Wow, intense day in NYC. Can’t even put in all the links of activities, so I’ll just say that Sneaks was a blast last night and big ups to Sharmaji and Sunder for throwing a terrific party were people were down for adventurous music (although even within that I saw that the crowd ran away for the 15 minutes I played Post-Fly-Lo/Dimlite stuff…. amazing to me really, this is the stuff that interests me most, but I guess it’s a long stretch to call it dance music and mostly even underground people just want to dance.)

Tomorrow is OVC with the afterparty at Le Poisson Rouge. Then for me Dub War!!! Which I’ve never been to!

But the big news, for me, is that I got added, thanks to DJ N-Ron, to the Eyebeam Mixer party Saturday!!! Sweet! So come out if you can and support this great organization! I’m on from 11-Midnight. Info below!

Saturday, June 20, 9PM – 2AM
Eyebeam: 540 W. 21st St. (btw 10th and 11th Aves.)

Tickets: $15 in advance; $20 at the door.

Purchase tickets here:
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/528/t/9265/shop/index.jsp?storefro…

NYC’s #1 art party is back!
Eyebeam’s warehouse space comes alive with the audience becoming an integral
part of the performance

MIXER: VERSION: Eyebeam presents a remix-inspired spectacular with an iPod rock stage, mobile soundsystem, and a cutting-edge karaoke room among many other delights.

About Mixer
MIXER, Eyebeam’s quarterly event series dedicated to showcasing leading artists in the fields of live audiovisual performance, interactive and participatory art, returns on Tuesday, June 16 and Saturday, June 20, 2009. The upcoming event, dubbed MIXER: VERSION, explores various forms of culture hacking—from software and hardware, to media content and infrastructure.

MIXER: VERSION takes its inspiration in part from the creative approaches of dub reggae music in which an original music recording is remixed by various producers, creating new versions that still reference the original. Within this creative exchange between producers there exists both a competitive spirit and a sense of shared culture.

At MIXER: VERSION, the competition and collaboration take place between the artists and audience through the artwork. Participants can jam on the “rock stage” with hacked iPods, sing ridiculous computer-generated lyrics in the Fever Karaoke room, or produce their own hot audiovisual mixes on the mobile Sansystem. All of that creative magic gets mixed together by our own crack DJs and VJs, so at any given time you might be providing the entertainment for everyone at the party!

Participating Artists
Environment design: fluxxlab with Brian Osborn |  http://www.fluxxlab.com/
Video wizardry: Benton-C Bainbridge | http://www.benton-c.com/
Audio mixologist: DJ N-Ron | http://www.myspace.com/djnronhubbard
Fever Karaoke: Fever Creative | http://www.fevercreative.com/
The World Series of ‘Tubing: Aaron Meyers & Jeff Crouse |
http://www.jeffcrouse.info/news/events/the-world-series-of-tubing/
You and your iPod … on stage: Re-ware | http://dev.eyebeam.org/projects/reware/blog
Hack Your Face: LoVid | http://www.lovid.org/
TV Hijack: OMG I’m On (dot) TV | http://omgimon.tv/wordpress/
Causal Encounters: Intake Manifold | http://intakemanifold.org/hi_eyebeam/index.html
Sansystem: Art Jones | http://www.effectmode.net/selector/sansystem.htm
The Eyebeam Windowfarm: Britta Riley & Rebecca Bray |
http://windowfarms.org/
FIVE: Rashaad Newsome | http://rashaadnewsome.com/

Tuesday night DJ set: DJ N-Ron
Saturday night DJ sets: DJ N-Ron, with Gecko Jones & Uproot Andy (DUTTY ARTZ) and Kid Kameleon (Surya Dub)

Unexpectedly going to be back in NYC! Who knew? And Dave Sharma and Sunder were kind enough to give me a spot at their new weekly SNEAKS! at Rebar in Dumbo! Check it! AND, this is kind of my 30th birthday party, as much as I’m having one, so ya better come, ya heard?

And then I’ll be at the Open Video Conference for Friday and Saturday. So many good people speaking and being there that I don’t even know where to begin praising. AND if that weren’t enough, I’m playing the afterparty at Le Poisson Rouge, which is free to conference goers and and $15 otherwise (and I think that includes open bar!) I’m playing early, 7-7:45, and I think if everything works out I’ll have visuals by Mssngpeces, who I was fortunate enough to meet last year. Lovely.

AND OMG BEN SISTO JUST POSTED THE FLYER AND IT’S F’IN INCREDIBLE!!!!!

Best Poster Ever

Currently listen to this compilation of all the All City 7″ releases (of which there were 8, so I’m not so sure why it got called 7×7). Please people, go listen to this. It’s like this true testimate to how far beat music has come in the last 20 odd years. It incorporates everything that’s interesting and subtle and complex about the stuff that’s Post-Fly Lo (Can we say that now?), but totally showcases the diversity of it all. Snowman’s bangers, Fulgence’s awesome head-noders, Hud Mo’s almost beatless crackles (who knew he had it in him?) And kind of above everything else, Dimlite’s sheer utter brilliance. This man is THE composer of our time. I’m gonna do a full post on him in a bit, but it’s safe to say that both Quiz Tears on this comp and Ravemonds Young Problems on the Beat Dimensions comp are two of the most original pieces of music I’ve ever heard. And every time I play one of them someone comes up to me and says “What the F is that?” but can’t stop smiling!

Hope to see folks in New York. Oh, and, wordpress, thank you so much for fixing everything that was wrong with the interface. You actually making it somewhat enjoyable to blog again!

Tim Staypuft knows what’s what. For a couple years now he’s been touting Skweee! Skweee’s this crazy, kind of simple but kind of infectious strange combination of dancehall, R&B, 8bit music and instrumental pop that basically only comes from Finland, Sweden, and now Norway. The big labels to know are Flogsta Danshall and Harmonia, but recently Oslo has gotten into the act as well with the Dodpop label and put out my two favorite releases so far, entirely Norweigan artists. Apparently 003 and 004 are on the way, can’t wait! Skweee’s weird stuff, but it’s all worth checking out, and I’ve definitely been bitten by the skweee bug! Basically it’s homebase is here, at Nation of Skweee. The added bonus about the whole genre is that it has great art (see below)

Just recently, the awesome Ramp Recordings has put out a whole comp of the stuff called Skweee Tooth that’s an excellent primer on the whole scene. And I wrote an article about it for XLR8R, which is finally up. Check it out!

Currently I’m listening to something that has nothing to do with Skweee … it’s Mux Mool! Check him out!

Currently Listening to J Squared, an Aussie currently living in Tokyo. Found out about him through the Yes Yes Y’all blog which is definitely where I get a lot of my beat gems from. Check em out!

Just thought I’d post a few pics from Surya Dub, just trying to keep folks in the loop. It was an amazing night. The positives were many. Both Sander/Eprom’s set and Mala’s set were truly great in totally separate ways. Eprom is really taking this melding of dubstep and glitch to another level, and doing so with such crazy synths that it goes off almost into prog territory for a minute, but always comes crashing back so hard that it just makes it perfect party music. The west coast is really creating its own version of “Dubstep”, loosely defined, at the moment, and no one is doing it better than Eprom.

Mala’s set was dark dark dark. I felt almost like I was listening to industrial or metal music, even through most of the common musical tropes from those genres weren’t there. It was just dub after dub of very slow bass-heavy stuff… a few remixes I did recognize of older tracks but mostly just new stuff. I’d assume it was almost entirely dubs from himself and Loefah, but there might have been a few other folks in there as well. Mostly very 1/2 time, but occasionally it would kick up into energetic full swung rhythms. It was truly an unforgettable and unique musical experience, so much so that it actually knocked me on my ass for about 1/2 an hour and all I could do was listen.

The less the positive thing, and something we don’t always let on, is that once again we lost money on the show… Surya only barely breaks even most times, sometimes it loses money, and only twice have we gone into the black (and even then we just use that money to pay back debts)… Maneesh and I tried to dissect what went wrong, why 350 people isn’t enough in Club Six, and frankly we’re not sure what else we could have done. It’s just hard hard hard to do a show in this town if you don’t have a built in audience of hundreds for your event and if you are reliant totally on door sales.

Don’t take this as griping too much, it was a great show and I wouldn’t have changed anything, but man, throwing events in this town is harder than ever. Still though, very proud of what we made!

Photos up, thanks as always to Kelly!