does anyone know where i can listen to part one?  the alexchase link is dead

love how Thatcher's voice is sampled and used as a means to rise up✊

On U Sound...Disturbing the Comfortable, Comforting the Disturbed. Fair play JD that is a superb tribute to the man like Sherwood. Endless smiles

Tracked down Part 1 ❤️ - on.soundcloud.com/G4Gk1pgpzqgDwJCW8w

Optimo

Serendipity is a wonderful thing, and when we looked ahead in the guestmix calendar, a certain number jumped out. 303. A number synonymous with the roots of house music, which presented itself with a (somewhat obvious) opportunity to get an old friend into the series... a man who saw it all unfold before his very eyes in the 90's, and who himself excels with the execution of mixes with an underlying concept. 

Welcome to JD Twitch's ode to the Roland 303.

"The Roland 303 is a little silver box of electronics that accidentally produced the squelching sound that became the foundation of Acid House. Pioneered circa 1987 in Chicago, Acid House exploded around the world and that sound spread through electronic music creating myriad variants.

Fundamentally the 303 is instantly recognisable by its squelch sound. This squelch can be euphoric, hypnotic, joyous, uplifting, sad, dark, cheesy, silly, scary, ridiculous, psychedelic, beautiful and anthemic. This mix aims to showcase many of these shades of the squelch. It is not the greatest hits of the 303, nor is it a collection of wilfully obscure forgotten 303 jams, it's just simply a paean to the majesty and never ending sonic possibilities of the squelch. Viva Acid!"

Artist: @twitch

SlothBoogie Guestmix #303 - JD Twitch

Live from Radio80000 Munich. Monday, Sept. 11, 2023 

Recent faves, shares, discoveries

*Xtra tnx to Benny and Jannis

Gates of Sincerity

Nicely nestled amongst Sammy Dee, Moopie & Magda Bytnerowicz, I was asked to replace Grandmaster Zip (Perlon) for the party hosted by Lifeworld & Spincycle. I warmed up for Sammy Dee, and this is what that sounded like.

Live @ the party

Nosedrip at Garage, Horst Arts & Music 2025

Shanti is a veteran and expert in four to the floor dance music - tune in once a month for a considered two-hour selection of the best house and techno around, transmitting direct from the NTS studio. 
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/shanticeleste/episodes/shanticeleste-19th-june-2025

Shanti Celeste 190625

The breezy sound of the Canadian Riviera, from Mood Hut's Pender Street Steppers.  
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/pender-street-steppers/episodes/pender-street-steppers-24th-june-2025

Pender Street Steppers w/ Space Ghost  240625

Justin Carter from the moment he starts to coax the first dancers onto the floor until he brings it to boil. Live from the Mister Sunday booth in the back yard of Nowadays on Sunday, July 20, 2025, from around 4pm until 6pm.

How I Build A Floor / Justin Carter at Mister Sunday, July 20, 2025

A section from my set at Magic Waves Summer Festival, Berlin, July 2015,  featuring the more accessible synth end of the kind of stuff I play at my occasional So Low night in Glasgow. So Low 2 x LP compilation in hand screen printed sleeve coming February 2016 via Vinyl Factory.

JD Twitch Live at Magic Waves Summer Festival, Berlin 2015 (Part 1 - So Low Synth NRG set)

feat Ari, recorded back in the day, singing in her back garden with her children.

Fade away

Part 2 of my Magic Waves, Berlin set. I had a sense that by this point in the night the crowd were, uh, feelin' kinda high, so it maybe reflects that a bit. It's a tad more all over the place and a little less doomy than the first part.

JD Twitch Live at Magic Waves Summer Festival, Berlin 2015 (Part 2 - So High set)

Read the feature: https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2815

JD Twitch (Optimo) live warmup - Sub Club In Residence mix

Live dj mix of Muslimgauze music recorded at Unsound, Krakow, October 22nd 2016. Apart from the occasional use of some FX, this is 100% the music of Muslimgauze with nothing added. Any glitches, distortions, weird audio anomalies, dramatic changes in volume etc. are all part of Muslimguaze’s unique production process. Available to download as a 320 mp3.

