It’s been a mad couple of weeks since I last posted. Straight after I played at C90’s Summer Bashment party we had the floods, plus I’ve been mad busy with work and a couple of projects, one of which I am releasing now. But first a couple of words about the C90 party – it was idyllic! Just the way parties are supposed to be. All the DJs ate together with the C90 crew before we all clubbed together to get the equipment sorted out – a real collaborative effort. All the people were fantastic, really nice. And best of all the party went OFF. It was full by 11 and stayed full til late – I went at 3AM and it was still packed and jumpin’ by then. The venue was wicked – a GREAT Ethiopian restaurant with dark little venue in the basement – on this occasion half full of a soundsystem, which was fantastic. And musically, it was triumphant, with some varied shades of dancehall and dub. I played a fairly banging set of mainly 80s dancehall, with a bit of roots at the start, climaxing with Yellowman’s ZungeZungZung and Tippa Irie’s Lyric Maker. Rich C90 (http://www.c90.org/) played a really hot, creative dubstep set. Maga Bo (http://magabo.com/) was amazing – almost two hours of Baile Funk, ragga techno and dubstep all cut-up live in Ableton (with a nice 8-way M-Audio controller). Some of it was godsmackingly good and of course lots of it had samples of groovy, poppy Latin gear, though the best of it was this really deep, minimal, throbbing 140bpm bass music with ragga beats. As so often happens with Ableton sets, the mixing was so seamless and perfect that it got a bit relentless at times and you really wanted a rewind, a disjointed element. But it was brilliant. Check out his website – there’s loads of great stuff up there and he’s done some very interesting projects. The main event was Heatwave (http://www.scandalbag.com) playing back to back with RuffNeck Diskotek’s (http://www.myspace.com/ruffnekdiskotek) Tim Dub Boy who were just fantasic. Both Gabriel and Tim were unbelievably tight! And the selection was huge. Plus Heatwave came with Rubi Dan who is just a FANTASTIC MC – I’d absolutely love to work with him.
I shot loads of video but the quality is pretty patchy. I’ll probably stick a few bits on YouTube and I might save out some of the sets as audio files and put them up here as a memento but it’s not quite as good as I hoped it might be. That soundsystem was just too loud!
