Category Archives: Gigs

Gigs

The Bleep Party

Leave a comment

It was really weird seeing Public Life in the day:

Even Jean made it down from Swiss Cottage. Who would’ve thought three kids from the class of ‘92 at Iowa City High School would be hanging out in a Public Toilet in London 11 years later?

During my first mix, I realized the monitor was only responding to one turntable, so it was a mix from the speakers again. However, the crowd was having a great time. I wasn’t horribly concerned about technical imperfections so much as I was struggling so hard to hear that I couldn’t fully feel what I was doing. Still, it was a great time. The bartended even ran up about ½-hour in to my set and screamed “Turn it up! This is fucking wicked!!!”

And just as the photographic evidence runs out, so does the recording. Ben and KT had to leave in order to get up early for their flight, but I think they had a really good time, getting to see what an awesome scene we have here, even if it wouldn’t normally be their thing.

The rest of the night was fantastic. The ownership were having so much fun they let Jonny play an extra 45 minutes past closing. His set was blinding too. I should have recording of 74 minutes of each set up soon. I got home really late after the most overcrowded night bus ride ever, and said a delusional goodbye to Ben as they left bright and early. It was a wonderful visit, especially since in Iowa City my attention is spread so thin. I really love these guys.

Gigs

Tracklist from my set at the Bleep 43 party @ Public Life last night

Leave a comment

Madlib – Steppin’ into Tomorrow – Blue Note

Tread – Till the Night – Third Ear

Marvin Belton – Bleed to be Free – Ferrispark Records

Amp Fiddler – Love and War – Genuine

Soho – Hot Music – Pal Joey Music

Ramiro Mendes – Angola (Carl Craig’s Mix) – Lusafrica

Romanthony – Trust (Ghost Mix) – Downtown 161

Charlie – Spacer Woman – Automan

Brooks – Dripping in Gold – Mantis Recordings

Rick Wade – I Can’t Take It – Funky Chocolate

D.S.L. – Soothe Your Soul – Chilli Funk

Rima – This World – Jazzanova-Compost Records

DJ Gregory – Attend 1- Kitsune

Cesario Evora – Nutridinha (Kerri Chandler Alternate Mix) – Lusafrica

Passion Dance Orchestra – Inner Dance – Inner Music

Kunuyuki – Prescious Hall – Natural Resource

Soha – Les Enfants Du Bled – Africanism

Moodymann – Silence in the Secret Garden – Peacefrog

Moodymann – LiveinLA 1998 – Peacefrog

House of Gypsies – Sume Sigh Say (Tee’s Ultimate Vocal) – In House Records

Salt City Orchestra – The Book (Bookin da Beats) – Paper Recordings

Reunion – Strange Attention (Seiji Remix (Vocal)) – Sonar Kollectiv

Plutonia – Wear Your Size – Visions

Paul Johnson – Aww Sh*t – Relief Records

Mixxvibes – PMS – Music Plant

Surgeon – Magneze – Downwards

Robert Hood – Tactel – M Plant

Jacek Sienkiewicz – New Direction – Recognition

Acid Scout – Holographic A1 – Kurbel

Clark – Clip – Planet E

Willie Hutch – Brothers Gonna Work It Out – Motown

Gigs

ASR Pre-Movement Party (Detroit Contemporary)

Leave a comment

Steve Roy will be performing a live experimental, minimal techno set along side Christian Bloch, Wraith, Katakonda, Tristan Watkins, Andew Ahrendt, and Minimalistic.

This will take place May 23 11:59pm-6am.

More details soon at ASR

The Detroit Contemporary is a shit-hot venue. One of my favorites in the world. Pitch-black, all headz, holds about 100-150. It’s the business.

I hope to sleep more than 4 hours tonight (what I’ve averaged this week) so I don’t sleep through my flight in the AM…

Next update from another continent. I hope to make many on the way. Toodle-oo.

