home! Traxsource in their wisdom have given us our dedicated top sales chart and associated complimentary assets – thank you!
Go take a look for yourself – https://www.traxsource.com/genre/29/garage/top
Group leader and talented producer Marc Cotterell quite rightly highlighted the diversity of sub genres that exist under this umbrella on the Facebook group’s header – see below
So it confidently encompasses the following:
- Garage
- Garage House
- US Garage
- 2 Step
- UKG
It’s a solid and sensibly mixed bunch that covers a variety of styles but there’s just one thing that needs clarification – how do you actually say Garage?
This young lady perhaps has the full lowdown:
The fact that the above video mentions class is interesting. Some people have told me in the past that they consider 4/4 Garage as ‘Council House’ but how does that make someone feel from that demographic? Appropriate? Insulting? I lived on a council estate for a few years and I pronounce it the ‘posh’ way so where does that leave us?!
Perhaps across the sub genres it is indeed pronounced differently. I was brought up on the US (Paradise) Garage and there’s no way the yanks said Paradise Garridge 🤣 That’s the reasoning behind my pronunciation – what’s yours?
What U Thinking?
So the big new music release is out today on Traxsource for DJs to download and all the streaming platforms for the music consumers out there.
There’s something super catchy about this one so I’ve put together a colourful and lively video that’s up on both tiktok and Instagram in reel format to allow people to get creative and do whatever they want to do with it.
This is a new venture for me and an interesting step into a younger and more accessible market, should be really interesting to track the results. I’ll let you know how it goes.. if there are any interesting findings I’ll put them on the blog.
All the links here – https://dannyjlewis.lnk.to/jhqDwa0x
Enzyme Black – Anthology
Out now as a Bandcamp exclusive and coming to streaming on the 15th October is a brand new compilation of remastered Deep House tracks I made a decade or so ago under the pseudonym Enzyme Black. These tracks sound amazing and I’m super proud of them still, especially “Simple” where I did something I very very rarely do – sing. You can preview the tracks right now in the player below and if you’re feeling the vibe and want to spin the tracks in your DJ sets you can purchase the complete album in uncompressed format for a great price. Let me your your favourite jams in the comments 😉
Not my usual…
Now one of the big benefits of releasing music yourself is the fact that you have total freedom and it means you can put up songs or tracks that are a bit more obscure and left of centre compared to your usual output. I was listening to a couple this weekend that I created a while back and I thought I’d surface them again here so that people can experience them if they haven’t heard them before.
Mind 2 Mind / No Exit
There are two tracks particularly that really stuck out as really sounding different. Case in point – one track called “Mind 2 Mind” and the other called “No Exit”. These are not what you would usually associate with me sonically as one of them starts off with a break beat that evolves more into a slow, deep house kind of vibe which has sections where it gets pitch modulated, twists and goes out of tune, but it was definitely deliberate. And it’s funny because I’ll make tracks, and it all depends on my mood at the time what comes out so certainly there are things that I mage on occasions that are little bit different to my normal output.. So when I listened back to these two, it was almost like connecting with music that I hadn’t made, even though I had, so I heard them with fresh ears and that was really interesting – I was really glad to rediscover them.
“Mind 2 Mind” is the one that’s got the break beat and the other one “No Exit” is basically a really long drawn out piece of music that hardly changes over time, although there are subtle shifts in tone and energy. I put it on and I found it almost meditative – I almost fell asleep to this thing and that’s not because it was boring but because it really had that kind of mood to it and I was really pleased to rediscover this so it’s another one I recommend that you check out.
I’ve put links to both of these into the page so you can have a listen and of course, let me know what you think using the comment functionality on the blog so if you have some words to say please let me know – I’m very interested to hear.
Danny J Lewis 