moWerk

eL-t-Mo

Between 1996 and 2003 i played jungle, mostly in and around cologne and mostly at parties we put on ourselves. the crew i hung around with was called solar rockaz. when jungle faded out i moved to the complex amen driven end of drum and bass, and there was always reggae and dancehall running underneath all of it.

Late shout out to Don K-li, Mista Magista, Adam and all the fine folks from back then who happen to read this. thanks for those good old times and memories.

then i lost interest in playing live. grinding a set into performance quality is a different craft from composing one, and composing turned out to be the part i liked. so the sets became studio mixes, built in early ableton and cut raw in audacity, staged and edited over weeks instead of rehearsed. i never really released them.

jungle, 1999 to 2006

On mixcloud.com/eLtMo.

The Kickzone 1999 set comes with a footnote. the recording is not the gig. it is me redoing the set exactly, in my dorm room, the day after.

There is also video: the 1999 performance, which i only posted after finding a snippet somebody else had put up.

studio mixes, 2005 to 2009

Dub and dubstep, on a second mixcloud account i ended up with by being careless with credentials.

how they were made

My thing was long transitions, and acapellas. my wife worked at music rebel in cologne, wolfgang’s record shop, so there was a steady supply of 7 inch singles to harvest vocals off. the mixes were composed in ableton and then garnished with those acapellas to light up the parts that would otherwise be boring. sometimes the result was better than it had any right to be.

I built the first version of that shop somewhere around 2001 to 2003. rockers uptown was the subtitle rather than the name, but it was the better known of the two, so i pointed everything at that domain. that stuck, and selectors-choice got pointed there too once wolfgang bought it. a friend of his took over the maintenance and overhauled the whole shop years ago, and the masthead at the top of it is still the one i made. it is 760 pixels wide. the artwork has held up better than the resolution has.

the name

I was bad at spanish at school, so people called me el timo. when i started getting out of the bedroom and onto small stages it became eL-t-Mo, camel case with a dash where an umlaut would have been. it was meant to read like a bbs handle, because that is what the chat conventions looked like then. years later i learned that el timo means roughly the scam in spanish. i did not plan that and i do not mind it.

There are brazilian comments under the youtube videos telling me to come and visit because people there know me. i still have no idea what to make of that.

Nothing is hosted here. youtube and mixcloud attribute the original artists automatically, which is where that belongs.