pocketsnacks

Last night I snuck outside the warehouse and hit Mezzanine to catch Jon Hopkins & Four Tet.
Man oh man it was gooood! First off, let me say the Four Tet was fine… Enjoyable. Yes he was headlining and all the hipster kids were there to see him (probably because Pitchfork told them to go), but he was no where near as impressive as Mr. Hopkins.

I was grinning from ear to ear most of his set. It started off with the long every building wave of pretty vibrating electronic goodness that just washed over you. As the set progressed it just keep swapping layers for layers and building into deep bone massaging techno with this super nice glitched out IDM twitch.

It was great how it went from this warm, slowly moving ear soup, over into piano-tinged melodies, into finally just heavy, gotta move your feet, where the hell did this come from, electronic madness!

I loved it… it was way more than I had hoped it would be. Oh and it was gear! Ot at least gear manipulated. He had a laptop running, but was twiddling knobs and slammin pads the whole time. Twas brilliant! My only two regrets were that A) they had no merch table for which to buy more of his stuff (I already purchased his 1st two albums in a heartbeat, online) and B) absolutely NO ONE I knew went. I was all by myself… which is fine. I’ll go to shows by myself if I wanna see someone and no one I know is interested.
But this was one of those shows where you kinda wish you had someone there to share the experience.
Oh well…

After that I was feeling pretty damn good, just because it was such an uplifting thing… So I walked thru the rain over to 103 Harriet (aka part of 1015) to hit the Space Cowboys Finger Lickin Anniversary party. There, I actually knew some people, which was not exactly a surprise. That was also a damn fine show in it’s own right. REALLY good breaks. Like, really good. Wasn’t some dub steppy bullshit or whatever the newest trend is, it was really hard clean super fun breaks.  I had actually forgot what good breaks sound like… now I remember.

Good music on a solo Saturday night adventure!

Recently I have found myself in that awesome position of really digging into some new (at least for my ears) music. I think it sort of started with my over listening to Tripswitch’s Circuit Breaker album, which I still think is just the friggin’ bomb. Anyhow, that kind set my mood for more down tempo leaning stuff than I had been listening too.

That I think led me back to Ulrich Schnauss , who I have been a fan of for a few years now, but never really got sucked into.

Well… I inhaled deeply.

And, man it is some good shit. I even went so far as to BUY some of his CD’s online. I do realize I am some sort of freak for actually doing that, but good music made by good people on small labels deserve our money. (Oh and I was also able to find Circuit Breaker as well. Got it too)

Sticking Ulrich Schnauss into the last.fm player also got me to discover Abfahrt Hinwil and their album Links Berge Rechts Seen.

They are on the Toytronic label, which my friend mr. projectile used to be on as well.

Their music is much more idm/minimal than the other stuff I have been listening too, but still pretty nice.

And then lastly, mr. projectile shared with me a link to a song on Jon Hopkins website, and I was immediately hooked and proceeded to buy his two albums fro his labels (Just Music) site the next day.

And wow… They are great. Simply brilliant stuff. Just tasty as hell. It’s one of those discoveries where you are almost happy you never heard it before, because here it is all new for you to take in.
Contact Note and Opalescent are just amazing. Go buy them now! I will wait…

Oh and if that weren’t enough, Jon Hopkins is going to be performing live in San Francisco on March 21st @ Mezzanine with Four Tet!

I gotta say, last.fm is the shit. It continues to turn me on to new music and keep me mindful of artists I like who are performing near me.

And finally, two of those CD’s I got came from Juno Records.
They are a great online CD store for electronic music and they are FAST. I order two discs on monday night, from England, and they showed up here, in San Francisco CA, USA, on thursday the same week. WTF!? Yes i paid for the FedEx shipping, but it was only like 3 bucks more… but DAMN that is fast.