Even though there’s nothing new in this article, it’s still pretty interesting to read.
The Year the Superstar DJ Died
Ministry of Sound stated some sort of a reaction on this, telling that it couldn’t be less true. If you find the MOS comments somewhere, let me know.
5,5. 300.
The size of the Unity 10th Anniversary set in hours and megabytes. The Unity posse kindly shared Orkidea’s set from the event – it’s nothing but classics.
Download it here: Unity 10th Anniversary live recording.
2957 5754 6205 7230
My Wii number. If you happen to have a console, too, feel free to exchange numbers to get the most out of it.
Global warming seems to be more and more regular topic on the daily news, at least here in Finland. I wonder when the yellow press realizes its commercial potential. Think about it: “Global warming ruined David Beckham’s holiday in Greenland: ‘Where’s the snow?!'”. Top seller! ;)
Seriously speaking – people tend to think that fighting global warming takes a lot of time, money and the deeds of one individual just don’t count on a large scale.
But wrong – you can (and should) just start by changing your light bulbs.
Yes, light bulbs. Replace your old bulbs with CF Bulbs (Energiansäästölamppu, in Finnish). Today.
Changing the bulbs is
1) the easiest way to reduce our dependence on oil.
2) the cheapest way to cut down the amount of greenhouse gases
3) a direct way to prevent new power plants to be built
AND
4) it IS cheap, actually every bulb will cost itself back in less than four years
P.S. If you’re a blogger or a media person (which anyone can be these days:), consider spreading the word. It’s not only mediasexy, but it makes the world a bit better place, too.
To start the double-o-seven properly, I guess it’s time to sum up some of the moments of the past year.
Left Rovaniemi behind and moved to Helsinki. Getting a possibility of being part of Misc Management and working with some of the nicest guys in the southern electronic music scene has been more than delightful. The future looks exciting.
Got a possibility to travel a lot. Loved the Birkweiler wine fields. Saw Belfast, both sides of it.
Graduated. Wrote the Pro Gradu about Flyers in Electronic Music Culture.
After waiting for 11 years, finally saw Underworld live. Also enjoyed the Unity 10th Anniversary, both being the highlights of this year.
Finished remix of EBTG’s “Missing” and a remake of Innerself’s “Gautama”, released seven DJ-mixes and a couple of radio sets. Buried Worldwide Mix Selection podcast project and concentrated on DJ Orion’s podcast with a plenty of hi-quality guest mixes from Finnish artists.
Disliked Teosto and Gramex. Enjoyed some very good movies. Got sentimental while moving away from the north and couldn’t help looking back.
Experienced some very nice gigs such as Spinni in Tampere, Choon! in Turku, Rio88600 in Sotkamo and Sunburn in Kalajoki to mention just a few. Got new friends and got together with the old – humble, simple and honest people, who I – once again – just can’t give enough credit.
Made a new year resolution last year not to involve in any event production or promotion in spring 2006 – and got hands on way too many projects. Expecting the same to happen this year again.
I just finished the last mix for this year. It became the longest – and if not my best mix of this year, it’s definitely the most interesting.
I’ve been thinking of putting together a mix of epic trance for a while now. It’s an interesting genre – I accidentally found a good description from Discogs while browsing around:
Epic trance has “musically interesting, constantly changing elements, and building suspense and emotion through means other than twiddling the frequency knob on a filter.”
There’s so little of this kind of trance released these days. Long tracks with lots of variety, several parts with different musical themes and truly innovative and challenging electronic dance music.
When choosing the tracks, I ended up leaving several nuskool epic tracks aside as well as some too obvious epic classics. And yes – the whole mix could have included only Sunday Club releases and been as epic as it’ll ever get, but there wouldn’t have been too much point in it.
Now, I’m pretty satisfied with the result. The sound describes very well where my electronic music roots are and also what was the whole idea of trance back in the day: hypnotic yet beautiful and driving.
Next year I’ll concentrate more on new music and leave oldskool aside – at least from the mixes. And as the autumn has been pretty trancey, the next mixes will be based more on house. Let that be the first promise for the new year.
Anyway, the new mix, Roots, will be online no later than tomorrow containing music from Sunday Club, Bedrock, Sasha, Gloat, Tenth Chapter, Spooky, Seafield etc.
See you soon.
I must admit that Kajaani event on the Desperate Housedeejays mini-tour really surprised me. There were about 400 people (which is a lot – we’re talking about North-East Finland here) and very enjoyable atmosphere. The night took off after 00:30AM and there was absolutely no need for playing obvious hits – in addition to house it was about breaks, oldskoolish quality trance and techno.
To mention some highlights, especially Brothers in Rhythm remix of Placebo’s Every Me Every You, Phunk-A-Delic’s Rockin’ and Mauro Picotto’s Coldfunk made Club96 go crazy.
