Thanks again to Soham for this great clip of KA-NA playing at the last Hell’s vs Trance Enough event. As usual it’s Alek Szahala overload, with the very underplayed Hydra followed by Man Eaten – typical of her style.
I was meaning to post about Alabaster’s latest two-track EP a few days ago, but I hadn’t heard the full versions of the tunes. That’s all sorted now, as Alabaster very kindly gave me a promo CD at last night’s NRGetic Romancer.
The first track on the CD, Tungsten, shows off his slower style while keeping the brilliant Grimsoul-style synths that he’s perfected lately. The breakdown brings in a classic Alabaster melody that rolls along with some nice acidy sounds at about 150bpm.
Revenant is a real stormer of a track, with the usual lovely filtered synths and a great pace about it – as soon as I heard this one I could imagine it working perfectly on a dancefloor. As well as being some of Alabaster’s best work, it might even be one of the best freeform tunes I’ve heard anywhere in the last few months.
Aquanox – Meteor Rain by Aquanox
Aquanox is back again with two more high bpm freeform tunes, and both are really worth checking out. My favourite is Meteor Storm, which builds up a brilliant atmosphere with the chorals and detuned acid. I think I like the first half more than the second, but it’s a very well structured track, one of his best so far.
The other tune is Chupakabra, a really pacy track with plenty of acid. There are some great sounds in this one, and you’ll find it on Aquanox’s SoundCloud.
Operation Karma has been and gone, and so here are a few of the videos from the event. It’s taking me a long while to upload them all, so for the time being I’ve focused on the freeform DJs.
Anyway, first up is DJ MT, who followed Dairin’s hard house with uplifting freeform. The first half of the set was very much UK style, but things got darker/harder as it went on and finished with the Karma anthems of Operation Stardust and Ephexis’ Quantum Fury (both slightly edited by MT himself). Here he is playing Epyx & Cyrez’s Heroes for Sale.
Check the rest of the post for videos from Kaz-B and KA-NA.
A few of us at Romancer didn’t know too much about Bootek until recently, so Guld has been passing this video around as a good example of what his style sounds like. Maybe not what we usually hear at NRGetic Romancer, but it really seems like it’d be hard not to enjoy one of his mashed up sets.
I was at Takuya Angel’s shop in Harajuku again today, and it reminded me about this footage from his fashion show in the US last November. All the designs are by Takuya himself, and that’s him on the decks in the background, playing his own tune. A few of these outfits might be a little (!) too neon for NRGetic Romancer, but I’m always impressed by his work – apparently the next Tokyo show is in July.
Aquanox – Killer Bee by Aquanox
A very welcome return to production for Hungarian artist Aquanox, who disappeared for a long while after a few nice releases a year or two back. Killer Bee is a 160bpm acid track, and while it doesn’t quite match up to Thunderbird it’s great to hear his different take on dark freeform – hopefully there’ll be more tunes on the way soon.
Suge’s tracks have found their way into a few mixes lately, so this promising release is nicely timed. Check out the crossfaded demo on the release page – there are some very nice sounding tracks from Suge himself, as well as guest tracks from Alabaster, Betwixt & Between, ziki_7 and Takumi Yamamoto. Hydra is a really nice tune with a bit of an old-skool Betwixt meets modern-day Betwixt feel to it, and even if the bpm is pretty high it seems like it might pitch down well. I’m not familar with the Alabaster tune yet, but the clip is sounding good…
The CD will be on sale at M3 2010, which seems to be a tech market held every year in Tokyo -not sure I’ll be able to get there though, so I hope it’ll be available somewhere else too.
Guld’s latest track is now all finished, and a preview is up on his MySpace. Final Revenger is actually something like Solid State Scouter Part II (using the vocal samples and the main melody), but this one has a very different feel. The preview starts about halfway through, but it has also has an amazing intro, very Voices of Babylon-style and one of the nicest I’ve heard for a while.
Be careful with the volume when you open his page by the way, some considerate souls seem to have added auto-starting spam videos/audio to the comments section…
The return of Operation Karma is this Sunday, and the timetable looks perfect. You can see the lineup above – it’ll be a long night, but I’ll definitely be getting there early to see Dairin’s set.