The final Hell’s Gate event ended in fine style on Saturday, with a really upbeat atmosphere despite everyone’s disappointment that another hard event has bitten the dust in Tokyo. The general play style was hard house/hardtrance, but DJ Minagi as well as yours truly played hard NRG/freeform this time. As you might have seen from the timetable a few days ago, I was scheduled to play last, and so didn’t really want to use up what little energy I had left after work by overdoing the dancing – I probably did anyway, though. There were so many DJs this time that my memory of some sets is a bit hazy, but with the help of Soham’s photos and video I hope you’ll get a reasonable idea of what went on.
After MA-X’s (very nice, but poorly attended) hard house/hardstyle set, DJ Aemi came out with some twisted hard house that brought back memories of her Hell’s Gate sets last year. Doing a really good job of warming up the crowd around the midnight slot, it seems like she’s got quite a following – and she’ll be playing at a couple more events in the next few weeks, too.
It was my first time to meet DJ Takehiro (and to see one of his sets), and his selection was quality. Playing UK hard house, he threw in a few anthems (which I didn’t really know) and varied things with breakbeat interludes (check the video below), unexpected melodies, and so on. It was a classy set, and one of the most popular on the night, I think. In random trivia-news, I discovered that Takehiro and myself have both lived in the same part of London (Southfields). Small world, eh?
DJ Minagi deserves a medal this time – not only for his set, which was maybe the best I’ve heard from him so far – but also for making it through the night in one piece. He was struggling with a back problem that made it almost impossible to stand up, never mind dance, and right up to the last moment he wasn’t going to play his set. He managed it though, and came up with a stormer. Similar to his recent Hard NRG set in Chiba, he played Cyrez and Sam One’s Reboot the System and Sam One’s Black Pearl, but the standout track was definitely Nightforce and Substanced’s Operation Stardust. It absolutely blew the place apart, with people shouting along to the Gundam samples (the benefit of playing it in Japan), and I think it’s definitely on the way to becoming an anthem here. This was one set where I danced myself into the ground, and a real highlight.
Minagi might have surprised the schedulers with his faster-than-previous-sets Hard NRG, as A2C followed up with dark hard house/NRG. I’ve seen his sets once or twice before, and although I’ve heard he plays freeform now and then, this was slower, pounding stuff. It was difficult to match the tunes that Minagi had come up with, but it changed the atmosphere nicely and set up Yoshimasa really well for his melodic set.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen ‘the boss’ playing a set, but he was technically really good indeed, and was banging through anthem after anthem, hard dance style. A few of the tunes weren’t really to my taste, but the reaction from the floor was great, and he kept the interest up right to the end. Yoshimasa had also been playing on the Progressive/Techno 4th floor earlier in the evening, he definitely earned his corn this time (after doing all of the booking promotion, too).
Munetica’s set was pretty experimental, with hard trance, oldskool elements, and even bits and pieces of drum and bass. For some reason the crowd died a death for a while during his set (tired after Yoshimasa’s I suppose), with only three or four people keeping things going at one point, but I got the impression that he was taking the chance to try out a few new combinations anyway. One track in particular really worked well, either a remix or a key-locked-sped-up version of a classic early 90s oldskool tune…I can’t for the life of me remember the title (it was about 16 years ago when I first heard it). Have a listen to the video here though, I’m hoping one of the older techno heads out there might be able to ID it. Really good mixing in this clip, incidentally.
Everyone was glad to see Zio actually start his hardstyle set, as there seemed to be a chance that he was going to bail out. After a few too many orange juices he was feeling a bit ‘tired and emotional’ (as they might say in a British newspaper), but somehow he played a great 40minutes or so, with a couple of anthems and a great opening tune (Hellraiser & The Engineer – Legion -For We Are Many). A couple of people mentioned again how great it would be to see ‘NRG Zio’ back again, but the number of shuffling hardstyle fans is definitely growing.
Finally it was my turn (looking a bit tired in the photo above, but at least you can see the t-shirt), and I was definitely worried if anyone would be left to dance by this time. I’d underestimated the quality Hell’s Gate regulars though, a few of whom told me that they’d been saving some dancing energy for my set, and someone else even asked me to play at 180bpm(!). During the last couple of days I’ve had really good feedback, but at the time I was convinced that it was the least successful of my three sets at Hell’s. It could just have been the different atmosphere of a ‘really late’ play time though, and I did keep people dancing for almost all of the 40 minutes…
Here’s the tracklist:
- Booty – Oyagokoro BPM
- Epyx & Cyrez – Subida Del Muerta
- Betwixt & Between – City of Solitude (Guld remix)
- Alabaster – Ziggurat
- Horzi – Blind Faith
- Epyx & Cyrez vs Fea – Untitled (Cyrez Hell’s Gate edit)
- Zio – Glacial
- Alek Szahala – Iron Squid
- Alek Szahala – Voices of Babylon
The idea behind this one was to really go all out from the start (and so played Oyagokoro BPM from the melancholy melody in the main breakdown), then go into more melodic stuff and finish off with some of Alek Szahala’s most danceable/uplifting tunes. Hard to do all that in 40mins, and I came across a couple of tunes last week that changed my mind a bit. Guld’s remix of City of Solitude is incredibly hard, and a really good tune, but a ‘different kind of hard’ to the first two tunes of the set. I had the feeling I might have lost people a little there, when they were expecting more Epyx & Cyrez style. Nobody can resist the mad Guld breakdown in CoS though, so things picked up again there.
I was also planning on playing Alanamra, but decided at the last minute to go for Voices of Babylon, my tune of last year. It was an incredible feeling to finally play it at an event, although I must hold my hands up and admit that I slipped up a bit on the transition between that and Iron Squid. As a ‘thank you’ to Zio, I decided to play Glacial just before the Alek finale. He really appreciated it, which was great, but I wouldn’t have played the tune if it wasn’t a classic, and it really kept up the energy after the ‘Hell’s Gate edit’ track, even if not many people seemed to know who was responsible for it.
Soham’s video (see below) actually starts about 20 seconds into my set, so this gives a good idea of how I started off. Playing Oyagokoro BPM from the breakdown meant that I had to start mixing in Subida pretty quickly, but I think this was my favourite part of the set.
Finally, Zio came back for a final 10 minute ‘belt out some anthems’ session. He wanted to directly mix from my set, which was a great idea, but his first tune was Falling Down! At the time I was hammering along with Voices of Babylon at about 172bpm, and so he asked me to pitch down to 163/4. I could have wept (it’s against my religion to lower the bpm), but he did a brilliant job of pulling off the mix, and it really sounded great. He followed that up with some gabber tracks that I’m not so familiar with, and then the event was over.
There was just time for a final photo-taking session, including that one at the top of this post, and this one in front of about 7 cameras – cue ‘everyone looking in different directions’ hilarities:
Well, that’s that – time to thank all of the Hell’s Gate ravers who really welcomed me during my shortish stint as a DJ there, and danced away through all of my sets – I’m incredibly grateful. Thanks also this time to Mai, Yasuo, Nari, Guld and Alabaster for coming just to hear my set, I was amazed that everyone made the effort for a 4.10 start time…
Finally, the biggest thanks to Zio, for inviting me to play at Hell’s last August. I’m glad my sets went down pretty well, but it’s all thanks to him that I’m now a lot more known in the Tokyo scene, and have joined Hybridize in the meantime too. From now on I’ll be aiming to play at some events in the future, and get some of these mixes out that I keep promising. This has turned into an epic post, but thanks to everyone here too for their help/nice messages about Hell’s Gate, much appreciated.