Rolling Stone – the veritable boomer bible which still finds reasons to put Dylan and the Dead on their cover – has apparently decided to take another swing at electronic music.
This time they’re clearly going deep and keeping the EDM cheese confined to their ongoing pop coverage. Following a wonderful piece on Jeff Mills and Afropop legend Tony Allen’s ongoing collaboration, they’ve given high marks to Specter’s latest album Built To Last and now talk to Pete Tong on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix.
They’re asking great questions too. On the debut of the Essential Mix on October 30, 1993, Tong reveals that the great inspiration was WBLS and New York City’s amazing radio mix shows. “The idea of DJs doing continuous mixes on the radio I guess grew out of the popularity of the music from the days of disco,” he says. “In a city like New York, it still worked as a format”:
Timmy in particular was the first one. I remember going to his crib, and he showed me how he obviously has two copies of the same record. You’re doing your thing on the turntables, mixing it onto a reel-to-reel machine, and then running that reel-to-reel machine again and mixing two more records into that mix, and then recording it onto another reel-to-reel machine and then cutting the tape up, sticking it on the wall. It was kind of madness, and it kind of really expanded knowledge on the kind of possibilities of what we could do.
Read the whole coverage of the Essential Mix at 25 here.
