Hello, I’ve been a bit lazy for the past week – but thankfully not too much seems to have happened in the freeform world, so I’m safe.

Anyway, I managed to get to the Enough/Hell’s event last night, and it was good fun. Shinjuku M’s is located smack in the middle of Tokyo’s biggest red-light/gay district, and not somewhere I frequent too often. Cue me getting lost among the dodgy side streets,  and no doubt looking like someone in search of just the right kind of host/hostess bar while I gazed at all the signs.

All that meant that I was late arriving, and only caught the end of Minagi’s opening set. The part I heard was great though, finishing off with Guld’s remix of Heartbreaker and then Alanamra. Minagi said afterwards that he had started off with hard house, before upping the bpm and going a bit more NRG style…he might be doing something similar next month, too.

To be honest, I mainly went to the event to hear KA->NA’s set, and so the DJs following Minagi were a bit hit and miss. Mostly playing psych of different varieties, there were some good tunes from Hell’s Gate member MKT (who Zio tells me will be playing at the 1st Anniversary event), and some brilliant warping psytrance from take-de-x. Zio himself played some kind of tech-dance that I don’t really understand, but then darkened it up with some hardstyle towards the end.

KA->NA told me beforehand that she was going to play freeform, and as an indicator of her play style, the first tune was perfect – Rx’s Eternal Cannon remix! To be honest it doesn’t get too much play time here, but whenever I hear it in Finnish mixes it appears towards the end/after everyone has warmed up a bit. None of that this time, blazing in with it right away, and following up with Betwixt & Between’s Tindaros – very original selection. Halfway through, things turned a little more J-Core, with some Alabaster game music reworks that were mixed in nicely, but changed the mood a little too much (especially coming after Psychopath). Maybe wisely, KA->NA darkened things up again after that, with Mirage followed by….something I can’t remember. Hm, I’ll check about that. It was a great set, anyway, and I’m going to have to be on top of my game next month – we’re going to be playing one-after-another (me first, from the looks of things). Have to make sure we don’t play the same tunes, though!

After that, a particularly dismal day of work started to catch up with me, and so I bailed out almost as soon as KA->NA’s set ended (and walked home from Shinjuku, which doesn’t take very long at all, happily). It seemed that things were going back to psych-style for the rest of the evening, anyway, so hopefully I didn’t miss anything else TYFTH-worthy. The attendance was pretty reasonable, but it was obvious what kind of problems a VS event has – the two groups weren’t really interested in the other’s DJs, and so KA->NA’s and (in particular) Minagi’s sets drew far less people than they deserved to. Still, it exposes a few more people to the Hell’s Gate style, which can only be a good thing.