I just remembered that I did take a few videos at the last NRGetic Romancer after all – this is probably the best one though, Betwixt & Between playing his remix of Airwave. The floor seems pretty empty for some reason, but it definitely filled up again as his set went on… A few of the best dancers are already there, including Kangu, Soham and Kohaku.
Finnish
Fans of Nomic should rejoice – his new site has just opened, with mixes, track previews and all sorts of other info. It’s still in the early stages, but definitely something to keep bookmarked. Find it here.
Betwixt & Between has recently been experimenting with USTREAM, and now I’ve signed up too. After a quick test last night, I managed to stream my audio while mixing, so if anyone happens to be online around 10pm Japanese time (2pm BST) and is the mood for some freeform, take a look at my USTREAM channel and let’s see if it works well or not…
Seems like it’s possible to chat while in there, so feel free to stop in and say hello – if there’s any interest I’ll play a version of my last NRGetic Romancer set and a few other bits and pieces.
edit: It all went really well…not too many problems with the sound from what I could tell, and it was really nice talking to everyone while fumbling through my mixes. Thanks to BerN, Epyx, Jiipez, Labraska, Alchemiist, J-Mx and Decion for dropping into the room, especially at such short notice.
The massive time difference between here and Europe means that this will only be workable at weekends, so I’ll try to do something similar next Saturday (maybe starting an hour or so later). I’ll also be sure to give plenty of notice next time!
Make sure you’re sitting down before you open this link, as seeing this many tracks at once might be too much for a lot of Alek Szahala fans. After all the recent requests for old material, Alek has put together an amazingly comprehensive list of releases from the earliest tracker days to current work-in-progress tunes. I can’t imagine how much time this must have taken – all we can do is thank him for making such an effort.
I’m a big fan of his old Goa style, so I’ve been checking a lot of that out, as well as listening to his older trancy .xm tunes. As you’d expect, there are also some real gems in the freeform section, with tracks like Phobos, Jinnaya and Luna online for the first time, and his truly amazing edit of Vengeance is up there too. Talking of Vengeance, check out Glacier Queen for a lovely jazz lounge version of the piano melody. The one main regret is that Freezing Clouds has been lost, as that was really a special tune…
Congratulations to Alek too for the release of Crystal Thunder on the Spacesynth Revolution compilation. It’s got a really nice MOD feel to it, and from the preview it sounds like there are some other good tunes on the CD.
Thanks again to Soham for this great clip of KA-NA playing at the last Hell’s vs Trance Enough event. As usual it’s Alek Szahala overload, with the very underplayed Hydra followed by Man Eaten – typical of her style.
Operation Karma has been and gone, and so here are a few of the videos from the event. It’s taking me a long while to upload them all, so for the time being I’ve focused on the freeform DJs.
Anyway, first up is DJ MT, who followed Dairin’s hard house with uplifting freeform. The first half of the set was very much UK style, but things got darker/harder as it went on and finished with the Karma anthems of Operation Stardust and Ephexis’ Quantum Fury (both slightly edited by MT himself). Here he is playing Epyx & Cyrez’s Heroes for Sale.
Check the rest of the post for videos from Kaz-B and KA-NA.
Just to show we’re not only about kickdrums and filtered synths, here’s another wonderful instrumental track to follow Alek Szahala’s Alanamra edit. The Broken Glass is classic Nomic, but this time the drums are stripped away to give us 2 minutes of distilled melancholy. Apparently he wrote this in an hour (!), which is impressive to say the least.
This event was actually Horzi’s first solo gig (his previous sets were all collab/b2b), and this time he combined his own tracks with live guitar in really impressive style. The two tracks here are his remix of My Serenity and the very nice Infernal Psycho – definitely seems like the crowd was feeling it (and that J-Mx knows every single beat of Horzi’s tracks).
Syntse was also playing, so hopefully we’ll be getting some more video from him before too long.
Alanamra (Electronic Symphony Edit) by FINRG Recordings
I’m listening as I write, and predictably lost for words. A slightly retro electronic symphony remake of Alanamra makes perfect sense as soon as you hear it, and like some of Nomic’s slower instrumental pieces it shows again what a talented artist Alek is. I’ve got so many nice memories from playing the original (especially at Hell’s Gate), they all come back listening to this version, too.
Harder Faster has just posted an interview with Proteus, and there are some really interesting thoughts on hard house, reasons why he switched from psytrance to harder styles, and he also mentions that he’s working on his second artist album. Check the whole thing out here.