Recording of my weekly Tuesday morning chillout show produced in PDX, featuring a mix of music new and old, by my favorite producers and myself. I stream on MixCloud. If you enjoy, please find and follow me me there as well, also on Instagram, Soundcloud, and YouTube. Thank you for listening!

Photo by Rahul Pandit:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/closeup-photography-of-book-page-folding-forming-heart-1083633/

00:00 - Rain Geometries - H.U.V.A. Network
06:42 - Skyblue - Ishq
12:14 - Neurosomatic Circuit - Androcell
18:45 - Hyper-Sence - Phutureprimitive
24:47 - Mx - Jason Barty
28:37 - Vind (Max Cooper Remix) - Christian Löffler
36:02 - Mauve Deepens - Changeling Ray
39:56 - Ape to Angel (Bluetech Remix) feat. Pitch Black - Pitch Black
46:10 - Body Logic - Awe Kid
52:15 - Hang Back (Santiago Garcia Remix) - Nolan
58:00 - Elephants - MIKTEK

Studious Heart (downtempo / chillout 7/12/22)

Recording of my live weekly chillout show produced in PDX (Tuesdays from 10-11 AM Pacific), which I post every Friday morning. My shows feature a mix of music new and old, by my favorite producers and myself. I stream on MixCloud and am coming to other platforms soon as well. If you enjoy, please follow me here on Soundcloud, and also find me on Instagram and YouTube. Thank you for listening!

Photo by Anni Roenkae: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-multicolored-illustration-2832382/

00:00 - Diagrams - H.U.V.A. Network
07:22 - Behold (Mixed) - Joey Fehrenbach
09:45 - Electro Wind - Zero Cult
16:12 - Renascence - KiloWatts
21:38 - Silk - Christian Löffler
26:23 - Jetlag Corporation (Remastered) - Aes Dana
30:40 - Swoosh - Solar Fields
38:33 - Stereoscopic View - Al Lover
43:45 - False Dawn - MIKTEK
49:51 - Too Late - DARK SPARKLER
55:17 - Serenity - Yorokobi

Smooth Expression (downtempo / chillout)

Latest chillout hour! My weekly shows feature a mix of music new and old, by my favorite producers and myself. I livestream on MixCloud on Tuesday evenings from 8-9 Pacific. If you enjoy, please follow me here for more, and also find me on Mixcloud, Instagram, and YouTube. Thank you for listening!

Photo by Fiona Art on Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-and-blue-abstract-painting-4300128/

00:00 - Nautilus - Zero Cult
03:56 - Far & Off - Aes Dana, MIKTEK
10:33 - When Only Sands Remains (Tripswitch Remix) - Kaya Project
15:11 - Paused - Kiasmos
19:53 - Little Soldier (Extended Mix) - Jon Gurd
24:31 - Young Alaska - Christian Löffler
28:17 - Life- Mark Höffen
34:00 - Rosewood - Bonobo
37:28 - Found the Way - Lab's Cloud
45:57 - Elephants - MIKTEK
50:47 - Ensueno - Vibrasphere
56:47 - Esenia (Kolybelnaya Version) - Izhevski, Nikola Melnikov

Liquid Perspective (downtempo / chillout)

Latest chillout hour! My weekly shows feature a mix of music new and old, by my favorite producers and myself. I livestream on MixCloud, see my channel for the latest schedule information. If you enjoy, please follow me here for more, and also find me on Mixcloud, Instagram, and YouTube. Thank you for listening!

