Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Part of the Weekend Really Never Dies

One of these things is not like the others...

Warning: This post only works 2 days a week.

So we're halfway through "Rock-tober" (or should that be "Electroctober" given the predominant genre of events this month?), and it's really going quite swell. I'm sure recovering from a hernia has never been this fun.

A week ago I attended my first Nagisa Music Festival, a day-long event that happens in spring and autumn here and features an array of local DJ talent with a few obscure gaijin acts. It has big hippie roots, with a lot of psy-trance and conga drum groups, but there was a solid dnb and electro base too, and the small crowd (mostly driven away by the rain) responded in kind. I have one photo I took on my cell - will get it up when I manage to work out why it won't send on an email.

One week later, and I'm recovering from a 3 day weekend that started with everybody's friends Soulwax and ended with my good mates Pitch Black.

Soulwax was intense - big convoy of gaijin a la the JET program boys & girls, plus Mio and myself made for a quality outing. The venue was a little packed and badly-airconditioned (what is it with these guys only playing hot sweaty venues in Japan?), but fantastic. My mate Piers nabbed an awesome shot of them at Park Life in Melbourne - their set-up was the same in Osaka.

Their set included wonderful live versions of Miserable Girl and KracK, along with covers of tracks by LCD Soundsystem (Get Innocuous) and Daft Punk (Robot Rock). Soulwax have done a good job of reinventing their live side just when their DJ work was beginning to feel a little old-hat.

They did put on a DJ set afterwards, and it was by no means terrible, full of oldies-but-goodies and a couple of newer tracks (eg. Don Rimini's Let Me Back Up), but yeah a lack of flow mixed with the length of the set meant I wasn't really cheering for an encore.

Pitch Black (@Triangle with Extrawelt, Sunday 10/12) were also in good form, and I was glad I didn't miss them as I did last year. I've only managed to catch them once before, opening for Salmonella Dub, and their computers crashed 10 mins in. Ah well - this time they didn't disappoint.
Triangle being the small club that it is, I took the chance to grab them for a few photos (and shots of tequila). After all, they played Soliton, my all-time favourite dub track, so the least I could do is get drunk with them.



Rest of the photos can be found on my Facebook or flickr.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're such a groupie!!!! I bet you slept with them all too?

djbigted said...

Of course ;P

Anonymous said...

you such a player!
i thought you were "listening to" Drawn Together next to me that night...
i should've never gone to sleep alone.

...Luis time.

djbigted said...

Hahahaha no I meant Pitch Black on Sunday darling. I don't sleep with 40 year old Belgians. Only 40 year old Kiwis.