TIME Doom Ting
60 Seconds Of Madness original

Some time ago, back in the days of Basic FM (RIP), I hit on the idea of creating a mix that started with a one second track and went up in increments of one second until the mix was 24 hours long. I did the maths (I'd need 418 songs, the last of which would be 6 minutes long and would need to be faded a bit) and started to pick the tracks. Then, as with most things, it got forgotten.

Lockdown led me to consider the idea again and I inevitably realised that past a certain point the whole thing stopped being interesting and instead just became a mix of slowly lengthening tracks. Indeed, it seemed to hit this point around the the one-minute mark where doodles and interludes stopped and songs started.  So I decided to limit the project to 60 tracks, from 1 to 60 seconds in length.

I deliberately did no research so I'm sure this has been done before, probably better.

For the third year, Gary Lang (St James Infirmary etc) has organised The Great August The First Exhibition, inviting submissions from the 'public' (ie the shadowy cabal of disgruntled artists and malcontent musicians that make up his social circle) to be made on or before August 1st. As the man says, it's an opportunity for us all to say "'I made this today'. it can be anything you like,a poem, a song, a drawing, a hinge, an omelette, a painted toenail, owt that takes yer fancy. Just a way to be able to say at the end of the day,, no matter how good or shitty, I made this today."

This seemed like the ideal forum for my 60 Seconds Of Madness mix so here it is.

(* apologies to Coldcut)

There were a surprising number of decisions needing to be made to put this together, so here are the 'rules' I made myself:

• Track lengths would be based on what was displayed as the 'length' in a Windows explorer folder (see below)

  • Any track that had too much dead air at either end was discounted.
• Tracks were mixed very slightly if at all. *

Other than that, first thought best thought - I just grabbed the most interesting looking track (the only editing being the avoidance of more than one track by one artist).