ANTS Podcast

I tend to spend a very long time researching for and compiling Gentle Daps mixes, so I decided to challenge myself to compile, record, and publish a mix all in one sitting. This gave me an opportunity to revisit some favorites and not get too caught up in the discovery process. It was oddly satisfying to breeze through this and reach right for the good stuff. The result of this experiment is—surprise!—a pretty straightforward ambient and new age playlist. (Nothing wrong with that though, right?)

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English soft rock aficionado Deejay Greenman has returned with his sequel to last month’s Write Your Lucky Number (Gentle Daps XXIV). He picks up where he left of and offers up another hour of rare ‘70s-centric soft rock of the supremely hushed, mellow variety. These two mixes are treasures, and I am thrilled they are part of the Gentle Daps canon.

Brighton-based Deejay Greenman caught my ear a few months ago with his excellent Mixcloud series of smooth AOR. I knew his knack for picking out wonderfully soft adult rock from the ‘60s, '70s, and '80s would make him a great fit for Gentle Daps. Lucky for us, he heard my call and put together this enchanting entry to the series. He’s calling it Write Your Lucky Number.

Celebrating three years of Gentle Daps.

Gainesville, Florida-based producer Natasha Home (aka Sunmoonstar) has been on the Gentle Daps radar since wowing us with a pair of great albums in 2015. Now she has offered up her own entry in the series by blessing us with 93 minutes of ambient and new age splashed with a few bright peaks of experimental pop and classical.

This years’ Gentle Daps Halloween special features dreary, quiet obscuro, goth, and film scores. It includes a couple of creepy crawly Legowelt classics, a spooky Bowie cover, a few first-wave 4AD ethereal pieces, and much more.

Baby Armie turns the page on another quarter in chill music findings.

Baby Armie explores vintage synth-driven children’s music for Gentle Daps’ 20th episode.

The first quarter’s best offerings in subdued music.

Gentle Daps returns to its roots in soft pop, soft prog, ethereal, and fusion with this two-year anniversary episode mixed by yours truly.

Baby Armie looks back at his favorite findings in the realm of late 2015 chill music.

Portland-based ambient artist Opaline has gotten regular coverage here on AiMT, so I am thrilled that he’s been kind enough to offer up this latest entry in the Gentle Daps series. It’s a live mix made up entirely of vinyl and cassettes, and it continues the new age theme of the past few Daps episodes. The format choice is fitting considering Opaline’s thick release schedule of cassettes in recent years. His most recent is called Open Source and is available on Hacktivism Records. Stream/buy it and the rest of Opaline’s extensively serene catalog over on his Bandcamp page.

It’s time once again to examine the state of the revival of new age music. This episode of Gentle Daps focuses on this year’s standout new age cassette releases.

A spotlight on some of the third quarter’s best subdued musical offerings.

Vancouver-based tape label 1080p has been one of the most covered if not THE most covered label on AiMT over the past couple of years, so it’s only right that I give it a proper spotlight in the form of this 50-minute mixed tribute sampler, which features all dance and experimental material from the label’s 2015 catalog.

I can still very vividly recall the first time I heard ambient music. It was during my teenage years. I popped in the record store at our local mall—a Sam Goody or something like that—and picked up Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II by Aphex Twin. I had read about ambient but had never actually heard it. I remember being very surprised and delighted to find this album at such a small shop in our relatively small town. (Mind you, this was in the mid ‘90s, so music consumption via the internet wasn’t really a thing except for the tech elite.) I wandered back to the car, popped in the CD, and was absolutely mesmerized and transplanted by what I heard. The dark, eerie vibes of SAW2 aren’t exactly the ideal introduction to the genre, but I managed to gulp it all down without any trouble. From that moment forward, I knew this music would be a passion of mine. And fittingly, the SAW duology is some of the most celebrated and sought after material in Richard D. James’ (aka Aphex Twin’s) catalog. However his ambient work at large is scarce in comparison to his vastly more plentiful beat-centric material. When James shocked the electronic music world earlier this year by leaking 175 previously unreleased and unheard early demos on SoundCloud, it was no big surprise that ambient music made up a tiny fraction of the flood. Not that I’m complaining—this clutch of tracks is an absolute treasure—but I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t hoping for more SAW2-style ambient out of the whole ordeal. After all that’s the era of his career that shaped me the most. I’ve noticed that many of the fan mixes dedicated to the flood—both simple SoundCloud sets and intricate DJ sets alike—seem to favor James’ SAW1-era ambient techno tracks over the beatless tracks more akin to SAW2. (Even James put together a SoundCloud playlist entitled SAW 1.5, which is all techno.) But since I’m clearly biased toward his beatless efforts, those were my focus for this podcast. Luckily James’ friend and collaborator Mike Paradinas (aka µ-Ziq) followed James’ lead and leaked 156 of his own demos, which include a few beatless numbers. The combined beatless efforts of the two producers exceeds an hour, and it makes for good album-style listening. This may be the closest thing we’ll ever get to another SAW2-style album out of RDJ, so let’s savor these selections.

The new age revivalist sounds of elusive Lake Geneva-based producer Inner Travels have been featured on previous Gentle Daps episodes, so it is my privilege to let him curate his own mix, Welcome the Day, for the series. An avid new age cassette collector, Inner Travels has contributed mixes for folks like Sounds of the Dawn and Rainbow Pyramid, and I am happy to add Gentle Daps to that growing list.

Here’s my spotlight on the past quarter’s subdued musical offerings in quarterly Armchair Backlog series for ANTS Podcast.

Beat Bachs is a Fayetteville-based DJ and jack of all trades. He’s been active in radio for 16 years and counting with a few different projects, namely the film industry talkshow The Drive-in Speakerbox. That show got its start as a spotlight on film scores (and still incorporates film score material between talk segments). Beat Bachs, who goes by The Boom Operator on the show, has been amassing a gigantic collection of scores over the past decade for the show. He was kind enough to pour over this entire archive and pick out the quietest, dreamiest pieces he could find for Gentle Daps XV. For more of Beat Bachs’ projects, check out Art Amiss, a local art collective of which he’s the president.