Arc Tangent

I man­aged to get my mitts on a pre-​release leak of Pendulum’s newest album, Immer­sion (iTunes link). I’m about to launch into a track-​by-​track review, pep­pered with food analo­gies — if you’re feel­ing hun­gry, I sug­gest you make a sand­wich now.

I did this inter­view simul­ta­ne­ously with @ruzkin; it might be inter­st­ing to com­pare and con­trast our reviews.

Before I begin though, I’ll dis­claim: this album is going to be dis­ap­point­ing to a lot of fans. It’s going to take a pretty broad mind to get a lot out of it, and if you’re after more of Hold Your Colour (iTunes) or In Sil­ico (iTunes again) I sug­gest you lis­ten to a few tracks first and get a feel for it before purchasing.

This is not what you’re expect­ing. It’s exper­i­men­tal. @ruzkin described it to me as “rem­i­nis­cent of early BT”. It crosses a lot of genre bound­aries and tries to cover a lot of ground. In my opin­ion, the album is fun­da­men­tally com­po­si­tion­ally flawed; the wrong tracks in the wrong place, and some that should have been left off the album alto­gether. It is by no means perfect.

I found a lot to love in it; I’m a fan of elec­tronic music in gen­eral, so I’m not wed­ded to the con­cept of Pen­du­lum as a drum’n’bass act. I wager that at least 70% of their for­mer fans won’t feel the same way.

Here we go, track by track …

Con­tinue reading

The pho­tos below show you where I was for New Years Eve — Sen­sa­tion White! A dance/​trance event of about 40,000 peo­ple held at Eti­had Sta­dium in Melbourne.

It was an awe­some event. A per­sonal high­light for me was get­ting a thumbs-​up returned by Richard Durand (whose music, if you’re into dance/​trance, is brilliant!)

The cen­tral stage was enor­mous and fea­tured water foun­tains, flamethrow­ers, fire­works, lasers and dancers in an under­wa­ter theme (huge white jel­ly­fish sus­pended from the roof com­pleted the motif).

Only down­side was the pres­ence of a few unsa­vories who wanted to harass or intim­i­date oth­ers — cripes peo­ple, it’s a rave! Peace, Love, Under­stand­ing, Respect!

Thanks to my Can­berra boys Jonesy, Pedro, Rob­bie, @klepas, Delbs, Will, Geoff, Truckie, Alex and Sean for a great night; thanks too to Mel­bour­nite amigo Elex!

Happy New Year every­one — hope 2010 is fan­tas­tic to you. (Yes the post is late, shush.)

EDIT: Cripes, for­got to men­tion Rohan! THANKS TO YOU TOO ROHAN! :D

The first round of the Pang! DJ Comp at Lot33 was — to put it bluntly — awesome.

Many of Canberra’s best and bright­est upcom­ing DJs were out in force. The com­pe­ti­tion organ­is­ers left the field pretty open, ask­ing for trance, pro­gres­sive, elec­tro, breaks, dub­step, techno, tech house or min­i­mal — and I doubt they were dis­ap­pointed; entrants gave us a pretty full sam­pling of the world of elec­tronic music.

Entrants were given a half hour to wow the crowd, using their own equip­ment or the pro­vided CDJ1000s, DJM800 and two Tech­nics 1200 vinyl turntables.

Sadly, I must con­fess, I got to the event a lit­tle late. A mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion with a friend (oops) landed me at the event a full hour after it started, so I missed some of the ear­lier acts. The crowd was ini­tially pretty sparse — sort of to be expected, in Can­berra — which left the ear­lier DJs down on their luck for the ‘crowd reac­tion’ cri­te­ria of the com­pe­ti­tion. Hope­fully the judges took it into consideration!

Not once was I dis­ap­pointed by what I was hear­ing. It’s a dirty cliché, but the stan­dard of com­pe­ti­tion really was high.

Con­tinue reading