Photo by elifskies on Pexels

00:00 - Whitin - CYGNA
05:56 - Snad - Delayed
08:19 - Angelic Particles (Buckminster Fullerine Mix) - Hallucinogen
16:55 - Dream Escape (Luca Bacchetti Endless Remix) - Luis León, Haider Uppal, Luca Bacchetti
24:28 - Jetlag Corporation (Remastered) - Aes Dana
29:24 - A Forest - Christian Löffler
36:20 - Brutalism - Woo York
41:52 - Pad Destroyer (mredrollo Remix) - Slang, Technodreamer, mredrollo
49:05 - Linked (Original Mix) - Bonobo
54:20 - Vita - Coeus
60:25 - Mauve Deepens - Kangding Ray

luminous direction (downtempo / chillout)

Latest chillout hour! My weekly shows feature a mix of music new and old, by my favorite producers and myself. I livestream on MixCloud, see my channel for the latest schedule information. If you enjoy, please follow me here for more, and also find me on Mixcloud, Instagram, and YouTube. Thank you for listening!

Photo by Hasan Albari on Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/disco-light-1150988/

00:00 - First Revelation - Kiphi
06:20 - Under The Sun - Boyan
10:57 - Caribbeyond - Androcell
18:09 - Vind (Max Cooper Remix) - Christian Löffler
25:24 - Atlas - Bicep
30:14 - Manzanilla - Vibrasphere
37:56 - Wadi Rum feat. Madhushree (Extended Version) - Yeahman
41:51 - Hanging Masses - Cell
50:48 - Grass Snow Rain - Shielding
56:30 - Serenity - Yorokobi

comfortable function (downtempo / chillout)

DJ Set 2023-12-27 Distributed Drift

Last set of the year, warming up for a busier calendar of shows in 2024. Thanks for hanging out!

Time - Artist - Track
00:00 Julia Gjertsen - Out of Square
03:00 Francis Harris - Minor Forms
08:06 Martin Roth - An Analog Guy in a Digital World
15:39 Rival Consoles - Running
19:39 Christian Löffler - Myiami
23:47 Kiasmos - Gaunt
28:37 Tycho - Easy [Mild Minds Remix]
34:39 Thankyou city - Enveloper
41:34 Burial Four Tet - Moth 118
48:40 Menke - Echo [The Field Remix]
55:04 Aphex Twin - aisatsana [102]

Photo by Jeffrey Czum from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-underwater-with-white-yacht-beside-2281793/

DJ Set 2023-12-27 Distributed Drift

Distributed Drift (DJ Set)

As I first created this track I was thinking about the immense wildfires in California and Oregon that I have lived through, the smoke that turned the daytime skies orange and the moon red for a week. It was unsafe to go outside without wearing a mask and there was a general sense of doom and anxiety. Just as I was preparing it for final release, the fires in LA broke out and I watched with mounting anxiety as the evacuation zone encroached on Pasadena since my brother lives just south of there. The unsettled and ominous mood of this track seemed ever more fitting.

Red Moon

During those phases of my life when I was touring, I watched countless towns and cities scroll by through the window of a truck. Sometimes I traveled alone and sometimes with bandmates. Yet even when traveling with a band, the hours eventually lapse into a kind of solitude: those long stretches where conversation fades and you're left with just your thoughts and the passing landscape. This track captures the hopeful side of those times spent alone together—that sense of freedom and open possibilities in going to new places and meeting new people.

Open Road

I made this track during a dark time a couple years ago. Back in Oregon after a rough trip I had to move my studio in Portland yet again, and the day I was set up enough to start making music there I started working on this track, looking out the window of my studio onto a peaceful rainy day in Southeast Portland, mild but overcast and drizzling rain all day long — a kind of day we often get in PDX. The vibe of the track matched the weather so I named it after the moment. It’s got a peaceful, energetic feeling that is uplifting without being too intense.

Rainy Friday

This was among the last tracks I made in my first apartment studio in Portland, a couple months before the pandemic struck. That day, I remained at my standing workstation with a small keyboard in front of me, improvising layers for hours until I had a complete track, all while contemplating the rainy sky and the hedge of English laurel that separated our complex from the church next door. Hence the name.

The music evokes an optimistic and expansive but restful mood that makes me think of the feeling at the end of a long, satisfying day, full of favorite things and time spent with good people. The track got lost in the chaos of the seasons that followed, to be rediscovered only years later in what I expect and hope will be my permanent Portland studio, which coincidentally also has a hedge of English laurel outside its windows. Things have a way of closing the circle sometimes.

