'Let The Coffee Do the Talking' - caffeinated by Dan Mangan

Hi. I'm Dan Mangan: Information Technology high-earner turned broke-arse DJ, Producer and Radio Show sidekick. Why this sudden divergence in career path- Well who could refuse the opportunity to wear sneakers every day and eat breakfast at the same time as my highly stressed former colleagues are finding excuses to get out of work for their free assessment at a hair regrowth clinic-

This is my first column, and after reading 'the Dummy's Guide to Writing Columns' I'm apparently on the right track by using it to introduce myself. As you can see I'm off to a flying start so it's time to welcome you to paragraph two. Sadly, it is at this point that my carefully crafted super-journo persona unravels as you work out that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing and the strategic gameplan of a 2 year old playing chess. I guess it's time to throw 'the Dummies Guide' out the window and let the coffee do the talking and hopefully, a body of work will eventuate from it. Bonus points for maintaining any degree of coherency throughout.

Don't you hate it when DJ's press eject on the wrong cd player, or lift the stylus on the wrong record just after they've mixed it in- I usually have a laugh when other DJ's do it after having learnt the hard way one too many times. That's really all you can do. But I have to admit that just today, after 16 weeks (or 160 hours) of on-air DJ'ing on Kiss FM's 'Space Between the Beats', it finally happened. I wanted to share this little experience with you because when this absent-minded DJ faux pas happens on radio, it's a tad different to a club situation. In a club, the crowd has a jeer, the DJ has a laugh and the night goes on. But radio on the other hand, it's just good, old-fashioned dead air (or static, depending on how good your reception is).

Now on Mondays, Sean (Quinn) and I typically don't say a whole lot on the show and I'll leave it to your imagination as to why that is…but to give you a clue, our station manager warned us that if we played the extended version of New Order's Blue Monday again we'll be out of a job; and it's the same reason I pressed eject on that CD Player.

The first time I came across TF (Tranzfusion) was about ten years ago, back when I was a pimple-faced raver kid looking for music to download through my 28.8k dial-up Internet connection. A decade later, I'm still downloading music from the site (albeit legally, and much quicker) and somehow I've wound up as a contributor through my involvement with police line-up regulars and new TF managers, Kevin and Terry.

Now before we go looking to the future of TF, I'd like you to stop and consider that for any underground dance music website to exist for over ten years in Australia is no small feat, so please join me in giving Derrick, Sara Bee, Sarah West, Dean Millson, Aaron Roach, Danni B, Andi Red and the countless other contributors over the years a textual golf clap for their efforts thus far…clap clap clap clap.

Kevin and Terry have been busy changing a few of the precious things of the shop around (bonus points not only for coherency but for 'League of Gentleman reference - Ed.), and one of the "Under New Management" initiatives is establishing a charting system. There's only one other meaningful dance music chart compiled in Australia at the moment and it resembles a Nova FM playlist. I must stress, that's a good thing for the artists and labels concerned but it doesn't say much about what's going on musically in the underground dance scenes of Australia at all. What will set the TF Chart apart from the other one is that it's aimed at being more representative of the music us sneaker-wearing types are used to hearing in the clubs, and will be contributed to by the DJ's around Australia that don't take requests and are pushing the sounds they believe in.

Genre-wise, we've cast the net just wide enough to be recruiting DJ's that play Breakbeat, Electro, Progressive, Techno and House.< Tags

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