DJ Cruze

I have to give a massive shout out to one of my good friends, Alex Harmony, who has just released his first EP “Sonnendeck” on Germany’s Club City Music label. It features two rocking tech house tunes, Artefacts and Sonnendeck. You can check out both of them on the media player on the Club City Music website right now so head on over there.

Artefacts is a great deep and dubby track with its dark vocoded vocal breakdown and Sonnendeck brings us a massive wall of sound that reminds me of an old Orbital track (…I can’t remember which). I think that “sounding like Orbital” is praise enough for his first release and you should look out for the EP on Beatport soon. Make sure you pick it up if you like it deep and dirty!

Big love to you Alex and you beat me to it mate!

Anyone who has seen me DJ’ing knows that I like scratching. I scratch a lot in my DJ sets (although not very much on the podcasts!) and I love to watch technical scratch DJs like Q-Bert, A-Trak and DJ Craze. I got into DJ’ing back in the late 80s because I was a wannabe hip-hop kid. I realised pretty quickly that I was terrible at rapping, even worse at graffiti so I pestered my parents to get me a set of turntables so I could learn to mix and scratch. So I love scratching and turntablism but this video I found via Music Thing is crazy!

DJ Ramsey (an Arizonan DJ I think and not the DJ Ramsey that plays garage over here in the UK) switches turntablism back to the 80s and becomes cassetetapism! He takes two boomboxes and scratches, beat juggles and cuts up tunes by twisting the tape spindle and playing with the tape head. He’s a genius! Check him out:

Via: Music Thing

This has to be THE tune of the summer! I’d never heard of The Whitest Boy Alive but as soon as I heard the Essential Selection last week and this tune kicked in, I immediately recognised the distinctive vocals of one of my favourite singers, Erlend Øye from Kings Of Convenience.

Now Fred Falke has turned this moody little tune into an amazing summer anthem by adding some great electric pianos, a classic Falke bassline and a haunting main synth line. All of that extra production complements Erlend’s haunting vocals and I seriously can’t hear this tune enough.

Check it out on You Tube below:

Here’s the original mix too if you want to hear it. Not as funky as Fred Falke’s mix but it’s still got a nice vibe about it and Erlend’s wicked vocal style.

I forgot to post about this last week but my funky house friend, Simon Jobling aka One Phat DJ, has posted a great interview that he did with the house production team The Bassmonkeys. You can read it here.

Some good insights into a great production team. Nice one Si!

I’ve finally found the time to upgrade my old Wordpress installation which runs this site. After reading far too many security scares and getting scary emails from friends, thanks Si, I thought I’d better get it sorted.

So hopefully you won’t notice any difference but I’ve had a few issues with the podcast feed and my mod rewrite rules. If anyone notices anything wrong, either on the site or via the podcast feed, then please get in touch. Hopefully it’s sorted now but I had to get my Wordpress install to play nicely with Feedburner

Now that I’m down with the cool kids running Wordpress 2.5, I think I’d better get my website in order so watch out for some changes over the next few weeks. I’ve got some good ideas so hopefully I can get them implemented soon. Or perhaps a new podcast would be preferred by the masses! Don’t worry. It’s coming!

Update: Looks like the podcast feeds have been changed so my iTunes downloaded the last 5 episodes again. Sorry about that! You’ll just have to enjoy them all again!

Sorry to all of the trance fans out there but I saw this the other day and thought it was funny. Not that I think that Tiesto isn’t talented, but the interesting translation underneath did make me laugh a lot.

The rather predictable headline above appeared over the weekend after BBC Radio 1 and Pete Tong are blamed for the damage caused at a country house in Devon after schoolgirl Sarah Ruscoe asked for a shout out on his Friday night Essential Selection show. More than 500 people turned up at her parent’s mansion in Colehays, Devon and the four bouncers that they had couldn’t stop the kids from wrecking the house. However, the chaos proved to have snowballed from an ill-advised poster at Torquay grammar school in which everyone in the sixth form invited all of their friends.

After a similar thing happened in Australia where Corey Delaney threw a similar party and 500 people wrecked his parent’s home you’d think that kids would wise up about posting party details in public places. In my opinion it seems like posting this sort of stuff in your school and on Facebook, Bebo or Myspace isn’t really a good idea. When I was at school we still had gatecrashers at parties but it was a lot harder to find out where they were. You certainly wouldn’t get 500 people turning up! Here’s a video of Corey Delaney to amuse yourself at his stupidity.

Update: And now a YouTube video of the mansion party has appeared!

The awesome French duo Justice have released another bomb from their annoying titled † album. It’s a disco monster called DVNO and the video for it is absolutely awesome!

It presents the lyrics using the idents from old TV stations from the 80s, which some of you who are as old as me might well remember. Enjoy!

Via Create Digital Music.

A big thanks to everyone who came down to Schmidts on Saturday night for the Vibration Revival party. I had a fantastic time as you can probably tell by the pictures. Check some of them out here at www.fullhouse.de. Big thanks to Florian for pointing me at these.

I have to say that the crowd were rocking and so were Alex Harmony and Luke45. A great time was had by all but I wish I hadn’t had so much Jaegermeister. Flying back to England when you feel very, very sick isn’t much fun at all. Also, I’m sorry that the party ended early at 3 am. Apparently they were worried about the noise for the flats around the club. Hopefully they can sort that out for next time. Big love to all of the people I had seen for about 8 or 9 years too. It was like coming back to Vibration after a long holiday!

Hope you all enjoyed the party too.

I’m just about to set off to the airport with my headphones, a box of classic house tunes and a party vibe in my soul. See you all at Schmidt’s later on for a rocking “Vibration Revival” party. Mine’s a beer with a Jaegermeister chaser! See you on the dancefloor!