Laurel Sky

In one of his letters, the Stoic philosopher Seneca says that rushing through life trying to pile up possessions and accomplishments is like hurrying through a maze: "the faster you go, the worse you are entangled." Around the time I made this track I was working through a malaise that was both physical and spiritual. I began reading one of Seneca's letters each morning and, like millions of others, found his wisdom to be timeless advice for living, and they were among the things that helped me disentangle myself and move forward again. To me this track feels like that process, especially the glitchy, sometimes unpredictable rhythms of the percussion. You move forward, stop, look around, things look the same, you get lost again, pause, re-orient, feel like giving up -- then, after a rest, you begin again.

Through the Maze

Through The Maze

Late 2024. I'm starting a project of learning the Push 3 and pairing that with my other goal of creating a lot of new material. The idea is that I make a beat and record an improvised performance, all within two hours, on a daily-ish basis. This playlist is all those beats.

Today's Beat by Baby Tiger 2024-12-17

Today's Beat "Infinite Cloud" 2025-01-03 JAMuary 03

Today's prompt was to use some found sound, so I decided to record my morning routine of making coffee and having breakfast. I did get all my percussion sounds except for the kick out of that exercise, but the process put me two hours behind -- involving some kind of Push 3 glitch that required me to move the project to the computer for the first time in this project -- so I don't think I'll be following any prompts that involve learning new techniques or sound design in the future!

Fortunately I have such a routine down now that I was able to make this nice little semi-ambient track, make videos, and post them all in the next 90 minutes. Hope you enjoy!

Today's Beat "Tumbling the Dawn" 2025-01-06 (JAMuary 06)

Not gonna lie, pretty down today. But making and sharing music is like exercise or taking a shower: you never regret it and always feel better afterwards. And should be about as habitual. So I showed up, and thought perhaps the thing to do today would be to make something kind of ambient, with irregular loop lengths and a glitchy kind of beat to glue it all together. This one has some promise and I like it quite a bit, but I think the Push is not really the right tool to develop and finish an idea like this. This one is going to the desktop pretty much right away.

Today's Beat "The Gregarious Zeitgeist" 2025-01-09 (JAMuary 09)

For today I decided to take advantage of the portability of the Push 3 and get out of the studio completely. I didn't go far -- just the kitchen table upstairs -- but the light was good and it's a really pleasant day. Plus I'm in a very good mood because my wife is returning home tonight after a long trip away and I can't wait to see her. So I thought it would be fun to do a major-key techno jam to express that positive mood.

I'm definitely getting a lot faster at a certain Push workflow and have gotten to the point where I'm preparing these uploads barely an hour after sitting down to make something new. I haven't looked at all into what other people do, but in order to bring different parts of the beat in and out, I have taken to duplicating the drum track twice, which allows me to have different combinations of the beat element going at once. I've hit the wrong pad from time to time but the only thing I truly have to look out for is accidentally doubling the kick. If there is some way to make one track choke another on the Push, I'd sure love to know about it. Research time I guess.

Today's Beat "Vibrant Warping Jib" 2025-01-12 (JAMuary 12)

Was a little ill this morning and needed to re-patch a bunch of stuff in the studio, including the Push, so I started on this several hours after I had hoped to, and felt very pressured. Followed the prompt to use pitched percussion, which means marimbas above all to me! Something dorky started to emerge, which I wasn't super happy with, so I decided to transpose the marimba part from C major into F# minor, which is the exact opposite key in the major-minor system. This touched off the right direction and after some tweaking of presets and adding effects, I came up with something much more representative of the sound I am pursuing. It reminds me a little bit of some of Steve Hauschildt's work. I think this is a strong candidate for developing and finishing next month.