Tracklist -

The Taliban

Eleven Minarets Part 10

Arab Jerusalem

Tozeur Palm

Choke Noose Of Gold Silk

Bandit Queen

Noose Of Gold Silk

Azeri Jab

Azzazin 1

Zindabad

Bazoft Rope

Ishmael Tongue

Herod-1

Free From A Veil

Untitled 1985

Purdah Zealot

Azzazin 6

An Abyssinian Who Could Kiss Fine

Khan Younis

Negative Of Ethiopia

The Eternal Illusionist Of Old Baghdad

Baghdad

Najibullah Headless

JD Twitch plays Muslimgauze, Unsound, Krakow 22/10/2016

The full version of the text below can be read here - thequietus.com/articles/22925-optimo-20-mix-listen

As well as 2017 being the 20th anniversary of Optimo it is also 30 years since I started DJ’ing, in Edinburgh in the summer of 1987.

It had never crossed my mind to be a DJ and I fell into it quite by accident. Myself and several friends were devoted attendees at a sub basement club in Edinburgh’s Cowgate called The Backroom that started in 1986. It was the first club where we truly felt at home musically and that was frequented by people we felt comfortable being around. The resident DJs, Bill & Bobby, had been playing around Edinburgh for years and had phenomenal taste and abilities to play exactly the right records in the right order at the right time. After a year or so of religiously attending, my good friend Macky noticed a poster announcing they were looking to audition people to play the first two hours of the night. Macky suggested we audition and initially I point blank refused, partly because the idea terrified me and partly because it held little appeal to me at that time. He persisted and eventually I agreed being fairly confident that our total lack of experience would be so apparent that we would never get the gig. Over the next few weeks they auditioned various people by letting them play the start of the night and somehow we were picked to be the new warm up DJs. Yikes!

So began an uninterrupted trend of being part of a DJ duo, and every Saturday night I would get the bus through from Glasgow where I had now moved to study and Macky and I would take turns to play a few records each to a generally completely disinterested audience. Our fee for playing was £25 and I would get £15 as I had to travel through from Glasgow and Macky took a tenner. Once I realised how much I was enjoying doing it I would have happily played for free.

So, what was I playing back then? Well, I kept quite a detailed diary in those days and would write down the records I played each week. From those diary entries I have put together a mix of what I might have played in my first ever set had I had the technical knowledge or ability to actually be a mixing DJ at that time. Though the music played was very diverse, we were all particularly into records with advanced production that sounded state of the art at the time and we used the term Electrobeat to describe the core sound that we were really into. The term didn’t catch on and neither did the music. The club was very popular but the people who came generally did not like weird records they did not know, were quite averse to drum machines and I’d often hear people grumbling about us playing “that drum machine crap”, a scenario which is of course in complete reversal 30 years on.

So, here are 30 tracks mixed together that were the sound of my late teenage years that I tried to turn people on to 30 years ago. Most of the records in this mix would lie dormant on my shelves for the next 20 years but in the last 10 years or so a surprising number have found their way back into my sets and finally found an appreciative audience and sound as good, if not better today than they did 30 years ago.

There is no tracklisting but I don’t think there is anything wildly obscure or rare in the mix. I could have pretended I was playing lots of lesser known records back then, but this is a 100% genuine round up of what I was actually playing in 1987. The two tracks without a drum machine are the only ones which were anything like bonafide dancefloor hits for me at The Backroom at the time. I have also included one (loop from a) track my then co-DJ, Macky used to play lots and also a Bill & Bobby classic. The mix is available to download as a 320 mp3. For a bit of bonus fun I have included one track that wasn’t released until 1988. If anyone can identify which one it is they will win a prize.

