Specs One is sending me Less Is More West Coast Tour comments and I told him I’d post them on my blog. Here’s the July 19th Blog. Check out what Specs One is saying today:

well Portland was fun! we played at the Crown Room which was a nice place. good sound. didn’t get paid. but it was 70% women, and i can’t hate that. i also met a cool mc by the name MIC CRENSHAW, who i must work with soon. his set was dope! everyone sounded good. but we had to buy the beer. oh well. next up: LA!

You can find Specs One tonight in Hollywood, CA along with TULSI, and DJ ABLE of the Elefaders @ ON THE ROX 9009 Sunset Blvd. on July 22nd 2008 21+ cost: 8

Find his next event here: http://culturemob.com/events/132647

Put some gas in the tank and treat yourself to some original Hip-Hop all at the same time.

Stay tuned for more updates from Specs One on the tour.

Specs One kicked off the first leg of the Less Is More West Coast Tour last night at the Comet Tavern. Other artists included Tulsi, DJ Able of the Elefaders, DJ Wicked and Animal Farm. I told him I’d forward his tour comments in my blog. So here we go!

sup, Cedric? so the first show was a bit of mess, sound wise, but i have to say i had fun! i dedicated the night to the Seattle SuperSonics! a friend got me the Championship edition Pumas to represent fully. a few heads came out. but not enough to put gas in the tank. still i’m choosing to stay positive. next stop: Portland!

You can find Specs One tonight in Portland, OR along with TULSI, and DJ ABLE of the Elefaders @ THE CROWN ROOM 205 NW Fourth Ave. on July 19th 2008 21+ cost: 5

Find his next event here: http://culturemob.com/events/132642

Put some gas in the tank and treat yourself to some original Hip-Hop all at the same time.

Stay tuned for more updates from Specs One on the tour.

So I showed up at Trinity Nightclub in Pioneer Square last night for free.BASS JUST before 10PM, wanting to slide in before they started charging cover for Dave Dresden. But there was no need for me to rush, because Dresden wasn’t there; he had cancelled (something about a head through a window). 

But this was the overwhelming response of the crowd:

Who cares? I came to see KJ Sawka. 

At 10PM there was already a nice throb of party kids in the beloved club and KJ’s fantastical drum kit was set up in the Blue Room where people were drum and bassing it to The Dowlz. Life is good.

I made a quick trip to Belltown for a little birthday bash and minimal techno with Jules V, Ctrl_Alt_Dlt and a few other crazy people, then got my ass back down to Trinity for Kevin’s 12:30 set. The Blue Room was now PACKED. Like usual I pushed my way to the front of the dance floor (hey I EARN my spot) and was happy to see to my right and my left lots of my good friends straight holding it down for me. I was right in front of the drum kit and KJ was going freaking nuts with both arms and both legs on that thing. I think he was growling a little bit; he was so into it and the dance floor was responding to his passion- by going freaking nuts with both arms and both legs. It was ON.

I LOVE drum and bass; probably too much, like espresso and cupcakes. I kill myself dancing to it, that is for sure, I get so involved that I forget to take it back to half-time stepping and wind up a sweaty, feverish mess in a very short time. With KJ Sawka’s unique brand of fire-flavored drum craziness I am not sure how anyone walked out of there last night. I can’t even begin to explain how he creates the sounds that come out like an army of darkness onto the dance floor; I don’t know if he can either but it doesn’t matter. Trinity was beautiful last night and the Blue Room came alive. Big smiles all around.

YOUR PLANS FOR TONIGHT:

For your prefunk head out to the street fair in Pioneer Square along Washington Street in front of Fuel Sports Bar: live music and DJs, food, and some beautiful, amazing, I-want-to-kiss-everyone-I-see SUNSHINE!!! DJ Pressha plays 80’s B-More and Mashups from 6PM-9PM.

