“When the wine drinks itself, when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time, only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull. There be a trick to it, of course.” The Last Unicorn

First I have to get this out: I think I want a unicorn tattoo. Fact.
I’m aware that I already have to deal with some attributes that might get any other person kicked out of the scene but somehow I still manage to get away with it. I’m not sure though if I can push it as far as a unicorn tattoo. After all you have to keep at least some credibility.

Second: Please go and listen to Twisted Charm! Any band that makes me like instruments like saxophones can’t be bad. File under: Great Brit-post-punk. (‘Great’ referring to quality not the country.) Though I find it slightly worrying that they have a Michael Bolton bio on their website. I might go and check if they like unicorns too.

Third, let’s get a bit MP3 bloggish. I haven’t recommend bootlegs or mash ups or whatever you call them in a while because I hadn’t found any exciting ones but last week I came across a few I’ve really enjoyed.

Dunproofin’ did what had to be done: He nicely mixed Simian Mobile Disco‘s “It’s the Beat” with Technotronic. You can find it here.

My favourite new one is Totom‘s “Life’s A Great”. It mixes LCD Soundsystem with T. Rex and Depeche Mode vocals. It has a great fragile 80s New Order sound (okay, okay, the LCD SS song itself already sounds like New Order). The recontextualisation changes the feel of the T. Rex vocals, makes them sound dreamier than with the original backing. It’s a sweet one. Here’s a link to Totom’s website where you can grab it. His “Enter North American Sharona” would be great too if I wouldn’t loathe Metallica so much.

The Who Boys made a whole album, ‘The Good, The Bad and The Who Boys’ and there are a few great tracks on it, for example “Voodoo Molly” (Hendrix, Musical Youth, Little Richard, some “indian style” breakbeats) and “Staying a Firestarter” (“Staying Alive” + breakcore beats + Prodigy’s “Firestarter”). You can find the mp3s here. Be sure not to miss the choral version of “Staying Alive” too! “Dub Auctioneer” is a fine track too.

Something I recommend buying: Last weekend in Utrecht I played with Sage Soundbites, who is the first Wii-J whom I’ve seen live —– (more about that later on this blog)—–, which was really fun and he passed me a copy of his 4-track-12″ on Deathsucker Records which is really cool. Check it out here. Just like the Who Boys’ “Staying a Firestarte” it plays with Prodigy samples and I say, brothers and sisters, let’s make Prodigy acceptable again. Even if just in an ironic way. I’ve made a Prodigy / Jackson 5 bootie myself but it will be a GYBO exclusive so at the moment you can only hear it when I play out. It’s worth the wait though, I tell you! 🙂

Apropos playing out: Next weekend we’ll have another hot hot NUROTIC SOUNDSYSTEM night at the K4 (‘hot’ referring to the beats and all, not to the temperature. Although, who knows.). Ninish there’ll be a reading by Martin Büsser from the new Testcard book, that focusses on phenomena of extremimism in pop culture and should be pretty interesting. Straight or queer after that Tobi L. and I will start playing Grime, Baile Funk, rocking Techno, Dubstep and Mash ups, and some Breakcore too every now and then.

One of Tobi & mine favourite tracks at the moment is Buraka’s ‘Guns Up’ remix of M.I.A.’s new song “Bird Flu”. You can download it from Diplo‘s Maddecent blog here, where it’s called “chicken noodle flu (mad decent remix)”.
While you’re there you also could click your way through the blog and listen to the sophisticated mash up he made of Peter, Björn & Paul‘s “Young Folks”. The actual ‘Drums Of Death’ remix Diplo made for that song is quite nice, though I found his remixes have been a bit hit or miss since that genius “Gold Digger” one.

Playing with The Paper Chase in Würzburg was wonderful. First Signals To Aircraft played which wasn’t exactly my kind of music. When they played their last note I started my set but didn’t go on stage but stayed in the middle of the audience. So no one recognised I had already started, people thought it was just some loud background music for the break while the artists switched, so almost everyone went outside. Poor me… No, not really. It made me relax, laugh and took the stage fright away. Soon people came back in and it was nice to see them approaching and more and more of them started nodding and tapping their feet. The Paper Chase then were brilliant. Their music really goes under my skin. Emo hidden behind thick bars of acidic sarcasm. Technically stunning. With a love for details. They play together tight as fuck. Congleton is a great front guy but he’s never the only center of attention, they work as a band. I don’t know of any band at them moment who use the contrast of melody and dissonance just half as thrilling and effective as them. Go watch them.

Do you know this feeling when you wake up as if sleep had spat you out en passant? During the first moments you don’t know where you are, what day or year it is, don’t know if you’re still a child or a grown-up. You feel small and like hiding, you feel like a blank. I got that a couple of times the last weeks and it always makes me feel thankful for not remembering the dream I escaped from. I know that it was a really bad one although it only vaguely echoes in my veins.
I tend to dream very realistic. Documentary style. Not creative at all. Scenes that could happen like that in everyday life too. I still remember when I first realised that I dream this way. It scared the shit out of me. I was still a kid and dreamed of being home alone with my sister and my father trying to sneak in but we locked all doors and he still tries all those doors and then my sister kills him. Not action-packed but a really slow detailed frustratingly grey dream that drags on and on. I’m glad that I hardly ever remember my dreams. And by ‘hardly ever’ I really mean hardly ever: in the first 15 years of my life this one was maybe one out of three dreams that stuck with me when I woke up.

Pride will be the death of us all.
A few weeks ago we had to throw out a drunk guy. He had groped a girl and she had pushed him away which caused him to fall down a few steps of a stair and resulted in a little blood on his hand and an immensely bruised ego. He aggressively tried to have another go at her a couple of times while we already stood between him and her to keep him away. He kept screaming pathos-laden stuff at us for an hour or something: “You will pay for this with blood!”, “I could have died!”, “I piss on you!”, and his favourite line: “I’m gonna fuck you all”. (At one point I couldn’t hold back and told him that I didn’t think he’d be capable of doing so. For a tiny moment he paused and said “maybe you’re right…” but then goes back to scream on the top of his lungs.) Finally we had to call the cops, but even then he came back an hour after the cops were gone.
There were a couple of seconds in this scene in which his face was about 20 cm from mine, I felt his spit on my face while he was shouting “cunt” or whatever and he tried to stare me down. That was a moment which came back to me later when I drove home. Brought back memories of the fights with my drunk dad when I was a kid. I’ve always wondered if it was worse when my father still managed to stare me down and his screams reduced me to a scared puddle of tears, cause he seemed so strong and seemed to have absolute power over everything in my life, or if it was worse when I grew older and felt those mechanisms didn’t work anymore, and learned to stand up till he finally lost his power over me.
Well, people who act or function like that guy cause me such a strong and deep hate in my guts…. it’s scary. The whole power and honor and pride thing behind that situation is so pathetic. I pity the women in his life cause he really seemed not to recognise that it was wrong to grope the woman in the first place. Although he was drunk you could sense that he really was convinced that she had no right to defend herself. Oh my, please keep such macho assholes out of my life.
For their own safety.

That’s it for now. Beware of the faksters, my friends.