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.

Thanks to Decion for this short but excellent quality video of Proteus doing his stuff at the most recent Frantic event. I don’t know the tune, but it sounds great…any ideas?

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.

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…

Last Sunday’s set went surprisingly well, and ended up going on for a couple of hours before technical trouble started to ruin things. Huge thanks to Chip and Nisse for taking part right from the beginning, as well as to Twisted Freq and the mysterious Boddingtons (my younger brother back in the UK, in case anyone was wondering). Thanks too to the guests, whoever they might have been - we ended up with a show-record 12 people in there at one point.

Anyway, there’ll be another set this coming Sunday at the same time (11pm Tokyo time), same place (here). All are welcome!

If anyone has some free time tomorrow, I’ll be playing a small set at around 11pm (Japan time) on Sunday night. It won’t be anything as long as the two and a half hour epic of a while ago, but I have a few tunes in mind, at least. I expect that there might be time for a few requests too…