Gruvsessionz at Heavens Nightclub: Come get down with the dopest crowd in town. Produkt puts on a freakin’ circus with DJs Dab, Flave, Ben Shelton, Messiah, Dirty Steve, The Dowlz and Eric Nelson. Two rooms of music: house/electro/techno/progressive house/d&b/dubstep/and some mashups for the ladies- and don’t forget the aerial performances, fire twirlers, live art, lasers, magic, burlesque, belly dancers and the Tap-Taparazzi.

Next door is Fuel Sports Bar and a new monthly breakbeat night: The Breakup. Kicking it off are the Mendicants and beautiful Nyx who will be partying along with the “NW Breakbeat Ambassador” Dig Dug.

Chop Suey’s got Trevor Loveys and DJ Same DNA, Jizosh, and mad religious prophet and rabble-rouser Recess.

Jacob London is at SeeSound Lounge.

Afterhours? It’s all about Hengst Studio (my favorite venue in Seattle) until 7AM with Claire Huxtable, Snap ‘N Pop, Grindle, and Ctrl_Alt_Dlt…….mmmmmmm…minimal techno until the sun rises, baby!

I will be everywhere, all at once. See you on the dance floor.

GUEST BLOGGER: DANCEFEVER5000

First I just want to say that any condo owners on Capitol Hill who have ever complained about noise from clubs can go straight to you-know-where: I’ll even weave you a hand basket. You move into a vibrant and colorful neighborhood and then proceed to bland it down to the color of your khaki pants with your lame sheep-calls for quiet. What, do you want the neighborhood to be as boring and uninspired as your lives? Oh right, you do, because the kids out rocking it and having fun dancing to loud music for all hours of the night remind you how freaking lame and shallow your existence based on the pursuit of material goods really is.

Turn it down! I need a good night’s sleep so I can get up and go to work and make more money and upgrade my IKEA living space! YOU are what is wrong with American society. You are not happy, and you know it, and it pisses you off that we can be so fulfilled listening to beats with our friends and drinking cheap beer with nary a luxury SUV in the parking garage. It is not Chop Suey’s fault that you hate your lives. Move to the Eastside already where you belong, start having kids and drop out of life.

WOW! Rant over! So I obviously thought the show should have been louder; but this is not Kode9 or Chop Suey or anyone’s fault besides the pansy-ass City Council and the Mayor and the aforementioned condo owners. I don’t know anyone who owns a condo near Chop Suey, but if you do, please by all means forward this link. I would love to chit-chat with the lame-O’s.

To be fair, I have a huge pro-noise bias; just about every night you can find me on the dance floor getting fresh with a speaker screaming “LOUDER! LOUDER!” at the DJ. I do prefer the loud side of life and will never understand how the wishes of one quiet-lover trump a dance floor of a hundred people who want it loud. I call bullshit.

On to the show review:

A big mix of people came out for the Tuesday night dubstep-mania; the crowd was filled with many random friends from different Seattle scenes, all there to check out what the legend Kode9 would throw down. I LOVE shows like this which mix up the cliques and bring people together, from the dreadlocked hippies to the hard-core breaks DJs to my work mates to a guy speaking French who just moved to Seattle that day from Belgium. The master of dubstep was brought to Seattle by Decibel which should make you tingly all over in anticipation for the upcoming Decibel Festival taking place in late September all over Capitol Hill, condo-owners be damned.

Dubstep is a weird genre which a lot of people don’t seem to get. I think it scares them. The wavering, syncopated sound was the first electronic music I listened to (unless you count the Gorillaz); I was living in New Zealand where the reggae scene is flipping redonkulous, off the charts, balls-out crazy- which means the dubstep party is right there behind it. I truly think that people who don’t like or don’t get dubstep are just scared of the bass whether they know it or not. More likely they are scared of what the bass will do to them, and maybe they should be because IT WILL MAKE YOU DANCE LIKE A FREAK. Deep down we are all bass sluts though, for real. I go absolutely crazy over the mad dissonant grooves; I have ‘give me the bass’ tattooed across my forehead in bold.

