Just give it a listen…it’ll have all you down-beat Mother-F!@#%&s turning hard, with your windows down and your systems up!
Music Fix the Glitch: Glitch Mob Shows You How
4.00 (1 votes)
4.00 (1 votes)
Music Ghostly International’s 10th Anni-insani-versary!
Words by Ryan Patrick Hooper, photos by Dustin Downing, Additional photos by Joe Gall
For the past ten years, Detroit’s Movement festival has been notoriously fond of after parties. Whether they be of the renegade rave, abandoned factory sort or the most official, posh push-pop you can come by, the entire city becomes blanketed in non-stop nightlife until the sun comes up and the festival grounds once again reopen. Saturday was no exception as the Magic Stick (regularly voted in the top ten best venues in the country by Rolling Stone and Paste, home to the oldest bowling alley in the country) in Midtown Detroit welcomed nationally renowned electronic label Ghostly International’s 10-Year Anniversary to a packed house after tearing apart the Red Bull Music Academy stage earlier that day with the likes of The Sight Below, Lusine, Kate Simko and Ryan Elliott.
“It has been ten years of the festival, and it’s our ten-year anniversary,” points Sam Valenti, owner and founder of Ghostly International, hours before the showcase at the Stick backstage in the green room. “It’s fun to run into friends that Ghostly has had for six, seven years all day at Movement.” And with Ghostly International Tycho by his side, it’s easy to see just what Valenti is getting at. “It’s exciting to be back where it all started over ten years ago,” adds Tycho. “To be right in the middle of it all…”
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Music Landstrumm Lands
It’s not like we love Neil Landstrumm — it’s like the man lives inside of our ear drums, pounding out his innovative, hybrid cocktail of dub and grime powered auditory awesomeness. His Sunday set at Movement ’09 was certainly no exception. Although the poor dude was set up to the side of the stage, he made up for his lack of strategic positioning that lives in the world kick snare, kick snare — but stands tall in an ocean of imitators who chase his sound but continually fall flat. When you’ve been it for as long as Landstrumm has, you’ll run it into that … but you’ll also learn how to run directly over it, reverse and repeat a few times until you stand adjacent to only your own legacy and a long line of DJ road kill. For what seemed like an eternity (but was probably closer to an hour if we settle down and face the facts), Landstrumm transformed his daytime set into a time bending performance that turned the audience into midnight marauders of the sexist sort, Landstrumm’s often space age slugtone beats unleashing some of the weirdest, most sensual dance moves we’ve seen in quite sometime.
Words by Ryan Patrick Hooper, photos by Joe Gall
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Gallery If God was a DJ…
The DJ set on the Red Bull Music Academy at Movement 09. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.
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Event Music Sweet and Sticky: Bassnectar Delivers the Juice
Whether you were grinding along with the heaps of patrons in the audience, sacrificing your drinks to the Gods above in the VIP lounge or planted on boxes of gear backstage, everyone was smothered in a sticky, relentless coating of thundering bass as Bassnectar closed the Red Bull Music Academy stage on Monday night. Unleashing his Whip-It brand bass lines (imagine those adolescent wah-wahs magnified by a million) and eclectic dub step to new wave mash up style and you’ve got a good reason why the majority of the independent vendors were shut down as the sun set and the more hair than flare DJ took to the stage — who would want to miss it? But Bassnectar’s set wasn’t without complication as Lorin Ashton, the California-based multi-instrumentalist behind the name, is quick to point out.
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Music Risky Business: The Education of Jeff Risk
As Jeff Risk, Detroit producer/artist/DJ, found out, never delete your junk mail before you see what’s in it. Because sometimes, buried amidst the spam, the porn and the diet drug solicitations, there’s an email in there that might change your life.
Risk, whose taste in music is as impressive as his ten tattoos, cut his teeth listening to everything from Liz Copeland on the Detroit radio to punk rock, hardcore and death metal. Then he fell in love with drum ‘n’ bass and became a DJ. But while he loves to DJ, he’s not the guy who sends out demos and is intent on elbowing his way up the food chain. Instead, he thought his reach would be no farther than his friends.
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Music The Rhythm & Wisdom of Afrika Bambaataa
A wise man once said, “The biggest crime when [Afrika] Bambaataa plays is not to dance.” Actually, King Kurmanji, the international spokesperson for the Zulu Nation and Bambaataa’s right hand man, said that a few hours before Bambaataa’s set on the Red Bull Music Academy stage on Monday afternoon in a hotel lobby when he was actually on the right hand side of Bambaataa, firmly planted in a rather comfy chair. “When you dance, you lose your stresses and your worries,” continues Kurmanji. “You wash that negativity away when you release it, breathe it and move that behind.” Heavy words that are certainly not to be taken lightly — just like the political persona that Bambaataa encompasses in his large frame, and just like the cameo-packed performance he brought to the stage. “We just don’t want any wallflowers,” coolly adds Bambaataa.
5.00 (1 votes)
Bars/Clubs Botanica Bar – A Dive for Wandering Souls
Nestled in a non-descript location in downtown Manhattan’s kitschy Nolita area, on the cusp of the overpriced SoHo area is a bar called Botanica – a dive bar that gives all dives a good name. After walking through Nolita’s narrow (and expensive) side streets and coming across charmeuse blouses and wine lists that cost more than most outpatient surgical procedures, it feels great to enter a dimly-lit, affordable, no-frills spot that takes things back to the true basics.
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Music Busy P & the Art of Electro-Boutique
Musicians carry a fraction of diva within their core. It is one of those unwritten laws that no matter how down to earth (or buried within) they may seem, there resides a chunk of entitlement in their bones that screams “gimme this” or “double wrap that.” As long as we don’t have to endure it constantly (read: be Kanye West’s personal assistant), it’s easy to push on the back burner and let it cook — considering it slightly, but never holding such pretenses against the artist. Busy P broke these rules on Monday evening when he slammed his designer headphones (and then his microphone) at the beginning of his set when something went wrong with the sound, and proceeded to scream in a mixture of French and English at the crowd and also at that poor, unfortunate sound guy (who seemed relatively unaffected by the whole ordeal).
5.00 (1 votes)
Film Gallery Damn it Janet! It’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show!
Words and photos by Zoetica Ebb
The most notorious of all midnight movies, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a rock-opera-comedy that was released in 1975 and is still played in countless theaters internationally. The plot is, shall we say, complicated – check out the Wikipedia page to get some idea of what the hell happens. Involved stage productions are acted out as the film is played, with cast member-created costumes and props to match ones used on-screen. These scandalous performances require constant audience participation – skimpy attire, water guns, and shouting insults at the screen are encouraged [but not required].
4.63 (8 votes)