Touring IS all it's cracked up to be...

Last Friday I had to go to Rennes in France to play at the third edition of the awesome Eclektic Festival. Although my flight wasn't until 18:45 my alarm went off at 8:00 because I had to drive up to Record Industry in Haarlem to master the new PRSPCT 2x 12" EP together with Thrasher. I remember switching off my alarm, blinking once, and then suddenly it was 8:30. I was late in the blink of an eye. I hate it when that happens. I double-checked to see if I had my CDs, passport and wallet as they're really the only three essential things needed to travel. (Except maybe for some spare underwear.)

I made good time to Rotterdam where the one known as the Thrasher (Gareth) lives. For some reason I was stuck in traffic about 5 minutes from his house. It would be the first of many transport-related hindrances. We had to drop Gareth's son, aka Lil' Thrashy, off somewhere before trekking up to Haarlem. It was somewhere around then that Lil' Thrashy decided that he should vomit all over my my backseat and his dad's pants. Needless to say this caused another slight delay as we really needed to clean that mess up. We ended up getting to Record Industry only one hour and 45 minutes too late, but, also... about 2 minutes before they were actually ready to start work on the PRSPCT EP. I guess being that late but still on time somehow is pretty good in rockstar terms. Gareth borrowed some deodorant from one of the ladies who works at Record Industry and sprayed the hell out of his pants to cover up the vomit smell. He now smelled like a hot girl. (More rockstar work, there.) We worked with the cutting engineer, Bob, for about 45 minutes on getting the tracks to sound rock-solid on vinyl. He was also able to open up the last two Genosha records on his system to show me how they sounded there. Top geezer, Bob.

I still had many hours before my flight, so I decided to go back to Rotterdam with Gareth to eat lunch there. First order of business was for Gareth to change out of his rank-ass pants. We drove into town to get some Surinamese food. I had about 1.5 hours left to hang out and eat before driving back up to the airport. For some reason we got stuck in terrible traffic due to an accident right by the place where we wanted to eat. We finally managed to park the car close to the restaurant after about 45 minutes in that traffic and were able to eat a hurried lunch. We dipped back out and I would have dropped Gareth off where he works but somehow we ran into a traffic jam. (Yeah, I swear.) I was forced to turn around as soon as I could and exit Rotterdam another way. By this time I was still going to be on time for my flight but I didn't really need anything else to go wrong from there. Lo and behold... Anther huge traffic jam in the direction of the airport. Bad traffic jam. Super traffic jam. I would have missed my flight had I gone that way by car. I decided to go the other direction and park my car in Dordrecht (pretty close to Rotterdam) and take a train from there. I got on the train as the doors were closing and got to the airport about 45 minutes before my flight, which really isn't enough these terroriffic days, but it's just about okay if you use an electronic check-in kiosk. The kiosk didn't like me and I had to get in line anyway. This was starting to get annoying. I ended up making the flight by a hair and then... somehow... we just stood on the runway for a good 45 minutes. Consequently, the flight got to Paris very late and I had about 15 minutes to make my connection. One lady in the back of the plane suffered a panic attack because she thought she was going to miss her flight. She actually started hitting the two people right behind me. Not cool. It was a 20 minute walk to my connecting flight so I made yet another flight with almost nothing to spare. I finally got to Rennes where I was promptly singled out by customs who wanted to know what I was planning on doing in their city traveling with only a CD-wallet and some underwear. (What's suspicious about my underwear, I ask.) Fortunately my driver had stuck around at the airport to wait for me even though my flight was heavily, heavily delayed. Again? Yes, again. It was delay day for me. I got to the venue two hours before my TOA gig with Noel.

The event itself was amazing and that's what makes it all worth it. There were many reputable techno and hip-hop DJs as well as hardcore DJs there, and everyone in attendance was in good spirits. We played a 90 minute set which started at 144 BPM and ended at 244 BPM and took various detours into drum & bass. We had people screaming pretty much all throughout the set and since there were cameras trained on our hands during the entire set they would scream extra loud whenever we did something that looked cool to them. (We were greeted as liberators, so to speak; not enemies.) I hope they'll have us back there next year because it was a blast.

