Shameless
Posted on | August 27, 2008 | No Comments
More on this later…it’s going to be “off the chain” as the kids say!
Versatile has a Posse
Posted on | August 23, 2008 | No Comments
Versatile Records started a blog! Well, in May at least, but it’s just now news to me.
Versatile has been a favorite label of mine for many years. With a roster that includes Fabrice Lig, Joakim, I:Cube, Chateau Flight, Etienne Jaumet and others, they’re too cool for school, smart and funny to boot. They’ve single-handedly released several of the most-loved and oft-played 12″s in my collection, including I:Cube’s Pooh Pah and Fr33z, Joakim’s Come Into My Kitchen and Chateau Flight’s Cosmic Race. Check ‘em out!
Dan Bell in Houston October 24th
Posted on | August 23, 2008 | No Comments
Believe it! And let me take this opportunity to say that Button Down Mind still reigns as my favorite techno mix evar!
Red Herring Disco
Posted on | August 14, 2008 | No Comments
I’ve been stealing free minutes here and there all week, digging through my music library in an effort to put together some semblance of a cohesive set for The Kitchen on Saturday. Although the patio party is billed as a disco affair, my early set is shaping up to be something more like brown-leather, sweat and dirt than silver-sequins, perfume and strings. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m spending far too many hours in front of a computer this summer, but lately I’ve been predisposed to music that’s either full of fantasy (Alex Moulton, Lindstrom) or marked by a healthy amount of grit (Lee Perry, DJ Harvey mixes). Whatever the case, I’m going to try and make sense of it on the decks. A few things I’m feeling…
Vangelis: Let it Happen (Beatfanatic’s remix). Beatfanatics add some, well, beats to the original culled from Vangelis’ Earth. But it’s all done very tastefully and it just plain works, giving the track some momentum and drive that it previously lacked (the original tune floats dangerously close to the hippie ether). All you need is love on the wheel of life, baby.
Yearbook 1 wants to be played on a beach. At sunrise.
Studio: Yearbook 1. Studio is old news to most of the heads, I’m sure. I gave Yearbook 1 the “iTunes Scroll-Thru Listen” last year and it didn’t make much of an impression. Then somehow it ended up being the only music on my work laptop for about a week. By necessity, I listened to the album several times over the course of that week and it finally clicked. “Origin”, “West Side” and “Life’s a Beach”, in particular, are brilliant.
Pastrami Boys: Whole Lotta Love. Yeah yeah, everybody’s tired of edits and blah, blah, blah. Whatever, this tune smokes. It’s an Idjut Boys edit of Tina Turner covering Whole Lotta Love. Slow burning and supremely funky, the “edit” here involves little more than slightly extending a couple of breaks and giving the DJ a little instrumental flourish at the end of the tune (the original just fades out). The brilliant build-up and vocal is thankfully left intact; nice one Idjuts.
The Kitchen
Posted on | August 12, 2008 | No Comments
This Saturday is the return of Drew and Mr. Bristle’s Kitchen, a monthly celebration of the soulful, deep side of house music. The Kitchen always draws a good diverse crowd of groovers to the Mink’s Backroom. For this installment, I’ll be setting up my sound system on the patio and playing an extended set of disco, italo and electro, both new and old.
The party kicks off around 10pm and we’ll be rocking until the standard, state-approved TABC closing time.
Speaking of new disco, do not miss Lindstrom’s soon-to-be-released long player, Where You Go, I Go Too. It is one epic piece of work and currently sits very high on my best-of-2008 list. The album is constructed of three tracks ranging from ten to twenty-eight minutes, but it clearly sounds as though it was conceived as one long piece. The influences that inform this work could be a “who’s who” list of electronic music pioneers: Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Klaus Shulze, Cluster, Gottsching’s E2-E4, Jan Hammer. At the same time, Lindstrom has created something that is thoroughly contemporary, and the entire album plays out like the soundtrack to some bad-ass, neon-soaked sci-fi flick that I really want to see.
Neon Lights
Posted on | August 10, 2008 | No Comments
The light rig that Brandon and I have been working on is coming together nicely. I’m getting my head around DMX and we are slowly but surely gaining better control of the shows. I’m still underwhelmed by the DMX interface and software we’ve been using (buggy and unpredictable are two words that come to mind), so I’m looking into a couple alternatives such as Enttec’s DMXUSBPro or Lanbox LCE. I really should not take on another side project right now, but I’m sooooo tempted to dig in to MaxMSP and roll my own bespoke DMX control interface. One of Brandon’s buddies snapped some excellent pictures of the rig in action at our last Neon Nights.
M13 Geek Cluster
Posted on | August 10, 2008 | 2 Comments
As part of my long-term plan to put my daughter squarely on the path to geekdom, I packed up the car tonight and headed south to George Observatory, kid in tow. It was one of our quintessentially great daddy-daughter outings: “so bad, it’s good” Chinese buffet for dinner and a long drive through a burnt orange Texas sunset marked by several wrong turns, missed exits, and one unfortunate encounter between a Prius a slow moving armadillo. We arrived at the park just after sundown–10 minutes before ticket sales stopped.
Q was visibly excited by the whole affair, asking questions, talking to the docents and staying thoroughly engaged with all things astronomical despite the balmy weather and merciless mosquitoes.
We spent the first hour watching an orientation presentation and checking out views of celestial objects through telescopes that were set up around the patio. Between the HMNS scopes and the hobbyists, we got to see M15, the Dumbbell Nebula (though not very clearly), and a great view of Jupiter with three moons visible. One of the hobbyists had a rad computer-controlled rig that output a video image, and we spent a good 15-20 minutes watching him pan across the moon’s surface and enthusiastically point out features like Plato, the Lunar Alps and the Sea of Tranquility (”and that is where Neil Armstrong walked on the moon!”).
The highlight of the night, though, was a viewing of Messier 13 through the observatory’s 36 inch research telescope. It was inspiring, and led to some great ride-home discussion about time, space and how wild it was to think about the fact that the light hitting our eyes had been traveling through space for some 33 million years.