IDM Mailing Archive

To who anyone who cares: I went to New York last week for the CMJ festival, and what a horrible ripoff it was! I paid $170 for some stupid little badge that was supposed to let me in to all sorts of shows for free. Anyway, the one show I really wanted to see was the opening night party--it was the one with all the Ninja Tune guys, Luke Vibert, etc. Well, when we checked in to the CMJ thing and picked up our badges (a bag full of free but useless crap), I found out that you needed to get a special "pass" to get into the show. I bet you can guess what happened. They were all gone ("Yeah, they went pretty quick"). Needless to say, I was pissed. So, I got over that after a night. Then, on Friday, I wanted to go see Komeda play at some place called the Mercury Lounge. I walked 20-30 blocks by myself from the Knitting Factory (where my friends were enjoying an awesome jazz show which I wish I'd stayed for) to the club, get there just in time to catch the band, and the guy at the door tells me it's fucking sold out. I show him my little badge and he gives me a look like "Yeah right, buddy..." and then tells me I can come in in an hour. What's my point? If any of you guys are thinking of ever going, my advice to you is skip that damn badge and just pay for the shows individually. You'll save a lot of money, trust me. On the brighter side of things, I loved seeing NY (never been before); I bought some kool records, did a little sight-seeing, and overheard someone at Other Music saying the Ninja show was disappointing. BTW, anyone else go? How was it for you? Later, Jeff

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998 00:46:47 -0500, Jeff Barszcz <jmb@vt.edu> sed

quoted 2 lines I went to New York last week for the CMJ festival, and what a horrible

> I went to New York last week for the CMJ festival, and what a horrible > ripoff it was!

Agreed. They always organize this very poorly. Opening night at the Roxy was ridiculous. Everyone, even the badge holders, had to wait over an hour out in the freezing cold for those idiots to get their act together. We got pretty disgusted and left. Considering how many people they already stuffed into the club, I think we did the right thing. J -- Perfect Sound Forever online music magazine perfect-sound@furious.com http://www.furious.com/perfect

At 17:41 10.11.98 -0400, Jeff Waye/Ninja Tune wrote:

quoted 4 lines so that it flowed better but what can you do. Unfortunatly Coldcut's set

>so that it flowed better but what can you do. Unfortunatly Coldcut's set >got pushed back later and there set was cut short due to scheduling, but >they rocked anyway. If anyone caught it, the software they were using to >mix the audio and visual is what we are releasing next year.

they played live in cologne on the final night of the 10-day battery park cologne festival last month, 1 hour by themselves and 1 hour vs. air liquide. the visual effects matched to their music were excellent, but sadly that was about all that was good about their show (just my personal opinion here, no disrespect to the ninja crew). IMO their music was a rather sad mix of uninspired big beats and a total overload of samples wrongly aimed at a mainstream audience (all the usual jungle book and classical music samples and stuff). fortunately air liquide's entering the ring completely changed the scene. they kept cranking everything from dr walker's trademark ultra-crunchy hip hop beats to jammin unit classics from deaf dub and blind, and for all i could see coldcut's function was reduced to taking care of the visuals. occasionally a sorry-ass disney sample would be dropped in, only to be drowned out by air liquide with even sicker terror loops. all in all, nothing against coldcut, i'm sure big beat fans would've had a great time, but this act clearly didn't fit into the rest of the battery park lineup. good thing you had strobocop and the modernist in the basement to escape to. cheers, tom