The Rare Mixes: A Vault That Was Never Meant to Be Opened: DJ Natural Nate® and the Recordings He Almost Never Released

In the world of DJing, the mix tape, and later the downloadable mix file, became the primary currency of reputation. From the cassette era through the SoundCloud era, DJs built audiences, secured bookings, and established their identities through recordings. You made a mix, you distributed it, people heard it, and if it was good enough, they came to your shows. That was the formula. That was how it worked.

DJ Natural Nate® never followed that formula.

Not because he couldn't. Not because he didn't have the material. He had more material than most DJs could dream of, decades of vinyl, a technical foundation that allowed him to execute transitions that other DJs couldn't even conceptualize, and a musical knowledge of the Breaks and Electro Bass underground that was genuinely encyclopedic. He had everything required to flood the internet with mixes and build a massive online following.

He chose not to.

The reason is simple, and it says everything about who he is as an artist: he believed, and still believes, that the real thing is the live performance. The mix recording is a photograph of a concert. It captures something real, but it cannot capture everything. It cannot capture the energy of the room, the physical presence of two turntables being played by someone who has spent decades developing a relationship with the equipment, the spontaneous decisions made in real time that will never be made in exactly the same way again. A recording is evidence that something happened. It is not the thing itself.

So he built his reputation on live performance. On being in the room. On the live streams that The-Lost-Art.com made possible, where you could watch him play in real time, see his hands on the records, see the concentration on his face, see the physical reality of what manual beatmatching at high speed actually looks like. That was the experience he wanted people to have. Not a file. A performance.

The mixes collected here exist almost in spite of that philosophy. They were recorded for specific purposes, for radio shows, for label exclusives, for benefit events, for archival documentation. Some were recorded because the moment was too significant to let pass without documentation. Some were recorded because someone else asked and the request was hard to refuse. None of them were made with the intention of becoming widely distributed calling cards. And yet here they are: a vault of recordings that represents one of the most significant and least-known archives in underground electronic music.

There is something that surprises people when they learn it about DJ Natural Nate®, and it is this: he is genuinely shy about his mixes.

Not about his live performances. In a live setting, at a show, at a festival, in front of a crowd, he is completely at home. The turntables are his instrument, the crowd is his audience, and the performance is his natural state. He has played in front of thousands of people, held down marathon sets that lasted hours, and executed technical feats that left other DJs standing at the side of the stage with their mouths open. In that context, there is no shyness. There is only the music.

But a recording is different. A recording is permanent. A recording can be listened to on headphones at three in the morning by someone who is paying close attention to every single transition, every single selection, every single moment where something didn't go exactly as planned. And in a live mix: a real live mix, played on real vinyl with no editing, no overdubs, no second chances, things don't always go exactly as planned. That is not a flaw. That is the nature of the art form. But it is also the source of the shyness.

He will tell you himself: these mixes are not perfect. They were never meant to be perfect. They were meant to be real. And real means that sometimes a transition takes a beat longer than ideal, sometimes a record doesn't cue up exactly where you wanted it, sometimes the energy dips for a moment before it surges back. These are not mistakes in the conventional sense. They are the fingerprints of a live performance: the evidence that a human being was making decisions in real time, under pressure, with no ability to go back and fix anything.

The perfection, if you want to call it that, is in the overall arc. In the selection. In the way the music moves from one place to another over the course of hours, building and releasing and rebuilding in ways that no algorithm could replicate. That is where the mastery lives. Not in the individual transitions, but in the totality of the performance.

"These mixes are not perfect. They were never meant to be perfect. They were meant to be real.", DJ Natural Nate®

He knows this. But knowing it doesn't entirely eliminate the shyness. These mixes are personal in a way that a live show is not. A live show is shared with a room full of people. A recording is shared with whoever downloads it, whenever they choose to listen, in whatever context they bring to it. That intimacy, that vulnerability, is something he has never been entirely comfortable with.

Which is exactly why these recordings are so valuable. They are the closest thing that exists to being in the room with him.

Eight hours of Electro. Not Electro House. Not the watered-down commercial version of the genre that found its way into mainstream clubs in the 2000s. Pure, underground Electro: the lineage that runs from Afrika Bambaataa through Egyptian Lover through Dynamix II through the entire Florida Bass and Electro Bass movement that DJ Natural Nate® has spent his career championing and preserving.

