Do you know how lax I am up at updating this blog? Like THIS lax. Ah well, let’s continue. I returned to Calgary after many years and this show blew the last one away. A great little spot called The Hifi Club was where I was at this time courtesy of my man Dan Solo. Check his cool photo blog too.
I love that guy.
Touring North America means catching a lot of flights and the whole airport procedure can get dull pretty fast so I take any opportunity to vary my mode of transport that I can. The show after New York was in Washington DC and it takes just 3.5 hours on the train to get there. I love trains anyway so taking this route was perfect. And trains provide an interesting photographic challenge in that you can see a lot of cool shots along the way but you only have a split second to grab it before you’ve passed by.
If one were to judge a place by the standard of milkshake, New York ranks very high – the Charlie Brown shake available at Sacred Chow consists of bananas, peanut butter, chocolate and coconut milk. Delicious. (Thanks to Dave Shichman of Driven AM for taking me there!) And tis better to judge it by shakes than by clubs for despite being one of the best cities in the world, New York has a distinct lack of club venues suitable for dance music. And the spot I was supposed to play in had to be switched for another at the last minute due to licensing problems. But thankfully the word got out and we had a full house for the show at Drom, which was a lot of hot fun in the end.
Toronto retains it’s title as the DnB capital of North America, what an incredible show. The club I played at, The Guvernment, is one of the best in the world in my opinion. It was the huge main room and the jungle massive came out in full force, such a great atmosphere. The stage was on hydraulics and slowly went up and down as I played. It was a joy to play there.
This was my first time in Boston and although it was a fleeting visit, it seemed like a cool place. Had delicious vegetarian food at hipster hangout The Other Side and was shown great hospitality by local promoters/djs Crook and Lenore who have been running the weekly dnb night Elements since Jan 99.
Liking the 2001 style deck stand.
It was a small bar type venue but I like the intimacy you get at places like that, also meant it was absolutely rammed. Apologies to the people who couldn’t get in though.
Chicago is one of my favourite US cities. It makes perfect sense that both The Dark Knight and the forthcoming Superman reboot are shot there, it has that quintessential American big city feel, without being the overly recognisable New York.
It’s also a great spot for crate digging, something that I hadn’t done for quite a while having been concentrating on writing non sample based tunes the last few years. But knowing how obscure the records would be at certain shops, I just had to go back in. Local producer/dj Submorphics was kind enough to take me round for the day. We covered a real societal cross-section from the serious collectors Dusty Grooves to the hipster haunt Reckless Records to the dj orientated K Starke Records to the totally ghetto Out of the Past Records. (more…)
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