A House Party

So I went to this really cool house party last night that was apparently organized only 3 hours in advance and listened to my favorite local producers go at their machines for a few hours. For such quick organization, there sure was a good turnout; there were plenty of people around enjoying the sounds. Scottfro played a great set, followed up by the unique IDMish sounds of Carson, aka Flybrains. Next came the wicked gabber-core styles of Mourning Side Excursion, then finally the equally as unique Blaerg (with the special ae glyph, I believe) came on with some more heavily abused audio. There was one last set by 000 (triple-zero) that was said to be a real treat, but unfortunately I was with some other people who had had enough by the time it became after 1:00. So, we had to miss the show, but hopefully I’ll be able to hear him next Saturday night when I hit up this Venetian Snares show in the Detroit! (flyer: front / back)

I’ll post a couple of the pictures I took. First, one of Scottfro. Then another one of the other three guys I recorded. From left to right, they are: Mourning Side Excursion doing his live pa (aka Barron when he’s on the decks), Blaerg just setting up his stuff, and then Flybrains playing with the kaos pad equipped mixer.

And of course, I had to record the sets with my iRiver… and why not post them on torrents for all to hear? Not a damn good reason I can think of… so here they are! (in order of their playing)

Actually, I think the levels were a bit high because it gets distorted when it’s kicking hard… still listenable, though. In the future, I think I’ll try and aim for low levels, cuz I can always normalize. And I also forgot to mention that Scottfro’s set ends abruptly when some hardware, still unknown, failed. Also, Blaerg’s set ended when the cops came after receiving a complaint and asked us to turn it down. That was about when we left.

Update: According to Flybrains, I am to refer to this house party as Jungle Chainsaw Massacre V! So make a note of it! Also, the party was actually organized in “3 minutes flat.”

Update: Mourning Side Excursion has remastered his set, and asked me to repost it. So, here it is:

Freaky Flow at the Temple Club

Another excellent show at the Temple Club tonight, Freaky Flow, DJ to of one of my favorite dnb mixes: couple of pictures of Freaky at the decks and a 1:18 video of some wicked turntablism. That video is 24 Mb because that the only way my camera dumps it—some strange motion jpeg format. I’m working on encoding it to a smaller mpeg or something, but haven’t had much luck yet.

Update: Sweet! My 24Mb “motion jpeg” video has become an 8.4Mb AVI file.

An Amazing Dnbradio.com Show

Thank you Southpaw for playing on our favorite internet radio station!! His set on Feb 11 was absolutely ballin. He had tried to upload the set (192 kbps, btw) to my ftp, but he got cut at 35 Mb, and I couldn’t find any way to contact him. So, #dnbradio op Vessla was able to help me out last night by dccing me over the set. It was Southpaw’s wish to spread it around, so I’ve posted a torrent on torrentbox.com. If you are interested, feel free to hop on:

On an unrelated note, I’m all sick. I’ve been sick for the last couple days. It sucks blowing my nose every other minute and trying to hold back coughs because they hurt so damn much. I’m going to the on-campus doctor at 1:30, hopefully I’ll be able to get some meds or something.

dnbradio.com is teh cool

So I have tuned in in the past, but just the past couple days I’ve been listening to dnbradio.com a whole lot. From my experience, I believe they consistently have better tracks than bassdrive.com. It was when somebody putting on a live set mentioned IRC that I decided to drop by. So, I have been hanging out in #dnbradio on EFNet for a couple days now. I haven’t IRC’d outside the geeky irc.freenode.net in a while, so it is refreshing to find a community of such dedicated junglists. A lot of them produce, too.

It’s especially interesting when there are live sets going on. For instance, the other day, Serpico/Freezha and MC Dozha were rippin it up, and Dozha would be MC’ing over top of the very excellent dnb, chatting with us in between rhymes. It’s almost as cool as actually going to a show: no atmosphere, but you get to talk with everybody listening at the same time.

