Last night was the first installment of Kanon’s new event, Illegrrls, and it was probably one of the best events so far this year. The whole concept is fantastic (only harder genres, with a girl-only lineup), so to see such a big crowd supporting it was really encouraging. The scene here’s been a bit disappointing recently, but Kanon managed to bring together ravers from all kinds of different groups for this one. I met a few DJs for the first time, as well as a lot of really nice people from events I don’t usually go to.
Anyway, I decided to go to the event at the very last moment, so after catching the last train and getting lost in Kabukicho (again) on the way to the club, the first couple of DJs had already played. I arrived just as Siki was playing her dark psy set. It was excellent stuff, if a bit more mainstream than Cogi’s style.
Next was Gizmo, playing a mix of hard house, psy and hard trance. Some of the tracks were great, but the selection switched the mood up a bit too often for most people.
Following Gizmo was AEMI, who played schranz and hardcore. After some technical problems at the start her set was a big hit, switching between uplifting and dark, and always high bpm.
KA-NA was next, with yet another awesome set. Almost 100% Finnish, she started off with Nomic’s Extinguish, following that with tracks like Sam One’s Code of Silence remix, Crank Cleopatra and Pain on Creation and DJ Rx’s Super Sonic. Apart from stopping to take the video above, I was dancing for the whole hour or so – I’m paying for it today, but it’s impossible not to when the set is exactly what I’d play if I was allowed such high bpms at Romancer. Betwixt & Between and Minagi were the other two at the front of the dancefloor, which shows she’s doing something right.
Unfortunately I was exhausted afterwards and forgot to take any video of Kanon’s gabber set, but it was well up to her normal standards, and even had me dancing again by the end. The club was really packed at that point, I really hope that we’ll see more of this event in the future.
Sounds like it was one hell of an event! Wonder if I’ll ever be in one of those…
they it sounded good!! a like them funky lights
BerN
Does that mean you’re taking up DJing? I used to wonder the same thing about Romancer…so who knows, maybe one day 🙂
Dale
Yup, they were very cool…it was probably Kanon’s idea, the design at THC is always awesome.
Actually, I have been thinking about that, but there are obvious problems. I have no experience with DJing and no means of getting into it at the moment. Maybe when I go to Lisbon next year, I’ll be able to go to some sort of DJing course. I don’t know… how did you start?
Plus, if I was a DJ, I’d want to put some good Freeform, not Black Eyed Peas’ I got a Feeling…
However, with my above post, I only meant being there, enjoying the good music and atmosphere. D;
Sorry for the late reply BerN!
When it comes to DJing, vinyl obviously isn’t really an option for freeform anymore…even when I was into drum & bass I used CDs (which means I’ve never owned a lot of my favourite tunes…), and now of course I’ve gone the digital route, so one of those two would definitely be the best way to start.
Handily I live about 20 minutes from Vestax HQ, where they have all their digital/CD/vinyl setups ready to try out, which helped with the decision making 🙂 My current setup is just about the best available right now, I think (VCI-100 and an Audio 4 DJ interface, Alabaster uses the same), but they have just released some cheaper ‘entry level’ kind of MIDI controllers with interfaces included – they don’t cost the earth and seem like they would be a fairly good introduction to more complex controllers or CDJs…
Incidentally, I noticed at the weekend that Inugami’s setup is pretty similar to mine, but he uses the smaller Vestax VCM-100.
And right, there’d be something wrong about becoming a DJ to play Black Eyed Peas 😉