Met some very nice new friends and generally people seemed just to be happy and smiling. Either it was a successful night in their opinion, too – or they were just drunk enough ;)
And still – this must have been the best b2b gig with Kaasi, the erickmorillo of Northern Finland. It just gets better every time :)
We got a nice amount of footage – a timelapse movie of the whole night, photos and videoclips. Online pretty soon, I hope.
Sibelius-Academy’s Development Centre for Artistic Activity has kindly approved our application and given us a grant for producing an audiovisual music production. The production will combine both traditional and electronic music plus visuals and motion tracking in a way which is – at least – new in Sibelius-Academy.
I will provide here a link or two as soon there’s more information available.
First the Misc news and then the Misc. stuff. Boy, I love these smart word games… :P
Misc Management website has a few minor updates, some new mixes, charts etc.
Our beloved oldskool DJ, the mastermind behind Rose Garden and Kuudes Linja (and various others…), mr. Lil’ Tony, has opened a new website called Cosmic City. Cool stuff there, check it out.
Niko recommended Dave’s Lounge podcast on his Softys blog. I’ve subscribed to that as well, but another very good chill-out cast (not independent music, though) is Chill Syndicate. Two hour sets of chill-out – and totally without voice-overs, which is good (as I’ve mentioned earlier).
New Zealand Herald listed TOP 10 songs played at the funeral. A coffin at the altar and Robbie on the speakers. Some people really know how to go with a style… eeeh…
In the end a small word about my photography project. A bit more than a month ago I started a “Project 365” which is about shooting one photo a day of your life. The main idea is to remember small things which you would have forgotten otherwise after a year. The secondary idea is to prove yourself that no matter how dull and similar basic work days sometimes are, they all have a thing or two worth remembering.
These daily taken photographs are uploaded to the Project 365 Flickr set at least once a week. Take a look.
I’ve been writing several blog posts about the fight between vinyl and mp3 supporters, archiving digital music and the relationship between a DJ and a music format. I’ve always tried to point out that there really aren’t any universal truths in this fight and that there are some facts you just can’t deny. And finally I’ve gotten to a conclusion:
I’ve been already thinking for some time what would be my response on the change of the DJ-culture. Follow the flow, sell my vinyl collection, start playing only digital music and make the best out of it? Or make a lonely fight-back, keep supporting vinyl and keep the amount of CDRs in minimum and play only promotional tracks in digi format?
The only what is certain, is that some changes have to be made. I’m happy that I’ve come to a conclusion which satisfies me both as a vinyl freak and as a music lover: With a “small” amount of work I’ve listed all the old records I still need in order to call my vinyl collection perfect and complete. In addition to that, I won’t leave the collection to the state “2006” but I’ll update it constantly with important releases and so-called future old-skool classics. I’ll also support certain labels by buying all their new releases in plastic to have a complete catalogue and collection of their music.
OK, that’s it about vinyl. What about mp3’s then? The amount of music mentioned above would easily fulfill the needs of my upcoming DJ-sets. But buying the music only for keeping the dancefloor pleased doesn’t lead anywhere (Miika wrote well about that already earlier). There are SO many better-than-average but far-from-classic tracks in online shops and it would be a pity to leave them there just because they are released only in digital format. And there are even more tracks which aren’t meant for dance floor but which you just happen to love. For the sake of keeping your sense of true music alive, it’s even necessary to buy tracks which you probably wouldn’t end up playing live. I don’t mean bad tracks, but tracks which are just interesting, but definitely not danceable. Would there be any better format for that than digital?
Hopefully this sums this up – for now.. :)
A new guest mix on the podcast now available. DJ OlliS, a host of Tiistain Tanssi-ilta, an electronic music orientated radio show on Finnish National Radio 1 YleX delivers a very nice 45min session of oldskoolish trance. Just the sound we love to support on this podcast.
To get more information of the guy, see www.djollis.com.
To subscribe to the podcast, check here. If you have iTunes, try clicking here.
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Rumours tell that Laserpoint starts their own 24h web radio on the 18th of November. On the opening day there should be an exclusive progressive house mix from DJ Orion containing tracks from artists like Gabriel & Dresden, Jaytech, PQM, D-Nox & Beckers etc…
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Enough of namedropping. Misc Management sent today their first newsletter in ages. If you didn’t receive any and would just love to get the latest news directly from the Misc artist roster, feel free to send your email address to juska *a t* misc *d o t* fi and boom, you’ve subscribed.
Miika Kuisma has written his best blog post so far. A long mind flow “About creativity and being an artist” is well worth 7-10min which it’ll take to read through.
The setup “creativity vs money” which Miika introduces is very very valid in the world of event managers and promoters, too. Even though organizing events can’t be categorized as “art” too often, the same series of actions appear there as well: if you organize events in order to make your living and/or to get rich, you’ll end up losing the touch to your audience and waste the real fun in it.