JD Twitch - 1987 reimagined (30 year anniversary mix)

** Part 1 now available from here - http://soundcloud.com/alexchase/ohm-dedication-series-2-jd **

For my ears, Adrian Sherwood is the most sonically innovative producer the UK has ever given birth to. If you don't know anything about Mr. Sherwood or his ON U Sound label, either do a bit of Googling, have a listen to this mix or read this interview I was fortunate enough to conduct a couple of months ago (when he was in Glasgow) that is on the Racket Racket website - http://racketracket.co.uk/music/jd-twitch-meets-adrian-sherwood/

This mix covers music from the years 1979 - 88 and focuses on Adrian Sherwood's dubwise productions, most of which were released on his ON U Sound label (a great overview of the label can be found here - http://www.skysaw.org/onu/)

The mix is DUB in the widest (and wildest) sense of that word and veers from beautiful, heart-melting songs to cavernously deep, hard bass pulsations to the odd bit of brain melting sonic radicalism. To this day I don't think any other producer has pushed the envelope so hard which is partly down to a general lack of balls on the part of other producers and partly due to the fact that these productions were all recorded to tape and mixed on a desk with 100% outboard gear, so that pushing the tape way beyond its intended limits forms a large part of the character of the sound. His totally deranged dub techniques are perhaps a little more prevalent on part 1 (see below) of this podcast while this part is in the main more of a continuous heart throb with odd moments of sonic destruction, offering a masterclass in dub mixing techniques many of which Adrian Sherwood pioneered.

In my late teens and early 20s, Adrian Sherwood's work impacted on me more than anything I had previously heard and made me think about sonic possibilities in a completely new way. I would buy any record he had been involved with unheard and got into a lot of other artists purely because he had been involved with making their records. Indeed, my nom de plume "Twitch" came from a record he produced and our Optimo slogan "We Love Your Ears" came from the sleeve of a record he remixed. I hadn't listened to a lot of these records for many, many years and fell in love with them all over again while putting this together. It was a complete labour of love to do and a revelation to hear how fresh and wild this music still sounds.

The tracks are mostly mixed together but this podcast really isn't about my mixing at all - it's all about the 25 sonic missives included on it (several of the tracks are different versions of the same rhythm edited together). All the tracks were taken from vinyl so any unintended sonic imperfections are a result of the source records having been played countless times in the past.

This is part 2 of this podcast. Part 1 which focuses on his more electronic wild side (Tackhead, Fats Comet, Keith LeBlanc etc.) is now available here - http://soundcloud.com/alexchase/ohm-dedication-series-2-jd
Should you so desire, the 2 podcasts can be synced together to provide one continuous mix of around 3 and a half hours.

As usual we aren't making a track listing available for the podcast, simply because we feel that knowing the contents often precludes actually listening to it. But, if you want to know what anything is, feel free to get in touch and I will let you know. The mix is a 320kbps mp3 (230mb) and is 101 minutes long.

Optimo Podcast 12 - Adrian Sherwood On U Sound mix part 2 (dub)

JD Twich is one half of Optimo, the legendary Glasgow party and a label. Some time ago he launched a new imprint called Against Fascism Trax, attempt to “provoke dialogue that is fundamentally anti-racist, anti-sexist, non-homophobic, non transphobic, non-ageist and non-ableist”. This podcast is a two-hour segment of this set at Hotel Forum's Kitchen from Unsound 2019. Before the performance, JD Twitch said of his Unsound set: “This will be the first ever presentation of an Against Fascism Trax DJ set, an experiment in whether music can convey an intent non verbally.” Starting the set and threaded throughout is the Italian protest song "Bella ciao", which originated in the late 19th century as a working-class anthem and was adopted as a hymn of the anti-fascist resistance in the 1940s. The song takes on new meaning in the current pandemic, as the need for new forms of solidarity — with health workers, cleaners and sanitation workers, impoverished people and all manner of vulnerable populations — becomes urgently clear.

Unsound Podcast 64: JD Twitch - "Against Fascism Trax"

Twitch & Wilkes' classic BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix from November 2006.

http://www.optimo.co.uk

Optimo Espacio - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix Nov 2006

I started DJ'ing in 1987, am 50% of Optimo (Espacio) and I also run the Optimo Music record label.


“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
Mark Vonnegut

Email - kmcivor@me.com

Optimo Music Soundcloud here - https://soundcloud.com/optimo-music

DJ bookings (worldwide) - caroline@spunoutagency.com



Press - optimopr@mac.com


Discography - http://www.optimo.co.uk/discography/

Optimo Podcast 12 - Adrian Sherwood On U Sound mix part 2 (dub)

JD Twitch

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