by DJ Z-Trip and DJ P: It’s hard for me to fathom that DJ AM passed away three months ago! It seems like yesterday I wrote a post after his passing professing my favor for his mixtapes with Travis Barker. One of my readers, aa, made a comment stating that I should listen to this mixtape because it was similar to DJ AM’s mixtapes that mix different genres. The stories behind the DJ Z-Trip and this mixtape are pretty cool. DJ Z-Trip is a founder of the mashup movement, which literally transformed the way people mixed and blended music. There were only 1000 copies of the mixtape released, but it spread like wildfire online. This was around 2001 so I can imagine it was right around the peak of Napster and Limewire. The timing also explains why I’m just now finding out about this. In 2001, I was too busy singing “Pop” by N Sync to worry about anybody else. You remember…Sick and tired of hearing all these people talk about what’s the deal with this pop life and when is it gonna fade out. You don’t remember??? Nevermind.

Back to the mixtape. I’ve listened to Uneasy Listening twice today and it’s ok. There is undeniable talent there that mixed every genre of music you can imagine and you can never tell when a song starts and when it ends. Yet, it was created in the late 90s and there are songs that included that I’ve never heard before. I think the inclusion of songs that I’m familiar with is what I liked most about AM’s mashups. I’m interested to hear more from DJ Z-Trip. On his website, he has a whole page dedicated to his work that you can download. I’ll be downloading some of this over the next few days, as well as Neil Armstrong’s Bittersweet, which was another suggestion from aa.