Eight hours of it, played live, on vinyl, with no breaks and no set list.

The 8 Hour Electro Set is one of the most significant recordings in this collection precisely because of its scope. Eight hours is not a DJ set in the conventional sense. It is a statement. It is a declaration that this music, this specific, underground, historically significant music, deserves to be heard in its full depth and breadth, not in a ninety-minute club set that barely scratches the surface.

The selection across eight hours is staggering. Tracks that most DJs in the genre have never heard sit alongside classics that defined the sound. Obscure label releases that pressed only a few hundred copies share space with the records that built the foundation of the genre. The arc of the set moves through eras and sub-genres with the confidence of someone who has spent decades studying the music from the inside, not as an academic exercise, but as a practitioner who has played these records thousands of times and understands their relationship to each other in ways that go beyond BPM and key.

This is not a mix for casual listening. It is a mix for people who want to understand what Electro actually is, where it came from, where it went, and why it matters. Eight hours is the minimum amount of time required to begin to tell that story properly. DJ Natural Nate® understood that when he sat down to record it, and the result is a document that has no equivalent anywhere in the online DJ mix archive.

The title says everything you need to know about the energy of this recording. Beast Mode is not a carefully curated journey through the history of a genre. It is not a showcase of technical precision or musical scholarship. It is a full-throttle, no-apologies, live turntable performance that exists at the intersection of technical mastery and pure physical energy.

There are moments in this mix where the transitions happen so fast and so cleanly that it takes a second listen to fully register what just occurred. There are moments where the energy builds to a level that feels genuinely unsustainable, and then sustains itself anyway, for another twenty minutes, another thirty minutes, pushing further and harder than seems possible.

This is the mix that demonstrates something that is easy to forget when you are listening to a carefully produced studio recording: DJing, at its highest level, is a physical activity. It requires stamina, coordination, and the ability to maintain focus and precision under conditions of sustained physical exertion. Beast Mode is the recording that makes that reality impossible to ignore. You can hear the energy in every transition. You can feel the commitment in every selection. This is not a DJ going through the motions. This is a DJ in a state that can only be described as exactly what the title says.

The fact that it was recorded live, on vinyl, with no editing, makes it even more remarkable. What you hear is what happened. Every moment of it.

There are DJ sets, and then there are DJ sets that exist in a specific time and place in a way that makes them impossible to fully separate from the context in which they happened. The Event Horizon Sunrise Edition is the second kind.

July 8, 2023. Colorado. Five in the morning. The sun coming up over the mountains. A crowd that has been dancing for hours, moving from the energy of the night into the strange, luminous space of early morning where everything feels simultaneously exhausted and electric. And DJ Natural Nate® at the turntables, reading the room, reading the moment, playing music that met the sunrise exactly where it was.

The Sunrise Edition is one of the most emotionally specific recordings in this collection. It is not trying to be a comprehensive statement about a genre or a demonstration of technical range. It is trying to capture a specific feeling at a specific moment: the feeling of being awake at five in the morning in Colorado with music that is perfectly calibrated to the light and the air and the particular quality of attention that comes with having danced through an entire night.

Whether you were there or not, this recording carries that feeling. The selection is different from what you would hear at midnight. The energy is different. The arc is different. This is music for the moment when the night becomes the morning, and it was played by someone who understood exactly what that moment required.

The fact that it was recorded and preserved is a gift. This is the kind of performance that usually disappears with the sunrise.

June 13, 2009. The date matters. This is not a recent recording. This is a document from a specific moment in the history of DJ Natural Nate®'s career: a live performance captured at a time when the underground electronic music scene in Colorado was at a particular point in its evolution, when The-Lost-Art.com was drawing millions of users, when Bruise Your Body Breaks was releasing some of the most significant music in the Electro Bass genre, and when DJ Natural Nate® was at the height of his powers as a live performer.

The Flashback Mix runs to one hour and forty minutes. That is a substantial recording by any measure, but what makes it significant is not its length, it is its historical specificity. This is a recording of a particular performance on a particular night, and it carries the energy of that night in every transition and every selection.

