October, the best month for electronic music ever!

Due to a number of factors, October is traditionally the best month of the year for electronic music gigs in Dublin:

1) Students are back in college, and to celebrate they usually spend the entire month of October avoiding lectures and going out each and every night, spending all their hard earned summer-job money (well in my day it was hard earned summer-job money anyway!)

2) Summer is finally over, us workers have used up all our holidays, so what better way to while away the bleak Autumn months than by going out to the club each and every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday

3) The DEAF festival at the end of October is always a great source of interesting gigs, and is also usually a catalyst for other people organising stuff near that weekend too. (and yes, I know that calling it the DEAF festival is wrong, seeing as the F stands for festival, you’re not supposed to say ATM machine either but everybody does anyway!)

4) Halloween always makes people a little bit crazy. It’s based on an ancient Celtic pagan festival Oíche Shamhna, so Irish people have strong connections to it and perhaps that’s half the reason we all feel like partying that extra bit harder during October!

So for the above (and maybe more) reasons, October’s always a lot of fun. And we’re starting October early this weekend too: tonight (the 27th of September, in case you’re reading this in the future) the Electric City guys host the Electronic Ireland men-folk down at Wax. Jamie Behan will be headlining the night with a support DJ set from Paudi Ahern and a live set from Mike McCoy.

I’ve missed the last few Electric Cities due to me messing around with nerdy stuff at home so I’m gong to have to drop down tonight to say hello!

In other news, a new club that has started up recently called Soundstream (fans of Sound Hack I take it!) in Rouge are bringing over the infamous Black Dog this Saturday (the 29th of September). The Black Dog has a long and interesting history. Originally a trio consisting of founder Ken Downie, and two other guys called Ed Handley and Andy Turner, they released two incredible albums on Warp Records, Spanners and Bytes (and one not so amazing one but still pretty good one called Music For Adverts and Short Films) all back in the early to mid ’90s.

Apparently there was a bit of a falling out between them, after which Ed and Andy left The Black Dog and went on to form Plaid, who went on to release loads more great stuff and continue to be one of Warp’s most interesting and enduring acts to this day. Ken Downie kept The Black Dog going as a solo act for a while releasing a few things here are there, one record that sticks in my mind is his remix of Lalo Schifrin’s Theme Tune to Bullitt, he then worked with a few other people before recently settling down with Martin and Richard Dust, this The Black Dog is a trio once more! (3, it’s the magic number!)

So, an interesting history, a classic back catalogue, and two new-ish members. This has all the ingredients of an unusual night of music, I’d definitely recommend heading down to this, although you may not hear some of the older material (or you might, you never know!), it’ll be interesting to see what Mr. Downie and co. have been working on since the reappearance of this black techno canine.

A bit of a gig review here also: I was down at James Ruskin in The Cavern last Saturday where Junction had very kindly invited him over to play. I missed Stam’s opening set but caught the second half of Sunil’s show which had liberal doses of electro all over the place which pleased me greatly! James Ruskin himself pleasantly surprised me in that he didn’t just bang it out all night, but in fact treated us to a very varied set, he was using decks and Ableton live, mixing in things like Aphex Twin - “On”, Technasia - “Ghetto Freak”, as well as some broken beat techno bits here and there and the odd classic electro cut like Man Parrish - “Hip Hop Be Bop”. He did throw in a few overplayed tunes, Paul Woolford’s “Erotic Discourse” and the Carl Craig remix of Theo Parrish’s “Falling Up” were probably in every second techno set I heard during 2006, I could live without ever hearing them again. I enjoyed his set though, he took a change and mixed it up, kept it interesting most of the time, but I suspect a lot of the crowd there were looking for a more traditional bang-a-thon techno night.

I’ve got a few photos but haven’t uploaded them yet, I’ve uploaded a few videos though:
Sunil Sharpe drops that 3 Phase bootleg I like to play all the time, I’ll have to stop playing it now, grrr!
Sunil Electro Sharpe
James Ruskin works that shit
Mr. Ruskin plays some Aphex, woo woo!
Cuts and edits
Ghetto Freak!
Man Parrish!