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.

Continue Reading

A little bit of a late announcement, but in a few weeks we’ll have another NRGetic Romancer, this time a ‘VS’ event with everfree. No news on the lineups yet, but it should be coming soon, along with the flyer design.

The video’s an old one from Cogi’s set last April, by the way – still one of the best events I’ve played at, I think.

It seems like a few people aren’t around for today’s ‘show’, but as it happens I’m also going to be busier than I expected. The hard NRG tunes I was expecting haven’t arrived yet either, so it might be better to delay this one for a little while, maybe sticking to Saturdays? Next week or the week after, then!

Just a bit of early warning that I’ll be playing some tunes on USTREAM again this coming Sunday. Not the 2 and a half hour epic of last time, but I’m thinking for an hour or so starting around 9pm (Japan time). There are a couple of newer Hard NRG tunes I’d like to play this time, as well as the usual faster stuff…

Back from Asakusa and a fun night at ECLIPSE. Guld was headlining of course, and I headed over there with Cogi just in time to catch the end of Morphonic’s set – it wasn’t the NRG he used to play, more like fairly mainstream techno, but for the last couple of tracks he played much older material from his Hashimoto days (and the crowd predictably enjoyed that more).

Guld followed right after Morphonics, and his selection was pretty much perfect for the event. The bpm was fairly low for the whole set, around 160, and he ran through a lot of older tracks while throwing in tunes like Android Lime’s Sunray remix and Hase’s Disintegration. The video at the top of the post was his intro, using a tune from anime classic Akira before going straight into Requiem.

The rest of the night was a lot slower and heavy on the hard house, but definitely had its moments. DJ ni-21 was technically fantastic, and even if I wasn’t too keen on many of the tunes, his mixing really kept the interest up. DJ 204 finished the event with a very varied set, going from chunky hard house to cheesy J-pop remixes, via the occasional hard trance tune. The highlight of his set (for me) had to be a hard house remix of Slipmatt’s 1993 hardcore classic from SMD 1. I was dancing at the time and forgot to take a video, but here’s the original – weirdly I was listening to this track in one of his live sets just a couple of days ago.