The word "Flashback" in the title is not accidental. This mix reaches back into the history of the genre, pulling tracks that defined the sound of Electro Bass and Breaks in the years leading up to 2009, placing them in conversation with each other in ways that illuminate the connections and the evolution of the music. It is a history lesson delivered through a live performance, and it is one of the most valuable historical documents in this entire collection.

Seventeen years have passed since this recording was made. The music in it sounds as vital and as relevant today as it did then. That is the nature of music that was built on something real, it does not age in the way that trend-driven music ages. It simply becomes more clearly itself over time.

Fragile Recordings: the Florida-based label founded by James Wolfe that became one of the most important homes for sophisticated Electro Bass and Breaks production in the late 1990s and early 2000s, commissioned this exclusive mix as a showcase for the label's catalog and aesthetic. What DJ Natural Nate® delivered was something that went beyond a promotional tool and became a genuine artistic statement.

The Fragile Recordings Exclusive Mix is, in many ways, the most focused recording in this collection. Where the mega mixes and the marathon sets draw from the full breadth of the genre, this mix is specifically calibrated to the Fragile Recordings sound: the particular combination of technical sophistication, emotional depth, and underground credibility that made the label significant. Every selection is in conversation with the label's identity, and the result is a mix that functions simultaneously as a showcase and as a critical perspective on what made Fragile Recordings matter.

James Wolfe's productions are among the most musically sophisticated in the Electro Bass genre, and hearing them woven together in a live turntable mix by a DJ who understood them from the inside, who had played them at shows, who knew their BPMs and their structures and their emotional arcs, gives them a context that a playlist cannot provide. This is music being interpreted, not just played. And the interpretation is authoritative.

For anyone who wants to understand what Fragile Recordings was and why it mattered, this mix is essential listening.

The Underground Movement Show, UMS-119, was one of the most important platforms for underground electronic music in Colorado, and the BYBB mix recorded for it represents Bruise Your Body Breaks in its most concentrated and purposeful form.

BYBB, Bruise Your Body Breaks, the label co-founded by DJ Natural Nate® and Jiggabot in 1998, has always been more than a record label. It has been a statement of values: a commitment to the underground, to vinyl, to music that is made with craft and intention rather than commercial calculation. The UMS-119 BYBB Mix is that statement delivered in the form of a live turntable performance.

The mix draws heavily from the BYBB catalog, tracks that were released on the label over the years, productions that represent the specific aesthetic that Nate and Jiggabot developed together, music that exists nowhere else in the genre because it was made by people who were not trying to sound like anyone else. Hearing it assembled into a live mix is hearing the label's history told from the inside, by one of the people who built it.

The 320kbps encoding of this recording is worth noting. At a time when many online mixes were distributed at lower quality to reduce file sizes, the decision to encode this at 320kbps reflects the same commitment to quality that has always characterized everything associated with BYBB. The music deserves to be heard properly. This recording ensures that it is.

The title of this mix is one of the most honest things DJ Natural Nate® has ever put on a recording. Reflections. Not a statement of arrival or a declaration of dominance. A looking back. A taking stock. A recognition that the music that matters most is the music that has accumulated over years and decades of listening, playing, and living inside a genre that most of the world has never heard of.

The Reflections mix is different in character from the high-energy marathon sets and the technically demanding showcase recordings. It moves more slowly. It breathes more. It allows tracks to develop and resolve before moving to the next one, rather than riding the energy of rapid-fire transitions. It is, in the best sense of the word, a mature recording, made by someone who has nothing left to prove and everything to share.

The selections in Reflections span the full history of the music that DJ Natural Nate® has spent his career playing and preserving. Tracks from the early days of Electro Bass sit alongside more recent productions. Florida Bass classics share space with Colorado underground releases. The mix does not try to tell a linear story, it is not a chronological history lesson. It is more like a conversation with the music itself, a series of connections and resonances that only become visible when you have spent enough time with the material to see them.

This is the mix for late nights and long drives. For the moments when you want to be reminded of why the music matters and where it came from.

To understand what the Sky Watcher mix actually is, you have to understand how it was made, because the story behind it is as significant as the recording itself.

