Guld has just started up a SoundCloud account for those tunes that won’t/can’t get a release anywhere else, and first up we have his recent Solid State Scouter-based track, Final Revenger. I’m sure most people know it from his MySpace, and I’ve played it online a couple of times too…it’s a great tune, I still like that intro a lot. The file’s only 192kbps though, so it might not be one to play through a big PA…
It’s always nice to find some new material from Technorch - I’ve been a fan since the days of Gothic System, and really like his oldskool style in tunes like Table Talk Music. STRAIGHT is his newest release, a bit of a genre-bender at a relatively low bpm. I was surprised to find myself enjoying this one a lot, from the hard dance filters and kick of the intro to the inventive melody in the breakdown, it’s a quality track. The version up on YouTube comes complete with an amazing music video, courtesy of ace live artist Hiroyuki Takahashi and Maya Spirits.
Looks like the competition for ‘craziest event name in Tokyo’ is still ongoing, but look past that and this could be well worth a visit to Shibuya. HANKY PUNKY has been running since last year, and this time the organisers have managed to book both Guld and Eclipse’s DJ ni-21 to play alongside the rest of the lineup (including Morphonics, previously HASHIMOTO). Morphonics and ni-21 both played great sets at Eclipse a couple of months back, with plenty of schranz/hard techno/NRG in there.
At the last minute I wandered along to this one at the weekend, and it turned out to be a really nice event with one of the ‘happiest’ atmospheres for a long time. Sadly I couldn’t make it in time for DX Pasta’s DJ set, but I met up with a lot of the raver crew (including DJ Takehiro, who I haven’t seen since we played at Last Dance together).
As usual the quality is pretty suspect, but I took a quick video of the epic b2b session at the end of the event. A couple of the crowd had climbed on to the speakers by this point, and slightly cheesy hard trance or not, it was very good fun.
In a couple of hours I’ll be playing a quick Paocala/Alek Szahala only set on ustream, so here’s the stream for anyone who happens to check TYFTH this evening. I ended up going to an event last night though (Get Hard Back, some video coming tomorrow), so I’m already starting to fade a bit. I might not be able to manage much more than an hour or so, but let’s see how it goes…
Talking of ustream, I wasn’t planning on doing much tomorrow as I’m trying to get that remix finished (nearly done now), but if anyone’s interested I’ll be playing an Alek Szahala-only set for an hour or two (and I’ll stick to that this time!).
This is bad timing for most people west of Asia, but Hardcore Tano*C has just started in Shibuya. Brilliantly, they’ve set up a ustream feed for people who can’t make it - sorry I didn’t know about it earlier, but I’ll embed it here for the time being. No Alabaster this time (which is the main reason I haven’t gone), but Betwixt & Between is playing a B2B set with Technetium later in the evening, which’ll really be one to look out for. Looks like a pretty big crowd, with the kind of…special atmosphere you usually get at Tano*C.
More from SoundCloud - this time it’s an amazingly creative DJ set from Betwixt & Between. The nazo part of the title means ‘mystery’, and the mix lives up to it with mashed up vocal tunes, hard(core) techno sections and some NRG/freeform towards the end. Most of these vocal tunes would be painful in the extreme at normal speed, but at this bpm and joined by a massive kick they work really well. The mixing’s impressive too, it feels quite similar to one of Betwixt’s NRGetic Romancer Live PAs.
Really worth checking out, then - and while you are on the TOTAL DISCOMMUNICATION page, why not have a listen to some much older Betwixt tracks that were recently uploaded too.
A quick reminder that tonight I’ll be playing another live set on ustream, starting at 11pm Tokyo time once again. I’ve been rounding up a few tunes (still plenty of rounding to do before this evening, though) and there will be some brand new freeform and NRG this time (as well as the promos from last week).
Over on the Stand and Fight post’s comment section we’ve been talking about hard techno/hardcore and Betwixt’s high bpm tunes. It suddenly reminded me about WILD PARTY’s set last month at NRGetic Romancer vs ever free. He started off around 175bpm, and things just kept getting faster - a lot of the tunes were on the happier side of things, and not really hard techno, but he gradually darkened up the set as it went along, finishing with Unam Sanctum. I was really impressed with WILD PARTY - it was the most technical hardcore set I’ve seen for a long long time, and the preparation/practice that must have gone into it is something a lot of harder DJs could learn from. Just a shame that this is such a short clip…