Gigs

Bleep NYE

Leave a comment

I arrived at Public Life around 9, and I was one of the first there. It was surprisingly empty early, and most people came and went much more than I ever would have expected. I still hadn’t had a drink by 9:40, so I started then. My set started off really shaky, for about the first 5 or 6 mixes. People told me later that they couldn’t tell, but I dunno if I buy that. The recording will clarify for everyone how crap I started out. However, by the 30 minute mark I had hit my stride more-or-less, and from then on in it was all good. People kept filing in, and more people came to the dance floor. By the time 11:00 rolled around, I’d gone from 5 dancers to nearly 50, and then I really had some fun, playing way more techno than I’d planned. It went over so well! I can’t believe how receptive the crowd was. It is such an amazing feeling to DJ for a crowd that has the same musical vocabulary as you, I can’t explain what a difference that makes. More than any ‘breakthrough’ this year, I think that one is the most impressive to me. I really had an amazing time while DJing that last hour of my set tonight. It completely healed all that ailed me. Afterwards Toby hailed me for an ovation, which was really cool, if embarrassing. I don’t handle accolades well, so it was a bit awkward, but really warming.

Gigs

Retractor

Leave a comment

Friday: Left work around 1:00, drove with Lindsey to find Hertz – couldn’t find it for 1/2 hour – turns out it’s at the airport. Go to Hertz counter – they don’t take Check Cards. Try every place (Budget’s rate is $75/day) and wind up @ Dollar (who required a $350 hold on the card which will no-doubt make my life hell this week, and possibly result in overdrafts – ugh). Finally get Lindsey’s car back to her work and hit the road around 3:15 – now two hours later than planned. Miss most of the traffic until upper I-270, then sit through hell and conjestion for most of the next hour. Arrive in Detroit a little after Midnight. Casey meets us there soon before 1:00 to check us in (we got a drink in the mean-time), then headed over to the Sweetwater Tavern (one of my favorite places in Detroit) for a late meal and drinks. Got to bed around 3:00. Got good sleep! Would need it…

Saturday/Sunday: Wandered downstairs to meet Traxx and Casey @ 2:00 to run errands and get food while Lindsey woke up. Wound up not getting any food until 7:00 when we ate @ the Loco Bar & Grill (another of my favorite places in Detroit). The grilled cheese and fries was the only food I got all day… Went back to the hotel and started to work on a bottle of Rum & Coke. Went to the party soon before 11:00. The venue (2030 Grand River) is the old submerge building – a place with tons of musical history. The sound was very echo-y, and people still weren’t showing up. Lindsey went on @ 12, and played a nice set. Unfortunately, there still were very few people although it looked like it might fill up for a while. I got on @ 1:30 and played til 3. Traxx brought a Minidisc recorder and we got discs earlier in the day, so I have a recording of my performance in Detroit! Things were slightly shaky at first, between getting the bass out of the monitors, to cranking them up and adjusting the weight on one of the tunrtables, which skipped and ruined one of my first mixes, but after that it went really well (I think – still need to hear it). I had at least one nasty mix when Cali and Steve were saying goodbye in the middle of an already ill-conceived mix. People were mostly watching T. Linder in the other room for his set – most of the crowd were his freinds, but I made one bartender very happy, and I had a blast. I don’t think I’ve ever put that much of myself into a set, regardless of how the outcome may have been. Anyway.. I can’t wait to hear the set! The bit I heard last night got me excited.