Today's Beat "Jewel" 2025-01-14 (JAMuary 14)

I'm finding the daily prompts from @brianfunk to be extremely helpful in giving me a place to start each day. He's provided them to the MPC JAMuary crew in our Discord server but, if I'm not mistaken, they're drawn from his excellent book, The 5-Minute Music Producer. Today it was about starting with percussive melody. Took me a little while but eventually I found an electric piano sound that I wanted to use and the rest came together fairly swiftly, enough that I was able to spend half an hour just on the sound design and get things sounding a bit more poignant. This jam ended up being a little dark, in line with its random title!

Today's Beat "Dim Universe" 2025-01-15 (JAMuary 15)

I just felt like doing a long ambient techno jam today, inspired by the dub jams made by @jdtorian here on Soundcloud! Hope you enjoy.

Today's Beat "Beside the Curvature" 2025-01-17 (JAMuary 17)

Just a quick thing today since it is the first day of the long weekend and I mostly just want to hang out with my wife! This was made in the late afternoon after a relaxed day and a long nap. I wasn't sure what to do at first, as usual, and then thought about my experiment of doing everything in Operator. So this time I decided to do the same thing with Drift, one of Ableton's newer synths and one I have barely even looked at until today.

youtube.com/@babytigerbeats
soundcloud.com/babytigerbeats
babytigerbeats.bandcamp.com

Today's Beat "Zealous Apology" 2025-01-18 (JAMuary 18)

Okay, so this is the actual latest I've started one of these in a day, at 9:00 PM. To be honest, after 22 days in a row of making beats, and of course the relentless awfulness of the world beyond my head, I needed a break from everything in the morning. Stayed in bed until 10 with one of my cats and devoted most of the day before teaching to sorting out my audiobook situation (I decided to switch to libro.fm).

Putting the creative work off to the end of the day is obviously risky, but I usually have good energy right up to midnight and usually my wife is in bed by 10, so I figured this would be no problem. And I was right. 

https://youtube.com/@babytigerbeats
https://soundcloud.com/babytigerbeats
https://babytigerbeats.bandcamp.com
https://bsky.app/profile/babytigerbeats.bsky.social

Today's Beat "Grim Echo" 2025-01-23 (JAMuary 23)

Back in more of a normal groove today, spent the whole morning working on my Cage essay again (in the home stretch now!) and after lunch down to the studio. I had a bit more time today so decided to at least listen through the bass presets that start with numbers and the letters A and B, to mark favorites. Grabbed a couple of those and thought of a chord progression from a song of mine that I wrote in my singer-songwriter days, a tune that was always one of my most popular. Transposed it to a minor key and before long I had a beat going.

https://youtube.com/@babytigerbeats
https://soundcloud.com/babytigerbeats
https://babytigerbeats.bandcamp.com
https://bsky.app/profile/babytigerbeats.bsky.social

Today's Beat "The Metal Belonging" 2025-01-24 (JAMuary 24)

It's the 27th day in a row of this project, and I have grown weary of my self-imposed genre restrictions! So I decided to allow a different side of my musicianship through today. I found this FM piano that sounds like a plucked bass in the low octaves and this wonderful preset called Childhood Home Piano, and something developed that draws upon my fairly extensive experience playing in funk and latin bands. I added something like a ridiculously slow reggaeton beat to it and my work was done. (Another stream of influence was probably the fact they were playing the Buena Vista Social Club album in the bar yesterday.) What this really reminds me of, though, is that chilled-out, jazzy, sample-based stuff that we called "downtempo" twenty years ago. Quantic, Clutchy Hopkins, etc etc you know what I'm talkin about!

https://youtube.com/@babytigerbeats
https://soundcloud.com/babytigerbeats
https://babytigerbeats.bandcamp.com
https://bsky.app/profile/babytigerbeats.bsky.social

Today's Beat "Imagining the Signal" 2025-01-27 (JAMuary 27)