AND last night was the best dubstep show in Seattle I have seen in a while. I loved it all and had a freaking blast. Shocker, I know. Too big of a blast if you judge by my face-dragging this afternoon into work. Itchy and funkalicious sets by beautiful local boys Struggle and Kid Hops started the show at the perfect wobbly level. Call it blasphemy and get out the tar and feathers but I enjoyed dancing to Kid Hops’ set the most of the night. These two are absolute bad-ass DJs and you should experience them the next, and every, chance you get.

Kode9 came from another level though. His beats seeped out of a haunted home, crawling out of the dark shadows and up onto the dance floor, grabbing our ankles and our brains. His set was a searching introspection of the state of human existence, an aural illumination of the nihilistic free-fall through modernity that no one can stop. Kode9’s music speaks to a place in the furthest reaches of our consciousness, to the deepest parts of our heads and our bodies that still recall the tens of thousands of years of evolution when we danced to heavy drum beats on the African savannah in celebration of a hunt or a birth or a death. Humans love the bass, and no one can to deny it- just look at the surging popularity of all the bass-thick musical genres going on right now (ahem…glitch-hop, grindcore, laserbass…). It all goes back to the bass. Way back.

Kode9 goes there, with no reserves or apologies. He digs it up and lays it out raw and unfiltered. The lights stayed off at Chop Suey last night during his whole set which was perfect, as this was no laser-fest candy-kid acid-house rave. This was freaking serious. The wacky mix of minor chords and wonky rhythms made me wish I was dancing in a back alley of London, full of trash and buck-toothed rats and bums and leaky boxes, embracing the dirtiness of human existence, squatting in a filthy warehouse and making soup on a single propane burner to share with my new, unbathed friends. Yeah. It was that grimey and that real.

Kode9’s music makes you embrace the dark side of human nature, the evil emperor within us all, a welcome out-breath for this sunshine-snappy girl. Dancing last night my knees just bent deeper and deeper until I was practically in the final stanzas of “Shout” (get a little bit softer now); perhaps it was my subconscious effort to get closer to the earth, the roots, the black dog within me. It worked.

So once again my show review verges on the philosophical over the technical; I am a recent convert to electronic music, I cannot call out tracks from mixes or drop names of festivals I went to back in ‘95 or point out nuances in equipment. But I have an all-consuming, blazing passion for electronic music and I was not disappointed last night.

I left Chop Suey with a big fat smile across my head and spent the next three hours in Pioneer Square dancing my freckles off like a madwoman and it is safe to say that in writing this review my brain is not sunshine-fresh this afternoon. Evening. Though the mad beats should have been louder, Kode9 wrought his black magic on the crowd and brought to the surface an ominous and deep-seated feeling of grime and grit and filth which lives within us all and is an undeniable part of our psyche- even the shiny lives of the asshole condo owners.

Sorry yall, I read Sartre on the bus today. L’enfer c’est les autres. Just ask Harvey Danger.

Ya got something ta say? Think I’m full of it? Right on? Should shut the hell up about the darkness within us all? Do I write too damn much? Are you a black dog? Are you a condo-owner who is proud of your khaki life? For the love of dub, leave a comment.

…yeah, yeah, i know! hey, don’t blame me!

Seriously though, what gives???

What a great night! I will pull the strings of memories out of my head and try to convey the energy and vibe going on at Re-bar last Friday night for Produkt’s eleventh installment of Analog: Everything But the Kitchen Sink. I tend to not review the really good parties because I dance my ass off and pretty much just go into a DJ-induced trance and live in the energy of the dance floor. I lose track of everything around except the DJ and the beats, and a slap-happy gang of purple monkeys could run in behind me and go berserk and I would not notice. This is why there is no BreakBeatBuddha or Glitch Mob reviews, and I am a few days late on this one but I know you want it, so here it goes:

I was really looking forward to the night of breaks, dubstep, minimal techno and a little crazy rat bastard shit thrown in; the lineup was tight and the word was out. Analog has been getting better and better every month; May’s I Like Orange and Techno night was a freaky fun orange-a-thon complete with naked chicks, flying beer bottles, and a guy in his underwear jumping on the decks. 