Traxx came on after me, and played 2 1/2 hours of really tight, minimal chicago-y beats with proliferous layers. It was crazy… The cops showed up at 5:30 and closed the party down. We got back to the hotel really late, and didn’t get to bed ’til around 7:30 after hanging with Traxx and his friend Tiny in their room for a while. Great people! Casey called just after we fell asleep, then we woke up @ 11:30. We didn’t really get on the road after breakfast until around 2, so… we just got home @ 11 after returning the rental car and all that. Crazy weekend! Much to do this week…

Gigs

Eclectic Set at The Blue Room

Leave a comment

Last Sunday I spun the craziest set of my life @ The Blue Room. It went something like this:

-3 Wax Trax classics, on the dancier side of things

-Chris & Cosey

-2 Depeche Mode Violator era rarities

-Erasure remixed by Thomas Fehlmann

-Pet Shop Boys remixed by Mark Kinchen

-4 or 5 early “ravey” techno (but good not stupid) tracks and early Tresor stuff from Sun Electric, 3MB Thomas Fehlmann

-3 of my tracks

[drops the first and only record, all else was on CD] Nobukazu Takemura’s remix of Yo La Tengo

-The Sea & Cake’s “A Man Who Never Sees A Pretty Girl That He Doesn’t Love Her A Little”

-Human Resource’s “Dominator” (abrubtly cut short when I was informed this type of music – cheesy rave stuff – is forbidden in their contract, which didn’t bother me any, the joke was already over)

-concluding with the Jack Dangers remix of David Byrne’s weird industrial project “Forestry”.

It was a lot of fun, even if I scared about a dozen people off. 🙂

Gigs

The Abyss

Leave a comment

So I get a call at around 7:45pm asking me to go down to the club to help set up. I’m making dinner, so I don’t get down there for nearly an hour. All reports about this place leading up to this, my first visit, were horrendously sketchy. After I get in there, the place actually looks surprisingly cool. Kinda like a bigger version of Neo in Chicago – ya know, the all-black paint, weird risers near the walls, long bar, etc. First thing I hear from my friend Greg is that someone was shot with an AK-47 outside the place last weekend. Just what I wanted to hear, regardless of how factual it was.

So… when we arrive none of the sound is in place. After an extremely tedious process of moving an entire PA from the downstairs to the upstairs of this club, we start to hook this thing up. The entire DJ booth is run out of one wall outlet. 1500 Watts of power running through one wall outlet. Imagine 7 washer/dryers in one wall outlet. INSANE! Not to mention that all of the PA speakers are hooked up with normal speaker wire, like you and I have at home, from the aforementioned 500+ watt amplifiers. I can simplify all of this by saying it’s a fire code inspectors worst nightmare…. 5 minutes of testing the sound with 2/3rds of the speakers hooked up, the entire DJ booth goes dead. The owner of the club didn’t even know where the fuse box was! He wound up hooking up the DJ booth using the 20 foot extension cords you’d find in your garage to outlets on the other side of the room. WHAT THE FUCK??? THEN, after all of this, and one of the speakers blowing at 1/2 volume, he tells me we have ruined his club. I was about to strangle the guy… There’s just no talking to him. So this process of trying to get things powered back up goes on for another 1/2-hour until 10:05, 5 minutes after we’re supposed to start, and then I go home to get some things taken care of before spending the rest of my night there.

I get back to the club around midnight, and the first thing I hear is that we’re not charging anyone at the door because the sound is not working. My friend tells me his set was interrupted 7 times by the owner asking to shut everything off while he rewired things (did I mention the owner didn’t show up until 45 minutes before we started)? I immediately have to jump into a conversation between one of the managers and a guy who is distantly affiliated with us that was trying to fix the sound, telling him to back off, that it was a totally futile effort. During the next 45 minutes we lost the monitors in the DJ booth twice, the second time the owner told us to go on without them… I just left. What a disaster.

Did I mention we had maybe 45 people of an expected 500??? Apparently word had gotten out about the danger of the night (probably a good thing all things considered), and the ravers steered clear. My friend’s warnings that we didn’t want to tarnish our reputation in such a shady venue rang completely true.

Cheers to Lev, the Czech beer selling for $6.49 at the liquor store next door. I’m the only person who buys it so they’ve got a huge backstock that’s dropped over $2 in price since I first tried it. It’s got a picture of a guy that looks like Shakespeare on the 6 pack. Well recommended after a frustrating night of anything. 🙂