GOON by DJ DJ TANNER
Warm Gospel 56
Warm Gospel began with four tapes – two from DJ DJ TANNER and two of my own. Those days, we were hanging in the basement of our strange house in Portland, fumbling our way through the learning curve of Roland samplers. DJ DJ TANNER introduced me to some deep Madlib cuts. We obsessed over “Person Pitch” B-sides. We listened to all eight sides of “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx” and drank wine from Willamette Valley.
There were a lot of never-to-be-heard beats that came out of those early days. Most of them weren’t very good, but for a few select others, it just wasn’t the right time for it to be put to tape. Some of my favorite DJ DJ TANNER beats came out of that early experimentation.
To this day, one of my favorite pieces of his is a little ditty I put together of some of those dirty, early beats, called “The Best Phone Talker Mixtape”. We never put it out, and it’s possible that the only record of its existence is long lost in the music folder of my old computer. But it was eight-and-a-half minutes of some of the best beats I’d ever heard. Not because the beats themselves were that great, but rather because I understood them. I knew how they were made, and it was in that understanding that sampling became a part of my life. The sampler was the first instrument that made sense to the way that I wanted to craft music.
Seven years later, Warm Gospel is still preaching, and we’re releasing the 12th solo cassette from DJ DJ TANNER. To my pleasure, he dusted off some of those seven-year-old samples and finally put them to canon. This tape marks the crossing of the middlepoint in his series of 24 tapes wherein each represents a different hour of the same day. A kind of Ulyssean exploration of a cast of characters, we’ve met 11 of them thus far.
Now, meet “GOON
