Author: Jet Jaguar

For week four of WeeklyBeats I have gone back to upbeat dance music.

For this week’s WeeklyBeats submission I moved away from the relatively upbeat, dancey stuff of the first two weeks and went the opposite way. The track is entirely “off-grid” – I made it without thinking about tempo or time signatures and without any kind of snapping or quantising to a grid. All elements are either played in by hand with no kind of metronome or are field recordings.

For this week’s WeeklyBeats I’ve gone even faster than last week, an up-tempo dance track that I guess you’d call “breaks”, or at least that’s what house tempo breakbeat stuff was called after big beat and before dubstep (when people weren’t calling it electro, yikes). Anyway, scene nonsense aside…

I’ve decided to try participating in a challenge to make and upload a piece of music every week for a year. I talk about why on my WeeklyBeats profile page, and my main aim is to upload music I like that is different to my concept of what I write and release as Jet Jaguar.

Being a giant fucking nerd, I keep folders of WIP (work in progress) and finished music per calendar year.

My 2025 finished tracks folder has 27 things in it:

I’ve been listening to this wee 16-minute album a bunch recently and wanted to capture some thoughts:

Lia Kohl – Various Small Whistles And A Song

OK, another year has gone by since I last wrote up some things I’ve been listening to! I still listen to all of those things I was recommending this time last year, which is part of my point of going slow and not just sharing a link to a brand new release. So, here’s another five things I’ve really soaked in over the last year.

Someone found this print ad and took a photo of it. It got to me via social media. This was 1998 and the gig was at St James Cabaret. I found a page about it on obscure.co.nz which is kind of charming for not mentioning any kind of online presence for the gig or its promoter – but it does give you his landline, fax, and mobile number. Someone message John 27 years later and see if he’s got the same number!

I got Toby Laing to play trumpet and Tim Jaray bass. They’re probably best known for Fat Freddy’s and Black Seeds respectively, though they’ve both played for both bands.

In the 90s, along with many of my friends, I got really into 70s soul music. It was everywhere. On a trip to the wintry student town of Dunedin I picked up a soundtrack CD for a movie I’ve still never seen, just based on the songs on it. I rightly picked it was a super cheap way of getting many absolutely cracking tunes. This song opened that album and is still one of my favourite Sly Stone songs:

From there I remember living and breathing the chunky hits collection Anthology, and only much later bothering to check out the critical faves There’s A Riot Going On and Fresh.

I’ve always found the usual words for describing someone who makes electronic music a bit messy. Thought I might capture some thoughts about that. Ultimately none of this ought to matter, but also we do need to talk and write about things, so…