It was now around 5 in the morning and the one known to many as the DJ Hidden had his return flight at 6:30 so there wasn't much sleep for him to be gotten at all. He had to fly showerless and sleepless, which is the absolute worst. I was lucky enough to be able to sleep till about 11 at my hotel and I also took a much needed shower. I think I must have smelled like a rotten cucumber. I was taken straight to the airport after making it down to the lobby and I figured I could finally eat something there since I hadn't eaten anything since the hurried lunch with Gareth the day before in Rotterdam. The Rennes airport can hold about 10 people and all they sold there were croque monsieurs and whatever should have come out of the broken vending machines. Now, this croque monsieur is a french grilled cheese sandwich type thing. I ordered one and quickly wished I hadn't. There was a layer of butter on there that was thicker than the really thick layer of cheese and ham. Trust me, it was gross. French people can be really gross.

Now, due to some more delays I got to Amsterdam just in time to hop on the train to Dordrecht. I was faced with the choice of burger king, or getting the hell home to eat some proper food. I opted for the latter choice and finally sat down and ate at 23:00.

We were scheduled to play in Spain the next day, but couldn't go due to a strike at Brussels Charleroi Airport.

Touring is awesome.



Croque monsieurs are super nasty. Don't let the picture fool you.

posted by Eye-D Monday, June 18, 2007

 

Y'all some dumb motherfuckers.

The sheer idiocy of large sections of the human race never ceases to amaze me. People's reaction to the recently announced smoking ban for restaurants, bars and clubs that will go into effect July 2008 have seriously rattled my brain. Several people lashed out by telling everyone who would listen how 'dumb' this is and were asking if 'banning drinking and having fun altogether' was going to be next.

YES, 'THEY' WOULD TOTALLY BAN 'DRINKING' AND/OR 'HAVING FUN IN GENERAL' IF IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO BE DISCOVERED THAT YOU COULD CAUSE OTHER PEOPLE TO GET CANCER BY 'DRINKING' OR 'HAVING FUN IN GENERAL'! GAH!

Many folks here have not been fortunate enough to travel as much as I have and consequently haven't experienced that the smoking bans have been working out beautifully in countries where they're already in effect. It just gets to me when people start equating the intake of alcohol to smoking. That's simply not how it works. I'm counting the days.



What... You didn't really think we'd kill the fuckin' koala bear, did you?

posted by Eye-D Friday, June 08, 2007

 

TOA Interview @ Cardiac Website

We were recently interviewed by Cardiac Music to provide filler-material for their website. You can read it here. It's well awesome.



Our ride.

posted by Eye-D Thursday, April 26, 2007

 

Modern Technology vs Swing

I've been making edits of older hardcore tracks in Ableton Live because a) I can, and b) we'd like to start playing a few older 'industrial' tracks in our sets. Some of these old tracks suffer an incredible amount of drift; especially the ones that were sequenced on a 909 or other drummachine. (I believe the one that is known as Entro used to call this phenomenon 'Lebanese Timing'.) I straightened out all the drifting so I could do edits on the tracks in Cubase; and you really can't tell anything's different about them now. Is it unethical to fix unintended swing?

I decided to take a look at some of my older drum & bass tracks in Ableton as well and I noticed that all the tracks I had made between 2001 and 2003 had suffered badly from the fact that I was running a DOS sequencer in a Windows XP DOS-box. I mean, practically every note is off. I've since fixed these tracks up and I can't really tell anything's different. I guess I should try playing some of these tracks out again to check whether or not some nerdy dude will come up to me and ask me if I shifted the second hi-hat in Unicorn MF up 2 milliseconds.

Since I switched to Cubase SX in 2004 everything's rock-solid. Super straight, and I love it. I think this is definitive proof that I am too white for swing.



Above: A graphical representation of my 2001 to 2003-era recordings.

posted by Eye-D Friday, March 09, 2007

 

Party like it's 1999!

It's actually 2007. I don't really care, though.




Ooooow.

posted by Eye-D Sunday, February 04, 2007