Club History Part 2.

This is the final part of this BBC4, 3 part series looking into the birth of dance and its continued degeneracy at the hands of American club culture.  I signed off last time with the words fuck my life, or something similar.  Yeah that was pretty prophetic to say the least.

It starts off OK with a look at DJing with DJ Greg Credit to the Edit Wilson explaining the basics of beatmatching and a classic clip of him doing the same on the tube.  Works up through hip hop exploring the whole two turntables mixer style and lands firmly in Ibiza some time in the mid 80's.

Alfredo playing various tracks from the broadest beats around to a mega diverse crowd, something to get the crowd moving no matter who they are.  Its a leftfield choice but also quite a good pick,  I would have gone with Ron Hardy at the Muzic box here, but its how house and acid was seen outside the states.  Later on its Danny Rampling transporting these sounds back to Shoom and dear old Oakie at Spectrum and later mixing the Happy Mondays album Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches, bringing in the rock kids to the clubs, See also Stone Roses Fools Gold.

Its still bearable at this point, it talks to Normal Cook aka Pizzaman  Fatboy Slim, about DJing and such and the crowds, and Tiesto's "single handed" creation of trance as a gay form of techno. But mainly its about crowd adulation, playing the same style for 8 hours, making cash before burning out and coming back with a more varied sound.   TBH this is still the best thing he ever did.

From then on its down hill all the way with the rise of the mega club and the mega DJ and the whole EDM Degeneracy.  You get a bit of David Guetta, with some Kelly Rowland crossover that finally got the Yanks to play dance on the radio opening the doors for Black eyed Peas and all the other stuff that makes me weep.

Worse we have Steve Aoki a dude that's taken to DJing while prancing about like a little twat. No actual mixing here just poncing about and lobbing cake at the audience when he plays specific tones in his pre mixed sets.  The audience lap it up like Pavlov's Dicks that they are, and I couldn't shift the whole Brasseye  Drugs episode they must have something wrong with their Shatners Bassoons.

It then calmed the fuck down with a few bits and pieces from underground DJs the Black Madonna and Midland (me neither). I have just googled Mike Read's Stalker and her and have been pissing myself laughing as its an uncanny resemblance.

In retrospect if you can ignore the last 30 minutes of this its all you  need to know about DJing plus all the real heroes here are limited to a few sound bites such as Jeff Mills and Nina Kraviz which is a shame as her and Helena Hauff are probably the vanguard of what I call real DJing and welcome female perspective to boot.

TXK

So we finally got this to download and install.  Its an awful lot of work that for once was basically only a download code on a receipt.  We are down my aunts place in the country and decided to take advantage of her Wifi to do bits and pieces and install a few things on my Vita while I can.

I was going to write a massively long post about this being a bastard to do on PSN but once I worked out that my email had to be lower case then it was plain sailing from there.  Code was redeemed and the whole thing downloaded without a hitch.

If you have not guessed (or Googled this) already then I'll say one thing, this is a Jeff Minter game, if you aren't a big retro fan step away its not for you.  Loading this up and hearing some storming acid blaring out of a vector style title screen, you know this is going to be great.  Looking at the credits and seeing basically an old school ascii art of some sheep along with credits to Eugene Jarvis and Benoit Mandelbrot, I get the feeling this is what a rework of Llamatron or Ancipital would look like instead of another revision of Dave Theurers Tempest.

Music is another thing that they get right, whether its a full scale acid or hardcore or even some less frenetic house and trance tracks, there is a full credit listing for all music and a bandcamp page if you wish to buy it.

Of course this means nothing if the gameplay isn't that great and I can happily say that it is.  It gets hard, fast but that is part of the appeal, it will not hold your hand or make it easy its old school and fun.  You have to shoot everything that moves while moving round the grid, please make full use of the analogue nubs as it makes it easier (not much but it does) and collect the little plus signs for power ups.  You'll get a smart bomb, a better laser and an A.I droid that looks a lot like a pollen grain
under intense magnification. Worth the wait of me keeping hold of this,  a deserved 9 yaks out of 10.

Finally here is a few late round up articles,  EA are going to add women players to their popular yearly football cash cow, something I've wanted for ages.  I can only hope they'll be a lesbian equivalent of this previously homoerotic glitch. 
Also a bit of confirmation bias here but here is a bit on Liz Jones about teh Pr0n in the Fail on Sunday, if you've read here long enough then you'll know my stance on porno.

Acid Day Round up.

You'll get three, yes three postings over the bank holiday period so hold on tight as I'll take you on a trip up town and have a few round up of smaller news too.

PS2 to get unofficial Sixaxis support.

I never did actually grade up to PS3, what with the rise of online consoles, online updates, RROD / YLOD and the fact that the TV I used for gaming before fucking off to the darkside of portable gaming, was basically a tiny CRT portable, means that I don't know if those new dualshocks for PS3 and PS4 was backwardly compatible with the humble PS2 (hint they aren't).  

Ginger and TV for comparison.

However it looks like someone is finally getting their act together and hacking back support for those newer Dualshocks.  Looking at his Cheeky Github it seems there is also a library there for Wii as well so as long as you have a means to read homebrew on either Wii or PS2 then it seems that its worth a punt.  For me I don't have a PS3 or PS4 Dualshock to test out so no go here.

ACID Day.  (: ) )   
A trip up town today to see if they have this in stock, and came home disappointed (well sort of). I didn't get it as I crucially forgot its name but came up trumps in other regards. 

First of all a trip to Phonica as they are boss, and looking in there they have the new Luke Vibert album, Ridmik, if you liked Ace Of Clubs on FirstCask records then this is right up your alley, its acid all the way with Proper Gander being my highlight and track of the year.  They also had Interfunks off shoot Fatjack on his own label Acidicted with the superior Acidflash and  passed up on a promo version of Karim Sahraoui on Transmat (with bonus Strings Of Life). 

We thought we would look into Sounds of the Universe on the corner of Wardour Street and see if they had it.  They always have weird stuff so if you want that old afrofunk album its the place to look as they are boss.
Still couldn't think what it was on but looking through their stacks of house they had Paranoid London Paris Dub 2 which was one of my tracks of last year.  Massive old school acid monster and I'm having that.  We decided to veer off onto to the gay bit and see if an old arcade is still around, yup and  had a few pinballs for play but they were fucked.  Metallica pinball wouldn't even give us a game and lost about a quid on Pacman ball.

All in all a good trip out.

Hiatus

We'll not be updating for a while so to tide you over here is a short video we made to get you in the mood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsjjsB8-LKI

Ne Yo Beautiful Monster 80's Cover.

Contains 303 beats and Chris Crocker.