Sunday night at the troubadour, West Hollywood...
Some boring trance/hardhouse dj from the uk opened and played a very
linear 2 hour set. If you like that kind of stuff, it would have been
ok, but no one was dancing and it was just kind of pointless.
Scanner rocked the house!
All he had was a little notepad mixer, a theremin, a minidisk (or it
could have been dat) rolling out tracks, a small yamaha sampler, some
weird pen based music thingie (looked like a pilot) and a scanner.
Nice shit!
Everything from lush ambient pads to fucked up jungle beats.
He was constantly mixing it all up, drumming beats on the sampler,
changing the scanner channel, making the theremin do it's thing and
drawing on the pad thing.
He played for an hour and it was very entertaining.
Everyone really got into it.
The whole voyeurism thing, with a few hundred people listening to
peoples intimate phone calls was cool.
Most people there were surprised when I told them they were all live
calls. Some people are just dense I guess...scanner, get it?
Most people didn't.
And then came that sublime piece of shit, dj spooky.
The first and what should have been last time I saw Dj Spooky was a
little under a year ago.
How quickly we forget!
I should have been prepared for what I saw again tonight.
He walked on stage, tossed down two records and just started doing WACK
ASS shit over the top of scanner's last song!
Thanks a lot paul...
Frantic offbeat cutting and weak scratching, with no apparent logic or
skill.
After 5 minutes, I really wanted to go up on the stage and kick the shit
out of him.
He's the worst fucking excuse for a dj on the planet.
I understand what he's trying to do, deconstructing beats and all that
bullshit, but it doesn't make the crap he was doing on stage sound any
better.
It's just jacking off in public as far as I'm concerned.
I do stuff like that at home where no one can see (or hear) me...
After 10 minutes I was looking for my friends to tell them I was going
to walk home...Every minute I stayed I got more and more pissed off at
the aural bullshit I was being subjected to.
At this point, I was having flashbacks to the alec empire show at the
same venue. But even that didn't hold a candle compared to what was
happening this time.
After 20 minutes, I found my friends talking to Robin (aka Scanner). I
told him I loved his bit and that I was getting the fuck out of there as
quick as I could.
Just then, dj spooky grabbed the mic and said that he'd like Robin to
come back on stage and do a little duet with him.
We all said bye to the scanman and ran out the door as fast as we could.
I would have loved to hear Scanner again, but the thought of that
dickhead, slicing, dicing and scratching (quite lamely I might add) over
the top of Robin's music didn't make it even remotely possible.
I can't tell you all what an insult it was to hear Paul Miller up there
on the turntables.
BULLSHIT, that's what it was.
Fuck that guy...
peace out,
brock.
ps. Sorry for the strong language, but if you can't take it,
go see dj spooky, then you'll understand!