Nomic has yet another great tune under construction, and an almost complete preview is now up on his site. Black Lotus starts off very nicely with a lot of pace, but that beautiful melody joining the piano in the breakdown is where the track really comes to life…
The Sauna Boys – In The Heat [Unreleased] by FINRG Recordings
A bit late with this news, but congratulations to everyone connected with FINRG for the amazing download figures we’ve had since the label went free last year. 50,000 downloads is fantastic, and means FINRG must be reaching all corners of the hardcore scene these days. Hopefully we can take things to the next level once the new website is fully up and running, but in the meantime the FINRG crew have made Sauna Boys’ In the Heat available as a ‘thank you’. It took a while to hunt this one down again, which caused the delay in the release, but it’s still a really nice track. Grab it as usual from the FINRG SoundCloud.
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.
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.
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.
This was a couple of weeks ago now, but the footage of ConfigSys playing in the middle of a forest at night was too good to ignore. Now and then the video cuts to some very chilled out morning raving too, but it’s the night scenes that show ConfigSys in typically full flow.
Finally it’s time to post a quick review of the last Romancer. With all the guest artists and the ever free 4th floor, it ended up being one of the best for a long time, with a pretty high turnout of ravers from different scenes. Guld put in a huge amount of work for this one, so well done to him, and all of us were pretty busy for the whole night. That means that there might be a few gaps when it comes to photos/video…
Before the event it was great to meet up with Jody 6 again, and we ended up giving Bootek a quick tour of the crazier corners of Harajuku. Bootek was another genuinely nice guy, and it was pretty educational talking to him about the hard dance scene in the UK…the scale of events/what labels get up to is like something from another planet for us 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!
Thanks to Aryx for letting me know about his newest track – this version is obviously just a preview (played on Audiosurf), but it’s really promising and show’s how he’s improving with every tune. Personally I reckon this melody is easily a level or two above Chaldea’s, so fingers crossed that the rest of the track will keep the level this high.
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.