Although it's had far more attention then I thought it would, I feel like giving it a final bump as well as do something I've been wanting to do since it's release. A description, or comment on this mix. A walkthrough if you will. I just decided to give it a few more listens first to order my thoughts about it. It might give you a better idea of what's going on in this mix, at the very least it will give you something to read while listening. Just ignore it if you're not that interested but I'm always the fan of this sort of thing and I hope by starting myself I'll encourage others to do so as well.

So, let's start with a general intro.
The real concept of this mix was not only to showcase experimental music in a broad sense, since a lot of it doesn't actually fit the genre 'experimental' of which you can argue if it even exists. In my view experimental has an deeper, more free minded ambient side. It has the white noise ear-rape side, which I tried to avoid, obviously. And it has a random non music sort of style (tracks consisted of kitchen noises and that sort of thing). I mostly aimed for the first one, but the whole set was to have a more open approach to genre's with an experimental free-for-all structure to bind it all together.

When I started back in march I only had the first few tracks mixed together and had no idea were to go with it after that. I had a lot of tracks selected, but no idea how to go about making such a mix. So making this was to be a long and painful process of trying things until it worked. However, during that process I also fell more and more in love with the music as it's so incredibly fun to play with. Now, this is were I'd get ahead of myself if I start to explain further, so let's just start by walking you through the mix.

To opening portion is the oldest and most polished part of the mix, as I slightly tweaked it in each of the many dozens of incarnations this mix had. Most of these tracks or from this compilation: An Anthology Of Chinese Experimental Music 1992-2008. Which I had picked because hey, how often do you get to hear Chinese music? It also formed the main inspiration for this mix. Originally it just consisted of Li Chin Sung's somewhere and the untitled track from Lim Giang, which is one of the most impressive pieces I've ever heard. Definitely worth listening to in unbutchered form as well.
Most of the tracks on the compilation are quite similar anyway so it was easy to paste some of them in, like WFDD's Sin after somewhere which builds upon it nicely.
I also added a nicely subtle bit of 'screamdrone' in the form of As Slow As Birds Dive by Alistair Crosbie to spice up the long bell sequence from Lim Giang's track, which creates a nicely haunting sound scape although playing 3 tracks at the same time is not appreciated by most speakers and headphones and results in lots of crackling, but it had to be a bit noisy as well. So a balance in volume and EQ settings had to be found. You'll also hear Somewere coming back for a few seconds during the rest of Unknown's running time.
Now after that track releases proper I eventually opted to mix it in with another haunting drone: Drenched in Anguish by Proem. Which is layered with Ophidian's Secrecy, one of the ambient interludes on blackbox; one of my all time favourite albums.

This gave me a bit of an appetite for hardcore, and a good example of it's more experimental side is Sandling's Desolate Outpost. From None Follows The Sunrise. Another recommendation if you're interested in hardcore's experimental side. Also gives a bit of groove to the early part of this mix.

Then there's Inharmonic Symphony...
Now, Argaman is an amazingly talented musician but unfortunately most of the time he seems to be unable to take himself seriously, so i actually had to cut out about 3 minutes of this track because it was stupid and didn't fit the flow at all. You can hear where it's been cut, at 21:45 in the mix. I blossomed it up with some sinister laughs from an old Hugg & Pepp record. I think it sounds a bit stupid, but I'd rather have a few seconds of my own stupidity then 3 whole minutes of his stupidity. so, hence. Onwards to something interesting, the organ you hear at 24:05 is typical Dutch folk music. It was part of the track we sent to the Eurovision Song Contest. Check it out here. Everyone seemed to hate it, but I really liked the tune and thought that with a bit extra reverb I could use it in a mix, if only for few seconds. I had been looking for a good way to mix out of Inharmonic symphony for months and this turned out to break it up nicely, as i opted for a similar approach to earlier in the mix with a dark drone from Proem to offer a lot of layering opportunities.
Legowelt offers some fitting vocals after which Heckmann's The Sound Of Colour offers some nice windy textures. With a few small elements from an old Eulberg track thrown in to spice up the transition.

The next section, approximately 26 minutes and onward if you find it hard to keep track, is one of the cooler mixing ideas I think although i didn't really take the time to work it out as much as i should have, but alas. Endlessly tinkering with sliders got tiring at some point even for me. The rumbling thumps in Goldmann's Slit Trench were supposed to 'wake up' the creatures that originate from Kodema's Turning Leaf Migrations Part 2 (we'll get to that monster in a minute). And they are eventually 'shot' By Labyrinth's Carriage At St. Palurs Harbor. After that a small interlude is put in with a short track from Library Tapes, layered with some background noises in the form of Pawn - The Creak Of The Chair.
With the intend of breaking up the madness a bit.