If you rank income above creativity or fame above art, take a while and read the post.
Spinni’s 10-year anniversary event was all you could expect from the Tampere-fiilis revival which has been going on for a while now already. The party was well organized and I’ve never seen I-Klubi so well decorated (except at MIR club in ’99 when FuFu organization boys used a hell of amount of black garbage bags to make the club totally black from the floor to the ceiling). Especially the smoke machine was well installed (see the photo below)
The amount of audience really surprised me and the variety of clubbers was the greatest challenge of the night: Basically only few people knew the oldskool “hits” and the most were pretty confused of Aphex Twin’s Polynomial C as the set starter. But then again – those who had come to the event to hear the music from the past 10 years didn’t expect to hear the latest progressive house/trance tracks. The result was some sort of fusion of those two: old tracks combined to fresh releases. Check the tracklist here.
The afterparty was great, too. It was really refreshing to see a new underground venue in Tampere and jump into an afterparty where the music consisted mostly of techno – especially Hexe blew off the roof with his 3-deck set. Mad. Just like at Pinninkatu back in the day! ;)
I guess all copyrights that Teosto must respect are somehow related to music. Everything else they can just ignore…
Take a look at this:
Teosto’s Favicon:
IBM Lotus logo: 
and…
Teosto/NCB -logodownload:
Irfanview favicon:
This just tells so well how different points of view artists and major labels can have towards copyright.
Zero7 just told on their MySpace page that they’ve registered to YouTube and have some of their music videos online. They are asking people to post their recordings from Zero7’s gigs, some covers and maybe cover music videos, too:
“For those of you who might not know, Zero 7 have their own YouTube page.
You can watch the band’s videos on there and if you upload your own Zero 7 videos onto YouTube, then it could appear on the page.
They could be videos you’ve recorded at gigs, or even your own cover versions!”
I wonder what Universal, Sony BMG and other major labels would say about that. At the moment Universal is telling that YouTube owns them millions of dollars due to these kinds of copyright infringements.
I think any artist would consider a possibility to see their music videos on the Internet for free as a very good and very cheap promotion and not as a baad, bääd copyright infringement.
This goes back to Finnish copyright laws, too. As I’ve earlier told, it’s basically illegal to rip your own vinyls to CDRs and play them on gigs. I wonder how many electronic music artists would really deny a possibility to rip their old records which aren’t available as MP3s and bring them to life again.
It might be it’s because I’m not a recording artist, but I really do not see any good in the way big copyright companies are working – from the marginal music style’s point of view, at least.
Killing a possibility to define your own ways of promotion does not do any good for the record and copyright companies – it just harms the artist. And I want to believe they are going to find it out when it’s too late. That would do good for them.
This Friday & Saturday Spinni-organization’s 10th Anniversary Party takes over I-klubi, a legendary club venue nearby the centrum of Tampere. Many of my finest moments in the late 90’s techno scene are located there – and I guess many others could agree…
Who still remembers MIR, Taika, Dawn and many, many more…?
I have no idea how the organizers managed to get the authorization for their parties until 07 or 09 at that time – as far as I remember, alcohol was sold until 03:30 and then the party just kept on going. Quite impossible these days.
Spinni’s party will be more or less a look back to the past. I’ll be warming up Peak Twins’ Live set on Saturday and – I have to admit – I’ve been browsing through my records anxiously to get a bag-full of Tampere-anthems with me. I’ve been selecting tracks which were BIG 5-10 years ago – not too obvious classics, but records which made it all work at the time when Tampere-fiilis was at its peak.
>>> Spinni10 website.
If you’re into any kind of chill-out/ambient music, I highly recommend you to check out the latest album of General Fuzz, called Messy’s Pace.
The album is completely free. >> General Fuzz’s website.
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For a flyer freak like me, it was fun to get a copy of Club Unity’s latest flyer. The flyer itself is a DVD disk which contains a video of Unity’s past – 10 years of parties.
If you can’t get a copy of the DVD itself, there’s always a possibility to download the video in Quicktime format >> Club Unity 10 Year Anniversary Video.
Oh, it seems to be in YouTube as well. (Thanks, Niko)
As the update of Misc website still takes a while, here are some nice news from theee HeadQuarters ;)
First of all, Misc Management will from now on be taking care of the bookings of David West – a warm welcome to the artist roster :) The guy is simply amazing on- and off-stage – I guess anyone who visited [reiv:] Season Ending last Friday could tell that. David also proved how flexible he is by flying to Finland to replace Jody Wisternoff (who cancelled) with a super short notice of less than four hours.
And then – the main man of Misc, Oded Peled is warming up Underworld on their gigs in Tallinn and Riga. A very nice possibility to promote his excellent upcoming Underwater label releases. And – in case you didn’t know – warm-up set for Underworld’s gig in Finland will be played by DJ Orkidea.
