Hi, I'm Phi!

I'm a music chemist fond of weird harmonics and oldschool techno.
At some point I started making mixes. This website is dedicated to show off these mixes.

Mix Series:

• Nebula - DNB, Jungle, IDM
• Basement Beats - Techno
• Beats To Get Beat To - Hard Techno, Oldschool Gabber
• Cloud Walk - House
• Sour Candy - Melodic Acid
• Steam - Oldschool Techno, Oldschool Acid/Trance

Mixes

2024

2023

2022

Baby steps

Mixxx Era

Around the end of 2020 I started using the DJ-ing software Mixxx in addition to Audacity, which greatly improved my beatmatching. Mixxx has an awesome feature (that's also kind of necessary) that detects the BPM of each track you load and lets you synchronize the speeds of both loaded tracks. I used this feature to determine the speed adjustment I need to make in percent, and fed the value into Audacity's speed adjustment tool. This allowed me to make my transitions much longer and made it much easier to rehearse them, since I no longer needed to load the tracks into Audacity, manually match the speed and see if it sounds good or not. The sole reason I didn't switch to Mixxx completely was because I appreciate the ability to work on my mixes as projects instead of having to do everything live and start over if I screw something up; it also gives me more room for experimentation.

This is how I've been making my mixes until this day.

Audacity Era

At some point I started feeling like I can't get anything new squeezed out of LoopMash anymore, and since I've always wanted to make more proper mixes, I collected a bunch of tracks and arranged them in Audacity. I manually fine-tuned the speeds and checked whether the beats line up by eye. However, since my manual speed matching wasn't the most accurate (who would've guessed?), I was unable to make very long transitions without the tracks getting out of sync.
These mixes were made purely in Audacity, they are rather wonky but they were also my first actual mixes.

LoopMash Era

As a kid I always listened to DJ mixes by Sylvie Marks that my dad was occasionally playing in background. I was very fascinated by how the tracks metamorphed into one another and spent a lot of time doing nothing but listen to those mixes. I'm pretty sure if you were to take a random mix by Sylvie Marks between 2005 and 2016 and play me 10 seconds at a random position I could instantly tell you which mix it is, which position you chose and in some cases even the name of the track that's currently playing, that's how deeply I memorized them.

Anyway, I had a growing interest in creating mixes like these myself, so when I was 12, I downloaded a smartphone app called LoopMash. LoopMash allows you to populate 4 tracks with a looping sample from a built-in selection, which could for example be a bassline, a beat, a melody, vocals etc. and lets you apply diverse effects, filters or general playback behavior to them. The app was probably meant to be a cheap alternative to a DAW, but I used it to create mixes, using beatloops instead of actual tracks. It was actually quite fun to play with during school breaks.

Here are some recordings I made back then: