Monday 8 February 2010

Riva Starr

Fantastic set from Riva Starr on early at Annie Mac Presents on saturday night, going quite deep in places, but mixing it up with a few of his productions and remixes. Some of them sound pretty crazy, like his gypsy folk influenced I Was Drunk, others are Funky/Latin/Dancehall inspired banging house tracks.

He continued the form with a wicked Essential Mix on Radio 1 on saturday night.

UPDATE: You can also download the Essential Mix from his Soundcloud page.

Toddla T


This guy is fast becoming my favorite DJ on the radio.

The hour he's given for his Radio 1 In New DJs We Trust show (every third Thursday of the month at 9pm) just isn't enough. Luckily, he occasionally covers for other DJs and, with this cover show for Ras Kwame on 1Xtra, fully takes advantage of the extra time available.

Crazily energetic on the mic, he goes everywhere from Dubstep to Bashment with a bit of dirty Fidget/Electro House, Drum & Bass, Grime, Funky and Garage past and present. The Boom DJ From The Steel City somehow manages to cover pretty much everything I like when I'm in the clubs right now.

He also has a monthly residency at Fabric, so I might have to get involved and get Skanky Skanky next time he's playing.

Friday 5 February 2010

Annie Mac Presents

So it's Friday night and I'm chilling for once. This is usually my London mission night, but this week Saturday night sees our regular mash up at KOKO in Camden when Annie Mac Presents comes rolling back into town. We've been three times in the last six months, and if it's anything like the last ones it's going to be another mental night, so I'm on the download (literally) tonight, checking up on who's gonna be playing.



Big tings a gwan


 


In order of who I'm most looking forward to seeing:

  • Jack Beats - Wobbly, dirty, nasty electro/fidget house. My favorite sound of last year.
  • Rivastarr - Electro house from a relative newcommer on the scene as far as I'm concerned, having not really heard of him until hearing his tracks on the Loose Cannons' show after Snowbombing last year, but I've been loving his sounds ever since. 
  • sbtrkt - Deep and bassy -just how I like it. Dubsteppy African vibes and some techy influences. I've not seen him before, so looking forward to checking him out. He's on first at 9:30, so no doubt I'll be the first one on the dancefloor, sticking my head in the bassbins!
  • Annie Mac -  Mashes up the best of everything from Electro to Drum & Bass, passing through Dubstep, Disco and Techno along the way. Her show, along with Fabio & Grooverider's, has been my go to wake up call first thing on a Monday morning for a long time now. Expect to find Ian drooling near the front for the whole set.
  • Wiley - While I'm not a big fan of his pop tracks, he remains the king of Grime. Back in the day (although not my day -I didn't get into Grime until a few years ago), when he was calling himself Eskiboy, him and the Roll Deep Crew were pioneering the Eskimo sound that has morphed into modern day Grime. Tracks like What Do You Call It?, Eskimo, Icerink remain amongst my favorites of the genre. I saw him live breifly at 93 Feet East a few years ago and he concentrated on the chart hits like Wearing My Rollex. I'm hoping he leaves them at home and gives us a pure, grimey masterclass in where the Eskimo sound came from.
  • Sub Focus - He's made some monster tracks and no doubt I'll be going mental when he rinses out the D&B at the end, but I've seen him quite a few times recently, so I'm looking forward to the others more. He mixed Could This Be Real into Major Lazer into The Count & Sinden - Mega last time I saw him at Fabric though, so expect him to mash it up a bit as well.
I might just have to get my mixing fingers out tomorrow and lay down a soundtrack for the journey up there (not that I can actually mix yet!).

Can't wait!

Thursday 4 February 2010

I have been mostly listening to...

 

Kromestar - My Sound

Excellent album full of chilled and *dubby tracks from one of dubstep's most prolific artists.
7/10



2562 - Unbalance, TECTONIC

2562 - Unbalance


Another excellent dubstep album, quite dubby again but this time from a more techy angle. 7/10





I'm being pretty harsh with my reviews so expect a range like:
  • 10/10 = One of my favorite albums ever
  • 1/10 = Something from an X-Factor artist

*For those that don't know, when I say dubby I mean dubby like dub reggae or some roots reggae.

Ok so now I have a blog, but will I actually use it this time?

I've had blogs before, but never actually used them.

Some of them were just to satisfy my curiosity and to find out what exactly blogging was back in the days when people first started using the term. Others were experiments in web design and programming on my own site -some of you might remember me putting up hundreds of photos from Jaxx or Uni on there every week, but Facebook put paid to that. How the times have changed!

So why is this latest experiment going to be any different?

Lately I've been posting all my Facebook status updates through Twitter, to see what all the fuss is about, but I've only got six followers -five of which I'm pretty sure were just hoping I'd follow them back so they can spam me about their crap music. So far I'm not convinced.

Also I've been posting a lot of links and been wanting to post bigger messages about my opinions of stuff, which you can't do without hitting the limit, so you need something like SuperWall -which is rubbish.

So I thought why don't I just finally use the blog I created all those years ago as an aggregator of well, everything. So that's what this is.