Back from Asakusa and a fun night at ECLIPSE. Guld was headlining of course, and I headed over there with Cogi just in time to catch the end of Morphonic’s set – it wasn’t the NRG he used to play, more like fairly mainstream techno, but for the last couple of tracks he played much older material from his Hashimoto days (and the crowd predictably enjoyed that more).

Guld followed right after Morphonics, and his selection was pretty much perfect for the event. The bpm was fairly low for the whole set, around 160, and he ran through a lot of older tracks while throwing in tunes like Android Lime’s Sunray remix and Hase’s Disintegration. The video at the top of the post was his intro, using a tune from anime classic Akira before going straight into Requiem.

The rest of the night was a lot slower and heavy on the hard house, but definitely had its moments. DJ ni-21 was technically fantastic, and even if I wasn’t too keen on many of the tunes, his mixing really kept the interest up. DJ 204 finished the event with a very varied set, going from chunky hard house to cheesy J-pop remixes, via the occasional hard trance tune. The highlight of his set (for me) had to be a hard house remix of Slipmatt’s 1993 hardcore classic from SMD 1. I was dancing at the time and forgot to take a video, but here’s the original – weirdly I was listening to this track in one of his live sets just a couple of days ago.

I was thinking of going to an oldskool jungle club on the 26th, but looks like that’ll have to wait. Organised by Tokyo Hardcore Construction’s Kanon, Illegrrrls will round up the best female DJs in Tokyo’s harder scene for an awesome looking event. A look at the genres on the flyer was enough to get me interested, but now I’ve managed to find the full lineup of artists, too:

Kanon (TOKYO HARDCORE CONSTRUCTION/Party Pill)
KA-NA (operation karma-業-)
DJ ギズモ [GIZMO] (ever free/C-NEON）
DJ AEMI（夢音v.2 DiH / WEEKENDER / SUNRISE）
Milky (IScream/TWIST)
Siki (LunaticSabbath/Android）
MIYUKISS

This took place yesterday afternoon in Roppongi’s Studio FORUM, it was another of the mainstream/harder combination events that seem to be cropping up here pretty regularly now. I was thinking about heading down there just to catch Minagi and KA-NA’s sets, but Sunday evening isn’t really the best time for me to be dancing myself into the ground…

A lot of the regular crowd made though, including Soham who took some really nice video through the afternoon/evening. Here I’ve concentrated on the harder DJs (minus Minagi, sadly), but check Soham’s YouTube profile too if you’re after some of the more sedate stuff.

First is KA-Na, by the way – that’s definitely the kind of bpm to play Full Metal Jacket! Follow the link for videos from Kanon and AEMI.

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Guld is playing at this event in Asakusa later in the month, alongside other guest DJ Morphonics. I’m not familiar with any of the other artists, but apparently Morphonics has been around for a long time (previously under a different name though) and was a big influence on Cogi. I haven’t been to Asakusa for a while (and never to a club there), so I’m quite looking forward to this.

Just a quick reminder that I’ll be playing a few Hard NRG/freeform tunes from 11pm Tokyo time on Saturday evening. It won’t be anything too organised, but we had a nice little group in there last time, so feel free to drop by the USTREAM page to join in/say hi.