pMinusQ is short for Paul Minus EQ: a DJ mix with no effects and no changes to bass, mid or treble. Only the play button, the volume control and looping.
68 minutes · MP3, 320 kbps · download
The story behind the mix
I never really considered myself to be into music per se, but all the people around me were, so I was always surrounded by interesting music. The sounds all came from relationships. I didn't realise this until I moved to China and it was all gone.
The club music in China was pretty boring: high-energy, female-vocal pop trance, everywhere. I decided to be the change I wanted to see and bought a set of CD decks: two Pioneer CDJ-100s with a mixer in the centre, all in one flight case. Open the lid, plug in and go. I started practising hard in my little room on campus. It was unheated, and I remember practising through the freezing cold winter with a duvet for a cloak, my fingers almost too numb to feel the wheel on the decks.
It turned out to be quite easy to get gigs over there, and I had two residencies during my time in China. The first was in Wenzhou, a small industrial town, in the first foreign-owned bar in the city. There was no pay, but I got free booze and could play any time I wanted. Living on campus was quite strict and the gates closed at 9pm, so I had to climb the fence and sneak past the security guards to get back into the building close to midnight. Later I lived with the owner and would just come home early in the morning.
The second was a similar situation: the first foreign-owned bar in Chengdu, opened by a Parisian couple. The night there was called DieselPop.
My mission was to play music people would never normally hear, from lots of different genres, but have it all well mixed. The inspiration was the eclectic club night Optimo.
From decks to software
One night a girl knocked a glass of cola over my decks and mixer. They were never the same again, and I took the loss as an opportunity for a new approach, first switching to Traktor DJ with a Faderfox DJ1 controller.
Later I moved to Ableton Live, with the addition of a Behringer B-Control BCR2000, a unit with lots of rotary knobs for effects. Ableton really transformed what it was possible to do live. Being able to edit the start and end of tracks that had no solid BPM made them mixable in ways that were never possible before.
All of my digital recordings were lost in a forest fire in Portugal. This mix is the only remnant of audio I have from that time.