If you notice between the last mix and this one was a five-year gap, six years from the last Libations and Oscillations mix. It’s not that the duo of Tonebreaker and Noctum split, or that I attempted to “retire” from music again. It’s just that sometimes life happens. During lockdown orders in this extremely unusual year, Tonebreaker reached out to me with an idea. A mixtape to raise funds for charity. I was completely down with this idea. The charity we found was Music by Black Composers, a project of the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation.
On a personal note as we explored this mix we also decided to lay the Libations & Oscillations moniker to rest. So much had changed since the last time we touched that moniker. This time we released this simply as Tonebreaker and Noctum.
Music is one of the tapestries by which humanity tells its stories. From Congo Square in New Orleans to CBGB in New York, personal expression and culture have always been socialized to a soundtrack. As contemporary electronic musicians ourselves, we wanted to raise money for this charity to honor the rich and diverse musical roots that came before.
theWaxhole.com - Weekly Wax Vol 17 Mixed by Joseph Noctum
So what do you do when you are working with a kickass music blog and the DJ who is supposed to be dropping a guest mix for the blog drops an email the night before saying it won’t be done? You step up to the plate. That’s what this is a pinch-hit. With nothing really in the pipeline because my sets hadn’t really been in line with the Future Bass sound The Waxhole and crew had been pushing I decided to grab tracks the blog had recently posted and do a quick 30 min studio mix for the team. It worked and brought me into a new mindset to work more Future Bass into my sets. This was also a catalyst for a weekly feature I started with Waxhole called “Fourplay Fridays” which featured four new sexy and chilled-out Future Bass songs every week. I even eventually returned in Volume 27 of the Weekly Wax and did a whole hour set tunes featured on Fourplay Fridays.
theWaxhole.com January Mix Mixed by Libations & Oscillations
This was a fun promotional mix for theWaxhole.com. Our good buddy Hypo, then Editor-In-Chief for Waxhole was organizing mix series with various artists to weave the music featured on the blog into Mixtapes. This was a using November and December 2012 tunes as the palette which lead to some interesting choices for tracks, but ones that lead to some great audio moments.