Ozone's Mixes

Welcome to Ozone’s Mixes

Sat, 31 May 1997 12:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Ozone’s Mixes! This episode is only a hello: tap “Ozone’s Mixes” at the top of this screen to see all the mixes. There is one mix per episode, oldest first.

Each mix is one long episode with a chapter for every song. In Apple Podcasts the chapters are under the queue button (☰) in Now Playing.

The music you are hearing is “On Me (Ozone’s radio mix)”, from my first album, Retrospection. The mixes, their sleeve notes and their downloads are on the Music page of andrepang.ca.

Retrospection

Sun, 01 Jun 1997 12:00:00 +0000

Awww, my first-ever album. (Cuddly feeling.) It does sound a tad dated now, but I’m still proud of Bliss (track 9), which I think is, by far, my best song ever. My remix of Maelcum’s Supertron still ain’t too bad today either, although the cheesy 2 Unlimited vocal at the end does send me into cringes.

Many of the songs on Retrospection were partially done as a proud show of what you could do with a tracker if you employed a bit of sound engineering work. The music scene in the mid-1990s is pretty different from today: these days, hobbyist musicians can pick up a copy of Cubase, Logic, Live, about ten brazillion VST plugins, and can churn out stuff that sounds almost like it came out of a production studio. It’s not quite the same scene as the mid-90s tracker heydays, where we had serious trouble mixing together a mere 16 channels with no anti-aliasing on 486DX2/66s. Thanks to the incredible coding work by Jeffrey Lim, making professional-sounding work from the humble Impulse Tracker was actually possible. While Retrospection was published in 1999, most of the songs on here were written in about 1996, an era where the Gravis Ultrasound ruled over the Sound Blaster 16, and when we were still tinkering around with evil DOS memory managers like QEMM to maximise that 640k of conventional memory as much as possible. (640k! That’s less than half of a single sample these days!) I’m still somewhat impressed we managed to churn out these tunes on that kind of hardware.

And hey, if trackers were good enough for Force Mass Motion, they were good enough for me!

Ozone's 21st Set

Wed, 29 Dec 1999 12:00:00 +0000

Ah, the set that started it all… I still think my 21st set holds up pretty well to this day. (Hey, the introduction of Ebeneezer Goode still goes off.) It’s a little different from many other mixes since there’s a lot of short snippets from many songs, so that the energy level’s kept high by changing songs every 2 minutes, rather than building the euphoria on a single track for 7 minutes. This was specifically done since, well, it was for a 21st, where I wanted to try to get everyone on the floor even if they’re not really into dance music. (Keep in mind that the time was 1999 — electronic dance was still quite young back then!)

Project Seven

Thu, 01 Jun 2000 12:00:00 +0000

Project Seven was the first mix I did after my 21st set, filled with some classic 90s club-thumpers (some of which still don’t sound that bad today. No, really!), and is probably the most vanilla out of all the mixes I’ve done. Still, there’s some less popular songs on here that weren’t big hits at the clubs, but that I still adore as perennial examples of good 90s dance (The Trouser Enthuasiasts mix of Karen Ramirez’s Looking for Love, for instance, and Sunscreem’s Change). I guess you can’t really get more 90s with two back-to-back Felix tracks, hey?

Nymph

Mon, 01 Jan 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Nymph is my little take on the whole chillout genre, inspired by Red Jerry’s excellent Chilled Euphoria compilation. Strictly speaking, it’s not really chillout, since there’s quite a few tracks on here (such as Sunscreem’s “A Brief History of Nonsense”) that are decidedly non-chilled. However, since everybody uses the chillout moniker to mean general floaty background music these days, I might as well go with the trend…

I changed the cover artwork in 2026. It’s now “Skull and Roses” by Romulo Royo, from Flowers & Thorns (2016).

Tattoos

Sat, 01 Sep 2001 12:00:00 +0000

“Relentless” is probably the best word I could use to describe this dance compilation: it’s an unashamed 4/4 monster, with the intent of getting you to boogie. One song (Chicane’s Sunstroke) breaks up the otherwise continuous 80-minute marathon of rhythm; listen to this one loud.

Since I published it, I think there’s a couple of pretty weak spots in the mix toward the end, but I still love the start of the mix (Fear, Intensify, Dive, Lush, and Accelerator/So Pure).

When the Heavens Fall

Tue, 01 Jan 2002 12:00:00 +0000

When the Heavens Fall is a compilation in the style of Nymph: soothing, relaxing music. It was named after the famous Purple Motion track (well, famous if you were part of the classic PC demoscene anyway), as well as being excellent mood music when there’s some light romantic rain falling outside. Again, like Nymph, it’s not strictly a “chilled” compilation: in some ways, it’s the successor to Nymph, although I think the style and progression of the mix is different enough that calling it “Nymph II” would be a bit of a misnomer.

I changed the cover artwork in 2026. It’s now a photograph of the rainforest canyons around Vancouver, from r/vancouver.

Elven Sundays

Sun, 01 Jun 2003 12:00:00 +0000

This mix was done for those gorgeous Summer Sundays in Sydney, where the weather’s just perfect for hitting the beach and you’re looking for some music to complement that atmosphere. While there’s a variety of chilled, dance, jazz and pop, I think they all work quite nicely together.

Id

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:00:00 +0000

On Apple Music

(00:00:00) Faithless: Take the Long Way Home (1998)

(00:06:59) Way Out West: Pulse of Life (2004)

(00:11:08) Way Out West: Mindcircus (Way Out West Club mix) (2002)

(00:15:23) DJ Spooky: Belong (Sasha’s Involver mix) (2004)

(00:24:46) Sarah McLachlan: World on Fire (Junkie XL mix) (2005)

(00:29:51) Placebo: Passive Aggressive (Brothers in Rhythm Club mix) (2000)

(00:35:11) Paul Oakenfold: Southern Sun (DJ Tiesto remix) (2002)

(00:43:38) 4 Strings: Take Me Away (into the Night) (Original mix) (2002)

(00:56:47) Orbital: Doctor Who (Ozone’s Rhythmlayer edit) (2001)

(01:01:04) The Prodigy: Break and Enter (1994)

(01:08:27) Layo & Bushwacka!: Let the Good Times Roll (2002)

(01:11:53) Ian Brown: F.E.A.R. (U.N.K.L.E. mix) (2001)

Well, it’s been about three long years since my last mix, and I’m glad to say that I’ve made a return to the virtual decks. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a good thing or not ;-). So, without further ado, here’s Id—a throwback to the anthemic 120-138bpm uplifting dance culture that infected the clubbing scene at the turn of the 21st century, where every emotion took a back seat to just Feeling Damn Good. So, close your eyes, soak in the music, and feel the rhythm take you away…

Tes Lyric

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0000

2011’s been a rather eventful year for me. It’s been the happiest year of my life, but I also went through some big downs to get there. The songs on this album has been my comfort music: it’s all the stuff I listen to when I’m down, been kicked around, and need to get back up and fight another day. In a way, it’s the most personal mix I’ve done since it’s bearing my soul a little (but whoa, no Sarah McLachlan here?) I hope you find some comfort in it too; enjoy.

Stage Superior

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I think I actually started this mix way back in Singapore in 2008, originally with a rather different-looking track list. It was even finished by around 2010, except that I didn’t have an idea for the cover art, and it took me over a year to finally push it out the door. Covering two decades of progressive house—from the KLF in 1990 to Vibrasphere in 2010—this runs the gamut, from Radiohead to Photek, and Way Out West to M83. Enjoy.