But the theme for Analog XI was not citrus-laced hoohah; no, the mood was dark and dirty on the dance floor, starting out with the Milkman’s wobbly grime-laden dubstep. The beautiful Produkt dancers were all in black, a nice complement to the atmosphere. Asifa showed up in a big blond wig, and I didn’t even recognize her for about half an hour even though she was dancing right in front of me. By the time Noisemaker and Naha came on for their two-hour set, the scene was straight gritty and ready for some filthy bass, which the two poured over the crowd like a midnight waterfall. At some point an actual kitchen sink was paraded in, much to my delight (mad props for the sinkage to NickyJee, yet another of my bad-ass-up-and-coming DJ friends). Noisemaker effing kills it and the dance floor absolutely loves him; Naha threw down as well with the redonkulous rock star MC Anton Bomb doing his thing over the beats- the best that I had ever seen him.

So this is about where I put on my dance-trance-pants, so you are not going to get a lot of specifics on tracks or what-have-you. Rest assured it was a “YEAH” night for me- on the dance floor often all I can say is “YEAH” or “MORE”. It was “YEAH” all night long. After the crazy bass set, DJ Goner hit it thick like always with his wicked brand of minimal techno. GONER ROCKS. It was also my pleasure to hear him a little later in the weekend for several more hours, and I must inform you that Goner will be taking the Seattle techno scene by storm. He kills, always; he is as intense as his music which HELL! gets you moving. On Friday night the Night Train (Seattle superstar extraordinaire) played some mad harmonica over the deep techno beats. Think harmonicas belong on the range at home with the buffalos? Well then, you need to come out more. The Night Train always gives a twisted take over the electronic music, and with a smile no less.

So it should have been the end of the night, 2AM, last call and all, but wait- we were in for a exclusive appearance as Schlage hit the decks and the bar decided to stay open until 3AM. I really really love Re-bar; it is a dancing club FIRST with a giant floor and the crowd always comes to get down, which is a nice change from the usual Pioneer Square drivel. And to end the night in the sickest fashion, Noisemaker jumped back on the decks and fed us a little more sticky bass, of which we can never get enough. After closing down my fourth dance floor of the week, I went straight home to bed. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

What makes the Analog parties so consistently ON are the people who come out: the Produkt family always supports their people like mad, and those cats party like it’s the eve of the Armageddon. The dark and bass-thick music gave the dance floor what we wanted, and Analog XI was the best one yet.

This month is Analog XII: Meeting of the Minds (July 25th) where the big boys of four Seattle music collectives will be throwing down to another dance floor full of crazy dancing girls and boys. Jisaan, Ramiro, Mikey Tello, Michael Manahan and J-Sun will be out REPRESENTIN’ their respective crews and you can come out assured the night will go off with deep-house, tech-house, techno, and God only knows what else.

OK everybody- It is HOT, it is a HOLIDAY WEEKEND, and everyone will be out celebrating like fools that we live in an awesome, free country where the right to the pursuit of happiness is one of our nation’s founding principles. So do your civic duty and GET OUT THERE, GET INTO IT, and pursue your happiness, kids, unless he has a girlfriend. Don’t know what to do this weekend? Confused by all the choices? Go where I’m going- ‘cuz that’s always where the party’s at.

Like drum and bass? Tonight (Wednesday) at Pulse at Trinity there is a cherry-sweet lineup with no cover: DJs Jason Curtis, Aaron Simpson, The Dowlz, The Dub What, Contents, and Sonic MC will be giving you all the DRUM AND BASS! DRUM AND BASS! that you could ever want. Brad will be pourin’ ‘em strong.

Like minimal techno? BONKERS goes off this Thursday July 3 at Re-bar; you know you don’t have to work the next day so come out and get crazy with the techno-heads. With the deep, dark, penetrating, throbbing, beats you can’t go wrong. Ever.

