Mega Italo Action

I hadn’t intended on going out last Saturday but after spending a day encoding vinyl (more about that later) I decided I earned myself a break so I dusted off my bike, found that both the tyres were a bit soft, pumped them up and cycled off towards The Cavern, stopping to go back to my house when I discovered I’d forgotten my mobile phone, and then cycling to The Cavern again!

Last Saturday it was Slovakian DJ Boss who Junction had brought over, I’d never heard of him before but was assured it was going to be “hard” and “Slovakian”. And indeed it was! It started off a bit monotonous for me, just pounding out the four to the floor beats, but then he started mixing in some more interesting bits and pieces, namely broken beat stuff with a hint of wonky bass. Popular Dublin techno DJ Sunil Sharpe told me that I’d probably really like DJ Boss’s own productions, being that they’ve got a healthy amount of weird edits and things, but retaining their hard techno foundation, so to speak.

I must say, it was great to hear some proper techno again in Dublin, and I was surprised at how many people turned out, it was almost a full house! The new entrance to The Cavern (at the side of Issac Butt’s, on Frenchman’s Lane) has made things a lot better because now you don’t have to negotiate a dodgy rn’b club to get in! And Frenchman’s Lane itself is an underground techno kind of lane, you’ll see what I mean next time you step outside to have a smoke there!

I took some photos which are up here: DJ End Of Level Boss photos and a video:

Well done to the Junction boys for pulling off a great night, it’s good to see a promoter taking a chance with somebody unknown, bringing them over purely because they like their music. They’ve got James Ruskin (a tad more popular!) coming over on the 22nd of September, which I’ll definitely be down at (unless work send me off to another country again). You can check out Junction’s Myspace site here: www.myspace.com/junction303

(PS: I hate Myspace)

If all this talk of hard techno is too much for you then help is at hand in the form of some cosmic Italo tearjerkers. Yes, Mr. Mixed Up himself, I-F, is playing at Electric City in Wax this Thursday (the 23rd of August). The man needs no introduction or bigging up of any kind, all I can say is that his shows here always have a hint of magic about them, so miss this at your peril!If that wasn’t enough Italo Disco action for you, the DownTown Sounds people have Italian DJ icon Daniele Baldelli over to play Ri-Ra this Friday (the 24th of August). Baldelli is somebody that I-F would look up to, Optimus Prime to I-F’s Rodimus Prime so to speak (you’ve see the original Transformers animated movie right?), he’s been DJing since the late 70s and one can only imagine what kind of spaced out intergalactic journey he’ll take us on!

Oh yes, about the vinyl encoding, I’m still working through all my records, recording them slowly onto my hard drive. The main reason I’m doing this is because I’ve run out of space in my tiny (and crap) flat, so some of these records have got to go! Also, I’m tired of carrying a big bag of records out when I DJ, I’m planning on getting either Serato, Final Scratch or Traktor Scratch to play music with, currently I’m leaning a bit more towards Traktor Scratch as it seems to have more interesting features, but at the end of the day I just want something that’ll play the files with the feel of vinyl!As for sound quality, currently I’m recording everything through a Graham Slee Gram Amp 2 phono pre-amp, which goes into a Moto 828II soundcard and gets recorded with Adobe Audition 2.0.

I’m keeping everything as a 44.1Khz 16 bit wav file, I don’t see any point in compressing files when hard drive space is so cheap nowadays. So far I’ve recorded (technically encoded isn’t the proper term to use!) 306 records and they’re taking up 87.2 gigabytes of space. Now some of them were double LPs (and one or two were triple and quadruple LPs!), but I estimate that my entire collection of 2100-ish records will probably fit on my 750 gig Seagate FreeAgent Pro external hard drive, of course I’ll have to keep a mirror image of that on the PC in case one of you spills beer on the external hd! Of course in the future there’ll probably be some new lossless compression invented that will mean I can squeeze everything onto a CD or something, or I could use flac to have the size, but I like being able to edit the wav files quickly in Adobe Audition (or Soundforge or whatever), say if I want to add some weird chops and changes to some tracks, skkatter style!

My Technics 1210 (the right one if you must know!) sounds noticeably better through the Graham Slee pre-amp than it does through my DJ mixer (an Ecler Smac Pro4). Obviously it’s no good for DJing with though, as it only has one phono input (and no cross fader or any of that stuff!). I’ve been reading some interesting articles about why exactly you need a pre-amp for record players, this Wikipedia article on the RIAA equalization curve is an especially interesting read for me, but then again I’m a big nerd that becomes excited at phrases like “the noise level of cellulose acetate, lacquer/aluminum” and ” NBC Orthacoustic recording curve”. To sum it up, records have to have the bass cut quite a bit when you’re cutting them or you could cut into the previous groove, and all phono pre-amps (including every DJ mixer ever) boost the bass loss to specific level agreed by a load of dudes back in 1954. I find it amusing that I consider myself a fan of vinyl, yet know so little about how it works! Please feel free to correct me if any of the above information is inaccurate, that’s just what I got from reading a few things on the interweb.

Anyway, enough nerd talk for one day, hopefully I’ll see some of you at either I-F or Daniele Baldelli! Bye for now!