Damned SEND button... Here's the full report.
Haye! *** If you're not wiling to read a lot of personal useless opinions and a lot of digressing, please hit delete now. *** Since you decided to read, I must say we don't often get food Detroit DJ's around here. as a matter of fact, it was a long time I didn't had the chance to hear one, and today I was going to listen to Rob Hood, one of the DJ's I allways wanted to hear spin. This was on Saturday. I had a long trip ahead of me. 15min train + 30min boat + 3.5h bus +1h train + 20 min (of a realy expensive) cab. Well, with all the waiting times between all the transportations and with small stops for relaxing, I had arived to the club about 10 hours after I had left home. Gotta get some money to buy myself a car, one of these days. I don't think I have the energy I had 3 or 4 years ago... Well, all'n'all it was OK, I had gotten to the club and got in. This was a good place, realy big club, you could feel at ease. Good air conditioning, lots of relaxing spaces, a garden, realy cool. The line-up included Portuguese DJ's Jiggy, Ze-Mig-L, Luis XL Garcia and his brother Wla Garcia (I think there was some mention about him in the list about the EP he released that was remixed by The Advent's Cisco Ferreira), and Detroiter Rob Hood. The flier stated something like "Rob Hood - M-Plant, Underground Resistence". I hate it when they misspell things at fliers. Fliers should be subject to proofread. I think Ben Sims was suposed to play at the techno room too. Wla was the first DJ to play. The Techno room was accessed through a small corridor, and it was this heavy vibe. Wla was playing some hard techno, but had some faults. I'm no DJ, so I don't know what are the technical aspects to it, but it seemed that he had some very basic faults in his DJ'ing at that time. Things started to get better by the time he dropped that record with the Nitzer-Ebb vocal on it (anyone knows what record am I talking about?). From then on he got better crowd response, up to the point of almost filling the room. The room seemed to have a 4/500 capacity, but I'm a little dumb at measuring things. The house room was WAY bigger. By the time Wla ended his set, Rob had arived with his wife Eunice. Rob started with an introduction from Internal Empire, realy good way to start. The lights guy could have done better, though. From then on he proceeded to present some hard techno but not sterile in funk. I mean, it had these hard beats allright, but you wouldn't dance to the beat, you'd dance to the BASS. Good, there was this section of his set where he played these older tunes, including 2 or 3 Derrick May tracks. The rest of his set was a tight mix with good tricks, there was also a part when he played mostly UR styled techno. I must say that by the ending time it was too hard for me. I wasn't expecting this type of music from Rob. I don't know if I should have, but I was expecting A LOT more of the minimal loops stuff, some bad wicked loops, but somehow it didn't happen in 4 or 5 songs, not more than that. It was pretty OK, though. Rob is a very good DJ. I got to meet him and Eunice after his set (Thanks for the info, Mark Taylor, realy usefull. Do you know if they have an e-mail address at M-Plant?), and Rob seemed to be a genuinely nice guy, not like the fake-ass-smiling-to-anyone kind of person. It seems to me all the Detroit guys that I have ever met - no exception - are pretty decent guys. Kevin, Derrick, Stacey, Mike Grant, Banks,Pennington, all of them seem to be good people. Well, I can't realy say the same thing about Jeff Mill, since he's so inaccesible. The security guards around Rob made a realy ugly spectacle. There was this kid trying to get to Rob to greet him that was almost getting his head smacked by this security guy, but I guess those are the kind of guys that were bullied at school. It's nor Rob's fault, but there are most definitly differences in attitude. I remember seeing Derrick for two times, and in both of them he was walking through the party, going to the dancefloor, absolutely no security guys around him. You could walk up to him and have a decent chat. I can't see that happening for instance with Mills. By this time I was allmost leaving. They had closed the water at the club and turned down the air conditioned, in a way that sweat was pouring from the walls. Moreover, Portuguese DJ Jiggy was playing now at 7:00 AM, and I wasn't quite in the mood for listening to heavy metal. *** When I left, the House floor was FULL, but REALY FULL! They had DJ Mushroom and Rob Rob from Massive Attack as main attractions, but by the time I left it was Portuguese Luis Leite playing. Sweet house music, but I had just made 24hrs no sleep with all that traveling. Oh, yeah, the tickets were around 17 euros. I got home around 17:30. It was well worth it. Lay Unconditional Empowerment http://barkingcat.org/counterforce