Putting in Alex Smoke's Northwoods was a move I'm still not very sure about. It's a good record and it mixed in nicely, but I think I should have gone with a more subtle track so the next section had something to explode out of.
That section is one I put in because I wanted a bit of an organic forest field recordings thing going on in the mix. The only thing I could think of is.. basically a mini album in vinyl format: Kodama - Turning Leaf Migrations. What I dub as "part 2" is basically most of the B-side I suppose. I also wanted one of the tracks from Forest Creature - Frustrated Analogue, but it didn't feel strong enough on it's own, so the solution was a risky one: Layer it completely within the Kodema track.
Again, this took a lot of effort to get right and it still isn't perfect if you ask me. But I think it does the job nicely and creates quite a unique sort of peak moment for the mix.

After that kodema's track automatically transforms into a melodic drone, which I figured would be a good direction for the last part of the mix to go in. everything from sort off 48 minutes and onwards is simply your average melodic downtempo set and shouldn't be hard to figure out. In retrospect I wish I had done a bit more with it. Something that annoys me is that i forgot to put a track in from Cheju between Quiet Room and Glade Geita which i had used in older incarnations but didn't make it to the final one because, again, I forgot. But that shouldn't bother anyone else.
Glade Geita by the way is a very unique track which I only used a few parts of, you used to be able to download it for free on Chokai's last.fm page but I see this no longer the case unfortunately.

Clair D'mix adds a bit of coffee shop ambience and again breaks the mix up a bit, although I probably shouldn't have left it running for so long. Sine Weaver's Has Anyone Seen God is one of my favourite tracks of the decade but unfortunately I contextualized it rather poorly IMO. But never mind, It's definitely worth checking this EP out if you're interested. Or any of their other work probably, haven't heard any of that though.

I eventually close off to the final part of Glade Geita. Which has some interesting cinematic effects, and Mi Otra Mitad by Nicholas Szczepanik. A beautiful, almost magical drone. It used to sit somewhere within the latter half of he mix, But it didn't feel right and felt too long and understated. Basically I was too scared to lose the listeners attention. Layering it with more field recordings didn't do much good either, but I couldn't just leave it out. I'd be heart broken. So I eventually decided to stick it on at the end. Which I now regret. I actually wanted to build upon it more by mixing even more drones after that which would have given the mix an ending proper, but I didn't feel comfortable with making it even longer. So now it just kind of sits there on it's own. Unfortunately.

So.. As you can probably tell I'm not as excited with this mix's latter half. I think it's good, but could have been something exceptional if I had given it as much attention as the first half.
But hey, as mentioned. I have been working on this mix for the better part of a year so I forgive myself for wanting the release as soon I got a satisfying result.

This is mostly due to my own history. I have been mixing tracks together for a while now. Although usually just for myself. I eventually released a mix on trancecritic.com back in 2007. Which I took down shortly after because it sounded abominable. Every mix I've done since has gone wrong. I work on them until I have a result I'm somewhat satisfied with. Then I start to tinker with a few parts and end up breaking more then I fixed. And then eventually I lose interest and throw it all away.
This one was different, from the moment I started with it I thought this should be something I could release here. So I took my time, working on it once every few weeks, listening to the result and then just forgetting about it for a while.

The ironic thing is, I say I could have done more. But the fact is my hard drive died just a few weeks after uploading this. So I have lost the set data, most of the music in there as well as nearly 500 gig's of other data and music. So if I had worked on it a bit longer this set would never have seen the light of day. So naturally, I'm glad I ended it when I did. And that's also why I'm very glad with all the positive responses I got for it. Which helped ease the pain of all the data loss a bit.
I had expected more criticisms, there were times when I wasn't so sure about it myself. I almost threw it away once when I was listening to it while being a bit too high and getting all paranoid.
But that's all in the past, I like it now. The music and mixing is very forward and to the point. And it closely resembles what I consider to be an ideal set flow at some points.

So, that's about all I can say about it. Enjoy!

___________________
Mixes: Alaé (Conceptional ambient dub)
AOTSE (Experimental)

Listens:
http://www.last.fm/user/bierheld