Sky Watcher is a full productional mix built entirely from the catalogs of two labels: Bruise Your Body Breaks and The-Lost-Art.com. These were not just any labels. They were DJ Natural Nate®'s own creative infrastructure: the platforms through which he had spent years producing, releasing, and distributing the music he believed in. A productional mix from these catalogs was not a DJ set in the conventional sense. It was a curated, constructed performance built from the inside out, using material that he knew at a molecular level because he had been part of creating it.

The mix was performed live on The-Lost-Art.com in front of a live studio audience. That detail matters. This was not a bedroom recording or a studio session made in isolation. It was a live performance, with people in the room, with the energy and pressure and spontaneity that only a live audience creates. The-Lost-Art.com was the stage. The audience was there. The performance happened in real time.

After the performance, DJ Natural Nate® gave the recording exclusively to Linda Bee, host of The Linda B Breakbeat Show on 96.9 AllFM (Audio For All FM), for special broadcasting and rights. Linda Bee did not receive a file. She received an exclusive. The mix was hers to broadcast, and she broadcast it to her audience in the UK and beyond.

This is the correct history of this recording: made live, in front of an audience, on The-Lost-Art.com, from the BYBB and TLA catalogs, and given exclusively to Linda Bee for radio broadcast. Not a dual broadcast. Not a simultaneous transmission. A live performance on one platform, followed by an exclusive gift to another.

The second mix given to Linda Bee follows the same origin story as Sky Watcher, and that origin story is worth stating clearly: this is another full productional mix built from the Bruise Your Body Breaks and The-Lost-Art.com label catalogs, performed live on The-Lost-Art.com in front of a live studio audience, and given exclusively to Linda Bee for Audio For All FM (96.9 AllFM) special broadcasting and rights.

Two hours. Non-stop. Electro Breakbeat. Made live. Given exclusively.

The MTG Exclusive Guest Mix is one of the most focused and sustained performances in this collection. Two hours is long enough to develop a real arc, to build from an opening that establishes the character of the set, through a middle section that explores the full range of the genre, to a closing that resolves the energy in a way that feels complete rather than simply stopped. Two hours is long enough to tell a story.

And this mix tells one. It is a two-hour argument for the continued relevance and vitality of Electro Breakbeat: a genre that has been declared dead by the mainstream music press approximately once every five years since the early 1990s and has continued to produce vital, innovative music throughout. The selection draws from the deep BYBB and TLA catalogs, music that DJ Natural Nate® had produced, curated, and lived with for years. The transitions are clean. The energy management is sophisticated.

The "non-stop" designation in the title is not marketing language. It is a description of what actually happened. Two hours of music with no gaps, no interruptions, no moments where the energy drops to zero and has to be rebuilt from scratch. The mix breathes and pulses and shifts, but it never stops. That is a technical achievement that most DJs cannot sustain for two hours, and it is one of the reasons this recording has remained significant long after Linda Bee first broadcast it to her audience.

"Made live on The-Lost-Art.com in front of a live studio audience, then given exclusively to Linda Bee for Audio For All FM. That's the real story.", DJ Natural Nate®

The exclusivity of these recordings, given directly to Linda Bee, not posted publicly, not distributed through conventional channels, reflects the same philosophy that defines DJ Natural Nate®'s entire relationship with recordings. You don't hand out mixes. You give them to people who will honor them. Linda Bee honored them.

The Multiverse mix was recorded for Damage Control Records in March 2021: a period when the world was still navigating the aftermath of the pandemic shutdowns that had closed venues and cancelled shows across the globe. For a DJ whose primary mode of expression was live performance, the pandemic years were a particular kind of loss. The stages were dark. The crowds were gone. The energy that comes from playing for a room full of people who are responding to the music in real time, that energy was simply unavailable.

The Multiverse mix is, in part, a response to that absence. It is a recording made by someone who needed to play, who needed to put music into the world even when the conventional channels for doing so were closed. The title, Multiverse, suggests the expansiveness of the selection and the ambition of the performance: a mix that reaches across multiple dimensions of the genre, pulling from different eras and sub-genres and aesthetic territories to create something that feels genuinely comprehensive.

Damage Control Records provided the platform, and DJ Natural Nate® provided the performance. The result is one of the most significant recordings from the pandemic era: a document of what it meant to be a DJ in a world without shows, and a reminder that the music itself does not stop just because the venues do.

