Despite not going out on Saturday or Sunday last weekend was one of the busiest ones I’ve had in ages. It all started on Wednesday night with the Fusionfest gig in The Vaults where I was supporting Cylob. This was my very first time in The Vaults and as a result I kind of walked the wrong way and had to ask a local IFSC security guard where it was and he told me but he said “I think it’s closed on Wednesday nights”, luckily it wasn’t! When I arrived in the electronica (worst genre name ever) room wasn’t open yet as Steffan K was still tweaking his massive sound system so I wandered into the raggae/dub room and had a bit of a wobble to the music (robot dancing would have looked way out of place). In between the two rooms there was a room of stalls set up where you could buy clothes, shoes and jewellery, all presumably made (or modified) by the students of the Dun Laoghaire Institute who were also running the gig. I met popular drum and bass fan Ruth there who tried to make me try on a pair of blood red high heels that were specially made for transvestites but I politely (and wimpishly) declined.
The electronica room (argh, why call it this!?) had opened by this stage so I stuck in my specially moulded earplugs and headed in to check out Dancepig’s DJ set. He was playing off Ableton I think (or maybe Traktor, I didn’t get a look at the screen) and got all the girls dancing with a disco-flavoured electro set, the highlight of which for me was the Alden Tyrell track at the end (it’s off the Disco Lunar Module EP on Clone Records, I think it’s called “Knockers”).
Our room was pretty full at this stage, and also pretty loud as Steffan K had brought about fifty of his biggest speakers in to fill the place. Once Dancepig was on his last track I started rooting around in my record bag and decided I’d start off with some Egyptian Lover (”Dance”) just to be on the safe side and then move into some weirder stuff. Luckily for me those Dun Laoghaire Institute students have good taste in music and they seemed to appreciate the more darker end of electro such as Imatran Voima, Dexter, Autechre (Arch Carrier at 45, it worked really well!), Bass Junkie, Dexorcist, etc. I also played a few Warpy/Rephlexy things, Aphex Twin “Donkey Rhubarb” and “Meltphace6″, Squarepusher “Red Hot Car” and also Wagon Christ “Perkission” to which Cylob said “Tune!” ’cause he was just about to start playing. Overall I think my set went really well except for this annoying feedback hum that was happening with the right deck every so often (probably because the monitor was up so close to it).
Cylob was up after me. It seems like everybody’s ditching records for DJing with nowadays as he was using Traktor on an iBook and also controlling it with a USB Playstation style joypad which looked deadly! He started off slowly with some chopped up acid stuff, mostly his own tunes probably but with a few samples of other people thrown in (eg Bam Bam - “Where’s Your Child”), then he slow brought the tempo up and up (going through an excellent ghetto booty section) until it was a mentalist drill and bass BPM, all the time mixing in bits of other people’s stuff over his own (eg, Aphex Twin’s “Girl Boy Song”) before bringing it down to an electro pace again with that new LFO track (off the split EP with Aphex) called “Flu-Shot (Kringlan)” and some other things too.
Near the end of his set a bouncer gave Cylob the “five minutes to go, this is the last track you’re playing” talk and then wandered off. Just as he was finishing up his last track everybody started shouting “keep playing!” so he did, for another ten minutes or so until security realised what was happening and made them turn the sound system off. Overall a great night and a very impressive set from Cylob! Hopefully he’ll be brought over here again, The Vaults seems to be a pretty decent venue once you get a proper sound system in!
Stay tuned for a further update soon with a review of the Richie Hawtin gig and some photos!
In the meantime check out the photos from the T.Raumschmiere Band/David Carretta gig that was on in the TBMC a few weeks ago.