Randomly tuning into the station rarely disappoints me; they just always seem to have some ill beetz goin on. I even donated $5 to the station earlier today. If you like the dnb, this is where it’s at.

The Next Song

So I just polished up a dnbish track I’ve been working on sparatically over the last few days. This one weighs in at 2:35 and has a harder sort of dnb sound going on. Next time I think I want to go for an ambient dnb sound. It’s only a matter of time now before I have to make a songs section. I don’t really like providing two versions of the same file, so if you can’t play my ogg files, you maybe SOL soon. This may be the last time.

Edit: Broken links were removed.

Another Tune

I had another few hours of boredom, so I churned out another track. It’s still a bit short at only 2:35, but it is yet another improvement on my previous work. I decided to call this one Student Drum ‘n Bass because even though I have a pretty good grasp on how to use Reason at this point, I’m still working towards making the evil drum ‘n bass sound that I desire. So anyway, here it is:

Amens are Fun!

Although I’ve been familiar with the “Amen loop” for some time now, I was not aware that it, along with dozens of other loops, actually originated from songs from the 60’s and 70’s that have been sampled from vinyl, used, and reused in countless jungle/dnb tracks. According to History, the Amen has been sampled from a song called “Amen, Brother” by the Winstons. CD rips of this and many other samples can be found at this great site, Bourbon Breaks.

My buddy Scottfro of Irie Way Records also is using Reason to produce his ragga jungle tracks. He says one of the key things for ragga style jungle music is to use a lot of samples. So, he usually turns to his vinyl collection as a source of inspiration. While half of his songs were never supposed to feature the Amen loop, he says the urge to just “see what it sounds like” is always too great. And apparently, it always sounds dope. Hooray for Amens! Here’s my latest 1:32 effort:

Progress with Plenty of Reason

So in the past couple weeks, I’ve made a short pile of 1-2 minute tracks, each produced in about one sitting. I think they are getting better each time, which is a good thing I guess. I like (and want to produce) a lot of different types of electronica, but mostly I just want to be making some wicked evil drum ‘n bass. Making the sound I really want requires … basically more experience and skillz than I have just yet. But today I decided to go for a hard, distorted sound, so here’s what I have so far. It’s a 2:02 industrial sounding track.

Gearing Up

Although I haven’t mentioned anything about it yet, I’ve been experimenting with Propellerheads Reason 2.5. While I’ve only produced a couple of short and pretty simple tracks, I am in the process of becoming more serious with it. Up until now, I’ve only been using my sub-par 700MHz laptop with no proper midi controller. In the next day or two, I will clear up enough space so I can partition off something like 10 Gb for windoze and get to work with an Evolution MK-425C that is due to arrive on Thursday. But for now, I have to go write a paper. Oh, and you can click that picture for a (much) larger one.

A Trip to Temple Club

So I haven’t posted in a little while. I guess nothing terribly interesting has happened in a while. I even went and heard Michael Moore speak on campus, and I didn’t even write about it in my blog. (That guy is pretty biased and extreme at times, but he does have some good points, and I agree with him that Kerry is our best bet for the next four years.) I’m mostly not into politics, but since I’m going to be voting for the first time, I guess it’s good to have an opinion in all this… :) (Hey, I guess I wrote about it anyway!)

Last night, we went to the Temple Club. It was my second time going there, and neither time was I overly impressed. There are two rooms. One room had hip hop type beats, while the other one had a decent lineup of fairly skilled DJ’s. The tunes were good for the dance floor at the club I guess but they lacked enough variety for me, I think. I much more enjoyed the experimental junglist breaks that are performed live by the pros from LCC at the other venues I’ve been to like club X-Cel.

Also Temple Club is the most expensive venue I’ve been to around here. I think the show would have to include recognizably good names for me to go out there again. But hey, it’s still better than most of the frat parties around here… Oh, and it’s pretty hard to take a good picture at a night club.