The March 2021 date places this recording in a specific historical moment, and that specificity gives it a weight that purely technical recordings sometimes lack. This is music made under pressure, in difficult circumstances, by someone who refused to let those circumstances silence him.

On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and injuring 53 others. It was the deadliest mass shooting in American history at the time, and it targeted a space that was specifically a home for the LGBTQ+ community: a place where people went to be themselves, to dance, to be safe.

The Pulse Night Club Benefit Mix was DJ Natural Nate®'s response. Not a statement. Not a press release. A mix. Music as solidarity. Music as a way of saying: this community matters, this space matters, the people who were taken from us mattered, and the music that was playing when they were taken from us will continue to play.

The mix is a Bruise Your Body Breaks productional mix, drawing from the BYBB catalog and the broader Breaks and Electro Bass universe that has always been, at its core, music made for people who wanted to dance and be free. That connection, between the music and the freedom it represents, gives this recording a weight that goes beyond its technical qualities.

This is not the most technically complex recording in this collection. It is not the longest or the most comprehensive. But it may be the most important, because it demonstrates something that is easy to forget when we talk about DJing in purely technical or aesthetic terms: music is not separate from the world. It exists in the world. It responds to the world. And sometimes the most significant thing a DJ can do is simply play, to put music into the world at a moment when the world needs it.

"Music as solidarity. Music as a way of saying: this community matters, and the music that was playing when they were taken from us will continue to play.", DJ Natural Nate®

The Festival of Funk series was one of the most significant recurring events in the Colorado underground electronic music scene: a celebration of the music that built the foundation of everything that came after, played by DJs who understood that foundation from the inside. Being part of Festival of Funk 5 was not just a booking. It was a recognition of place in a lineage.

The BYBB live set recorded at Festival of Funk 5 is one of the most energetic performances in this collection. The festival context: a crowd that had gathered specifically to celebrate this music, in a setting that honored its history, brought out a level of performance energy that is palpable even in the recording. This is a DJ playing for people who love the music as much as he does, and the result is a set that feels genuinely celebratory.

The connection to PreservingThePitch.com in the title is significant. Preserving The Pitch: the tagline that has defined DJ Natural Nate®'s mission for decades, is not just a slogan. It is a commitment: to the music, to the technique, to the history, to the community that has kept this music alive without commercial support or mainstream recognition. Festival of Funk 5 was an expression of that commitment, and this recording is its document.

The Festival of Funk 4 recording brings together two of the most significant figures in the Colorado Breaks and Electro Bass underground: DJ Natural Nate® and DJ Mike Devious. The collaboration between these two DJs, both rooted in the same musical tradition, both committed to the same values of technical excellence and underground authenticity, produces a recording that is greater than the sum of its parts.

DJ Mike Devious has been one of the most respected figures in the Colorado underground for decades. His technical skills are formidable, his musical knowledge is deep, and his commitment to the culture is unimpeachable. Hearing him in conversation with DJ Natural Nate®, in a live performance context where the decisions are made in real time and the chemistry between two DJs either exists or it doesn't, is hearing two masters of the same tradition demonstrating why that tradition matters.

The MTG exclusive designation places this recording in the context of a specific platform and a specific moment in the history of how underground electronic music was distributed and shared. MTG, Music That Grooves, was one of the important channels through which this music reached its audience, and the exclusive nature of this release reflects the trust and respect that existed between the DJs and the platform.

This is a recording that rewards repeated listening. The interplay between the two DJs, the way the energy shifts and builds across the set, the selection choices that reflect both individual taste and collaborative instinct, these are things that reveal themselves more fully with each listen.

A second exclusive MTG mix, two hours of non-stop Electro Breakbeat, built from the same BYBB and The-Lost-Art.com catalog foundation. Where the Linda B Breakbeat Show mix was crafted specifically for Linda Bee's audience and broadcast context, "Can't You See It" stands as its own complete statement: a two-hour argument for the music, delivered without pause, without compromise, and without apology.

The title is a challenge as much as it is a question. Can't you see it? Can't you hear what this music is, what it represents, why it matters? Two hours of answer, played live, on vinyl, by someone who has spent thirty years making the case.

October 10, 2019. The-Lost-Art.com. A live turntable mix with a title that says exactly what it intends to do: take us back.