Posting a day late because of time constraints yesterday (couldn't record a performance), but I did actually make this yesterday, on day 28! I realized that I haven't yet tried to use the Push to make a truly free-form ambient piece without a beat, so that's what I did today. Believe it or not, I didn't even look at the prompt list yesterday, just sat down with my idea of doing something in the Brian Eno-Robert Rich-Steve Roach vein (three of my absolute favorite electronic musicians), and the Push named it after water, and the whole thing does sound rather like "Underwater Dreams" when it comes to it! It was nice to perform this meditative music first thing when I got down to the studio.

https://youtube.com/@babytigerbeats
https://soundcloud.com/babytigerbeats
https://babytigerbeats.bandcamp.com
https://bsky.app/profile/babytigerbeats.bsky.social

Today's Beat "Arbitrary Walking Ice" 2025-01-28 (JAMuary 28)

Today's prompt was to start with the bassline and build it up from there. Well, the electronic artist who writes the coolest basslines I know is Bluetech, so I thought it would be fun to sketch out a track in his style. With a little development it might even be convincing 🤣

https://youtube.com/@babytigerbeats
https://soundcloud.com/babytigerbeats
https://babytigerbeats.bandcamp.com
https://bsky.app/profile/babytigerbeats.bsky.social

Today's Beat "The Obscured Clouds" 2025-01-29 (JAMuary 29)

Wasn't too inspired by today's prompt and feeling quite exhausted with and bored of working with the Push, which perhaps isn't surprising on the 30th straight day! So I thought of my little Bluetech homage yesterday and this time decided to use a procedure that I use when I am just feeling completely out of inspiration. I got it from the Dennis DeSantis book "Making Music", where it is called "Catalogue of Attributes". You pick a track and listen to it carefully, writing down everything you notice. Then you set aside the source (not listening to it again) and use what you wrote as a more detailed prompt.

I'm happy to reveal that my source for this was "Form, Function and Friction" by The Black Dog, just to demonstrate that the source of ideas and the track you eventually make never have much in common. You can probably pick out the idea of a short piano loop backed with a noisy pad, a kick that mostly hits on one, and a breakdown section where the main element is the bassline. But it's not obvious at all.

We're on day 30 of this challenge and so far I have done something of this scale every day, despite some substantial headwinds on certain days. I think I might make a little video in early February just to sum up how the month went, and all the things I learned, and whether I advanced my original goals or not.

https://youtube.com/@babytigerbeats
https://soundcloud.com/babytigerbeats
https://babytigerbeats.bandcamp.com
https://bsky.app/profile/babytigerbeats.bsky.social

Today's Beat "Force" 2025-01-30 (JAMuary 30)

Today is the last day of JAMuary 2025 and I am proud to say that I somehow made a full track sketch on every single day of the month. The 31 sketches, plus two that I did in the middle of December in order to make sure my plan was not an overreach, amounts to two hours and twenty minutes of completely original material. None of them are final in any sense but there are three or four with great potential to become finished tracks, with maybe a half dozen on my B list, and the rest are acceptably workmanlike. That feels like a very high batting average. I feel a great sense of satisfaction at having carried out this challenge as planned and, importantly, I'm also proud that I was able to define a plan that I _could_ consistently carry out every day in the month, no matter what happened, and it was neither too easy nor too difficult.

There is absolutely no way I would have been able to do this on my own, so thank you to Brian Funk for organizing the MPC JAMuary group, and thank you to everyone in the group as well for being such an inspiration and giving so much encouragement. I have listened to every single post up to about noon today, and I'm looking forward to hearing the last ones as well. It's been much-needed positivity in my day.

So on that note, I decided to make something overtly positive and hopeful sounding, yet doesn't have a definite ending. It just trails off, promising more to come. Onward!

https://youtube.com/@babytigerbeats
https://soundcloud.com/babytigerbeats
https://babytigerbeats.bandcamp.com
https://bsky.app/profile/babytigerbeats.bsky.social

Today's Beat "The Angled Grain" 2025-01-31 (JAMuary 31)

downtempo / ambient / melodic house / lofi

BABY TIGER

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