Like art and music and want to go to the best party of the weekend? Want to see Noisemaker along with about 5 billion other mad DJs like PrEssHa, Theory, Von Dewey, Ben Shelton, Jisaan, Lovevirus, and B.Fly? See you Saturday night at the Columbia City Theatre for the much-antici…pated Collective Art Project. You will dance your pretty little face off- and oh yeah, there will be art and handmade clothes and HOLOGRAMS to buy, so bring cash.

Like freakish experimental nerdy brain-beat music from the future? Want to catch a glimpse into the evolutionary course of electronic music? Matmos hits the Triple Door on Monday July 7.

Like dubstep? Of course you do, you stoner. UK MASTER of dubstep Kode9 is at Chop Suey Tuesday July 8. Kid Hops and Struggle will be getting the party started; if you are a bass slut, your presence is required. We will be taking names.

Signing off,

DF5K.

If you would like to post this on your myspace profile or blog, please post the link back to this page rather than copy-and-pasting it. That will make Shilo smile.

If you would like to post a comment, please do so below.

If you enjoyed my review and would like to buy me a drink this weekend, that would be a vodka and soda with a lime.

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

The 3rd Annual Seattle Power Tool Race & Derby 2008 took place on Saturday (6-28). The event was part of Artopia in Georgetown. HazardFactory hosted the event. Their claim of faster tools, bigger air, more chaos, and more stupid (huh) turned out to be true. Check out the smashing and crashing that went down.

YouTube | Metacafe
Culturemob was proud to be a co-sponsor of the event!

Go to culturemob to discover more events.

Seattle based group “Manooghi Hi” perfoms in Fremont Sunday June 22nd at the Fremont Fair Rocket Stage 11:30am (event page) and at ToST 6pm (event page). Manooghi Hi welcomes back renowned Indian vocalist Mehnaz from Mumbai for summer performances to support their release of “Hi” beginning at the Fremont Fair.

Other members include: Mark Nichols, Todd Fogelsonger, Jimmy Thomas, John Hollis and Ava Chakravarti. I talked to the band about their upcoming shows and other news. Then I made a video of it here.

The band describes their music as an “ethnic mix of rock, pop, soul, and theatrical whimsy” which “Mehnaz’s clear, trilingual, rhythmic voice” creates “a sound that crosses many boundaries.” You can check out their music and get the latest about Manooghi Hi on their myspace page.

Manooghi Hi’s Fremont Fair event page and the ToST event page at culturemob.com

Head Like A Kite CD Release Party at Neumos June 26th for Free! Doors open at 8pm. So now that you know, you won’t want to miss it. Head Like A Kite just released their CD this Tuesday June 17th. The CD is called There Is Loud Laughter Everywhere (Mush) and it’s awesome.

We told you all about it a few days ago right here. We also told you we’d continue with the Culturemob exclusive interview with Dave Einmo of HLAK. So here it is Mr Fox Mulder, the truth you’ve been looking for.

Now you know how Dave came up with the name Head Like A Kite. A special shout out to the drummer Trent Moorman.

Speaking of the CD release party, special guests will include:

Smoosh
Foscil
DJ set by Glue
DJ set by Graig Markel of The Animals At Night
& MC Troy Nelson

Motorik plays live at the Blue Moon Tavern this Friday 6/20/08 for Free. They’re joined by Holy Name Dropouts and 3-Way Switch. Click here for more details.

I’ve seen this band at Skylark, Sunset Tavern and even the Nectar Lounge. It don’t matter where they play cuz they always bring the heat.

Motorik is a term coined by music journalists to describe the 4/4 beat often used by some so-called “Krautrock” bands such as Neu! and Kraftwerk (promoting the official CD release of Neu!’s back-catalogue, Klaus Dinger stated he called it the “Apache beat”).[1] The word “Motorik” means “motor skill” in German. - wikipedia

catch motorik at the blue moon tavern