The "Take Us Back to the Past" mix is one of the most explicitly nostalgic recordings in this collection, not nostalgic in the sense of being backward-looking or sentimental, but nostalgic in the sense of being a deliberate act of preservation. This is a mix that reaches back into the history of the music and pulls forward the tracks and the sounds and the energy that defined the genre in its formative years, presenting them to an audience that may be hearing some of them for the first time.

The October 2019 date places this recording at a specific moment in the history of The-Lost-Art.com: a platform that had, by that point, been through its own history of growth and transformation, but that remained committed to the same mission it had always had: to be a home for the music and the DJs who played it. A live turntable mix on The-Lost-Art.com in 2019 was a statement of continuity: a reminder that the platform and the music and the DJ were all still here, still doing what they had always done, still committed to the values that had brought them together in the first place.

The selection in this mix is deliberately historical. It is a curation of the music that mattered: the tracks that built the foundation, the records that defined the sound, the productions that proved that this genre was capable of something genuinely significant. Hearing them assembled into a live mix in 2019 is hearing the past made present, and it is one of the most powerful things a DJ can do.

The Dominance mix is perhaps the most straightforwardly titled recording in this collection, and the title is entirely accurate. This is a mix that establishes dominance, over the genre, over the technical demands of live vinyl performance, over the challenge of sustaining energy and focus across an extended set.

The BYBB and The Lost Art connection places this recording squarely in the center of the world that DJ Natural Nate® built and has spent his career inhabiting. These are not external affiliations or marketing associations. They are the institutions he helped create, the platforms he helped build, the community he has been part of since the beginning. A mix released under both banners is a mix that carries the full weight of that history.

The Dominance mix is also one of the recordings that most clearly demonstrates the relationship between technical mastery and musical intelligence that defines DJ Natural Nate®'s approach. The transitions are clean and confident: the product of decades of practice and performance. But the selection is what elevates the recording from technically impressive to genuinely significant. Every track choice is purposeful. Every transition serves the arc of the mix. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the parts are already exceptional.

This is the recording that answers the question of what dominance actually means in the context of DJing. It does not mean playing the loudest or the fastest or the most technically complex music. It means being so completely in command of the material, the technique, and the moment that the music flows with an inevitability that makes every choice seem like the only possible choice. That is what dominance sounds like. And this is what it sounds like.

The mixes collected here are not a complete picture of DJ Natural Nate®'s career as a recording artist. They are fragments, moments captured from a career that has been defined primarily by live performance, by the experience of being in the room, by the energy that exists between a DJ and an audience in real time. They are the parts of the iceberg that are visible above the water.

But fragments can be extraordinarily valuable. A fragment of a live performance is still a live performance. A recording of a moment that was never supposed to be widely distributed is still a document of that moment. And a collection of recordings that spans decades of work in a genre that has been consistently undervalued and underrepresented in the broader music culture is a historical archive of genuine significance.

The underground electronic music scene that DJ Natural Nate® has spent his career inhabiting does not have the institutional support that mainstream music genres have. There are no major label archives preserving the recordings. There are no well-funded museums documenting the history. There are no academic programs studying the music with the seriousness it deserves. What exists is what the community itself has preserved: the recordings that DJs and labels and fans have kept alive through their own commitment and their own resources.

These mixes are part of that preservation effort. They exist because people cared enough to record them, to upload them, to keep them available even when the platforms changed and the formats evolved and the algorithms made it harder and harder to find music that wasn't already popular. They exist because the music deserved to survive.

And they exist because, despite his shyness about recordings, despite his preference for live performance over documentation, despite his conviction that the real thing is always better than the recording of the real thing, DJ Natural Nate® understood that some moments are too significant to let disappear entirely. These mixes are those moments. They are the vault that was never supposed to be opened, and they are more valuable for having been kept closed for so long.

"These mixes are the parts of the iceberg that are visible above the water. And what is visible is extraordinary.", DJ Natural Nate®

Every mix listed below is available to stream directly from this page. These are not curated highlights or edited versions. They are the recordings as they exist, live, unedited, exactly as they happened. If you need to identify a track in any of these mixes, leave a comment with a timestamp and a description of what you are hearing. The information will be found for you.

This is the vault. It was never supposed to be this open. Enjoy every second of it.