Common
COMMON — Summer 2026
Recorded mid-June after a long working week. Three days of sun and heavy downpours through the middle of the week, then Thursday rain all day, and Friday a gorge scramble in Esk Gorge in big water from all the rain. A sporty day. The outdoor centre had been getting steadily muddier through the week, wood chips going down to keep the worst of it off the kids. I came home, dried out, and recorded.
There was a problem before I started. Somewhere in the mixer settings I'd changed something I didn't notice, and when I went to cue the second track the headphones gave me nothing. Not a quieter signal, just silence. I had a choice: stop, work out what I'd done, restart. Or carry on and mix the whole thing off the speakers. I carried on.
It opens with Empire of the Sunrise Kingdom by Sanoi at 117 BPM in D — pads, patient, a slow start by design. One step on the wheel into the long G plateau: Mada in the Shai T remix, Whale by Makebo, Tucumán by Fabian Krooss and Kon Faber, then Persian Rug in the Facundo Mohrr remix, then Vida by Roy Rosenfeld, Gorje Hewek and Dulus. Six tracks in the same key. The plateau lasted longer than almost any section I've recorded, but nothing inside it felt ready to move.
Off World by Forerunners sits seventh in the G run — instrumental, no vocal — to give Roisin Murphy's Can't Replicate in the Cattaneo & Mercurio remix more weight when it lands at track eight. Older crowd clocks the Murphy vocal, everyone else hears a contemporary progressive remix.
Then the drift down through the wheel. Forbidden Garden in the Tim Green remix moves to C. Sauti by Francis Mercier with the African Children's Choir steps to F — the second vocal moment, two tracks apart from Murphy so the voices don't cluster. Ahmed by Acid Pauli holds F across the act break.
The downshift at the end is real, not a fade. Sirene by Sébastien Léger drops to 120 in Bb. Louna by Sam Shure pulls down to 110 in the same key. Far Away by suncream breaks at 94 in F. Traces by Sebastian Mullaert and Hush Forever closes at 90 BPM in G — back to where the long plateau started. Without the headphone cue I couldn't preview the incoming track against the outgoing one, so I let each track play out further than I'd normally allow and committed to shorter blends. I let tracks hand over rather than overlap. That's why the back half runs slightly longer than the document predicted, and why the downshift arrives a bit later than planned.
Ninety-three minutes. Two minor glitches I didn't go back to fix. The whole thing mixed off what was coming out of the speakers, picking the moment by feel and by memory. I don't recommend the method but I'm glad of the evidence.
Organic · Progressive · Melodic · Festival · 117–123 BPM (closing to 90)
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