The Latest
Right then, after finally getting the studio wired and ready for live streaming again, I figured a test was in order. This short mix is the result of that experiment, recorded last night mainly to see if the stream would hold without catching fire.
It’s short, it’s a bit ropey, and the main focus was making sure the internet didn’t give up, but some music did get played in the process. Expect a quick journey through house and melodic techno before hitting a solid patch of driving tracks from the likes of Oliver Huntemann and the legendary Carl Craig. Things get a bit broken and bassy towards the end with tunes like “Drum Track” by 3Phaz.
The good news is, the stream held. If you want to catch these random tests and future recordings live, you can follow the channel at https://www.twitch.tv/boomtishnz. Don’t expect a schedule just yet, but the wires are now pointing in the right direction.
Want to catch me live? I don’t really have a solid schedule yet – but – you might see me over here – https://www.twitch.tv/boomtishnz
Alternatively, for those who prefer audio –
I do intend to get the podcast back up and running soon as well.
My Background
The subsequent three decades have been a blur of creative obsession. My desire to perform wasn’t to be a ‘DJ’ – it started with me being the kid who took over the stereo at parties, frantically swapping CDs. Seeing a DJ mixing on Max TV (R.I.P.) was a revelation; I realised you could shrink the gap between songs, and I was hooked, not on the title of ‘DJ’, but on sharing music.
This obsession went beyond tunes to the very nature of sound itself: the technical science of the signal path and the raw, physical nature of bass. I’m the guy who, after closing time at the pro-audio and instrument store I worked at, would rig all the subs together to feel bass sweeps rattle different parts of my body.
This eclectic taste found its first real home in my early gigs: marathon eight-hour sets in the chill-out rooms of hard house parties. This, oddly, led to me mastering the subtle art of the warm-up set at house gigs—learning to behave and keep the energy just ‘one notch below’ the headliner.
Instead of jet-setting to Ibiza, my industry experience involved working in music stores, showing aspiring DJs which MIDI cable to buy and running a mastering studio—a fancy way of saying I made other people’s kick drums loud enough to annoy their neighbours. I was podcasting back when you needed to manually code an RSS feed to get five people to listen to me interview DJs who were far more successful than I was.
My early DJ mentors shaped my mixing – I found myself surrounded by Hard House and Deep House veterans, and then deep into Drum & Bass by a DJ partner – but the magnetic north was always, undeniably, Techno.
While some artists talk about their influences in vague, sweeping terms, I can pinpoint the exact moments that broke my brain and permanently warped my DJing style. Separate from what I was playing with my friends, my influences were a ransom note cut from different magazines: the relentless futurism of Jeff Mills, the surgical deconstruction of Richie Hawtin’s ‘DE9’, a specific transition in a Kevin Saunderson Deep Space radio mix, the wobbly funk of Terry Francis, and the rhythmic chaos of Q-Bert. My internal and my external were a little uncalibrated. There was a bigger issue underlying, though.
Unfortunately, a deeply unpleasant experience on the industry side of things forced me to step away for a very long time. Though I always kept a toe in production, this extended break gave me the space to understand why performing has always been a cocktail of pure ecstasy and borderline terror.
It took a recent PTSD diagnosis to understand why. Turns out, having a bad case of Social Anxiety and Dissociative Personality Disorder is a spectacularly poor trait for a nightclub act. The only way I could ever function in a club environment was to have a job – performing, doing the sound, something to provide purpose and focus. So if you rarely see me gigging, this is why. The irony is not lost on me.
These conflicts have defined my output, which is probably why I’ve cycled through aliases and styles over the years, never able to settle on one.
It’s why the studio was/is my sanctuary: the stillness of an acoustically dampened room, the calm absorption, that perfect quiet within the sound coming from loud, accurate monitors.
This obsessive drive is probably how I once managed to write, master, cut a track to vinyl, and play it out in a single day—a glorious, nerve-shredding act I’ll never repeat.
It’s also why, if you look through some of my videos, I seem to completly change the way I do things regularly. Vinyl, CDs, Timecode, Controllers, Live PA, all hardware. Yep. Done it. I believe I may have done the first ever public demonstration of Serato Scratch – right back when it still was a plug-in that needed to run within pro-tools.
Bromide Dub
For a time, I was chasing the ghost of Daft Punk with my best mate, Clayton, as ‘The Filterbrats’. The common thread that brought us together was a mutual, fanatical obsession with The Prodigy. From there, we graduated to French filters and armed ourselves with more side-chain compression than was strictly healthy, convinced we were their less-talented cousins.
These days, I mostly lurk in the sonic Mariana Trench, making deep, echo-drenched Dub Techno as ‘Bromide Dub’. The problem is, my brain is a traitor. After being hardwired by everything above, it constantly tries to sneak in a big, dumb, four-to-the-floor kick drum. I am caught in a perpetual struggle between making music for abandoned warehouses and tunes for a dancefloor I have no intention of ever visiting. I don’t expect people to play them, but I can’t seem to stop writing them.
https://www.beatport.com/artist/bromide-dub/180777
https://tidal.com/browse/artist/3885327
Boom Tish
Boom Tish. It’s the sound of a kick, a snare, and a punchline. It’s also the name of the label I have put most of music out under.
Let’s be perfectly honest. There is no grand mission statement here. There is no A&R department in a sleek office discovering the next big thing. The business plan was likely scribbled on a napkin and is probably now coffee-stained and lost.
Boom Tish exists because music exists, and it has to go somewhere. Think of us less as a record label and more as a slightly disorganised digital filing cabinet for sounds we think are worth hearing.
The ‘Boom’ is the serious part: the 4/4 thump, the deep sub-bass, the carefully constructed groove that we genuinely believe in.
The ‘Tish’ is the punchline: the self-aware acknowledgement that we’re a tiny blip in a vast ocean of noise, doing this for the love of it and not much else.
We release music that’s serious about the groove, but doesn’t take itself too seriously. That’s the beginning, middle, and end of the story.
Boom Tish. The joke is, we’re not joking. Mostly.
The Deep and Meaningful
If you’re looking for the deep and meaningful ‘why’ behind it all, it stems from an early fascination with shamanism, psychedelics, and the function of tribal dance in shifting the consciousness of a community.
This culminated in what I still consider my greatest DJ achievement: taking a group of people through a full sleep cycle with music, and then gently bringing them back. Not many DJs would claim their fame was literally putting a room of people to sleep, but it left the participants genuinely trying to understand out what had just happened (I believe some seriously strange dreams were to be had), and that feels more profound (to me) than a thousand hands in the air.
So there you have it – a long, weird trip. Listen to my music. Or don’t. I’ll still be here, arguing with a reverb tail and bathing in the bass.