A Tale of Two Tracks

I attended Love Parade over the weekend. Overall it was a great time, though there were a few bumps along the way. Those bumps are somewhat humorous, so I'll talk about them before I get onto the real subject.

This weekend trip was made so that I could attend two parties – the free, day-time Love Parade festival and the expensive ($40 presale for me, probably $60 at the door), night-time after party. I was at the free party for pretty much the entire time. When it ended I headed out with a group of friends for dinner. Somehow getting dinner took 3.5 hours, which I attribute to the following factors: (1) driving around and trying to find parking in San Francisco on a Saturday night; (2) going out to dinner with a group of people whom had not paid $40+ for a ticket to a party that they were missing while getting dinner. On top of that I managed to lock the keys to our car in the trunk, so we had to wait another hour, adding up to 4.5 hours of missed-after-party time. And when we finally got into the party, the closing DJs were both trance DJs, which I really wasn't in the mood for. Granted, Marcus Shultz and Ferry Corsten are fairly ridiculous trance DJs, but I'm the guy that saw Tiesto live and left for the backroom after an hour. (I think Seb Fontaine was DJing the backroom. Heh. Seb Fontaine in the backroom. Gotta love Ibiza clubs). So, the after-party was basically a dud for me. Fortunately, I had such a great time at the day party that it didn't matter that much (which I'll get to in a moment).

The second bump came the "morning" after (whereby morning I mean early-afternoon), when we were trying to organize our group to get some food. It was 2:00 when we finally started talking about getting food. After the experience of getting food from the previous night I wasn't too keen on getting food as a group because I figured it would take a long time. My math went like this: Leave the house at 2:30, probably won't get to the restaurant until 3:30, will take 1.5-2 hours to go through the entire process of eating, meaning we wouldn't get out of San Francisco until after 5:00, putting us back in Pasadena around 11 and me back in Santa Monica at midnight. No, that was pretty much unacceptable, considering I was planning on getting up at 7am Monday morning. So, I voiced my concern, saying I wanted to be out of San Francisco before 4 (if not before 3 or 3:30). The response: "Oh, ok, we'll be fast." What happened: Got out of the house at 3:00, took ass-forever to get to the restaurant (got there at 4:00 by following our San Francisco host. I've only been to San Fran a couple of times and I swear I could have got to the restaurant in 30 minutes), and took 1.5 hours to eat, ultimately starting our drive home at 5:30, getting back to Pasadena at 11:30, and finally getting back to Santa Monica at 12:30. Bah. Exactly what I did not want to happen. Whatever though. In the end it doesn't really matter.

So now on to the positive part of the trip. At the day party I got to see Bad Boy Bill, Carl Cox, and DJ Dan, back-to-back-to-back. On word – ridiculous. Now, Carl Cox pretty much spins exclusively tech-house, so I wasn't surprised to hear him spin that. I was surprised, however, to hear Bad Boy Bill and DJ Dan spin a bunch of tech-house, as both typically tend more towards vocal/funky/"real musical instrument" house. Bill mentioned that San Fran is really into tech house, so I guess they were playing for their location. Anyway, the sets were amazing. DJ Dan's was probably the best of his that I've seen live. However, my experience hearing these sets was probably a bit different than most of the other people in the crowd. For example, here's how I reacted to the last five tracks in Bad Boy Bill's set:

• Track 1: Hell yeah, I know this track, it's awesome.
• Track 2: Oh shit, I have this track!
• Track 3: Oh shit, I have this track too!!
• Track 4: Oh my god, this track is ridiculous, and I have it as well!!!
• Track 5: Aaahhh!!! This track is on my wish list, and it's ridiculous too!!!

I've been really into house music for about two years now, yet only once have I heard a live set for which I could identify even a large minority of the tracks (fyi, that was the DJ Rap Valentine's Day party – best Q party ever, one of the best overall too). I heard probably eight tracks in Bad Boy Bill's set, and among them I had three, wanted a fourth, and knew two other (which I really liked, but not enough to buy for my vinyl collection). As a beginning bedroom DJ, it's tough to describe the feeling I got from Bad Boy Bill's set. Basically it was me thinking, "Damn, I have the same taste in tracks as BBB. Awesome!" But wait – it gets better. Two of the tracks that BBB played were tracks that I had bought without hearing them in any DJ live sets or recorded sets. Why am I mentioning this? Well, I would estimate that 75% of the tracks I own I picked up because I heard another DJ playing them. In a sense, those tracks were "DJ-proofed" and thus "safe" to pick up, i.e. "DJ whoever played this track, so it's gotta be good." For my last 20 vinyl purchases, a good number of them have been tracks that I heard for the first time on the website I get my vinyls from (dancerecords.com, in case you're wondering), so you could view those purchases as "riskier" in that I'm relying solely on my own musical taste to pick good tracks. I should note that I personally don't consider relying on my own musical taste to be a risk, as I believe I have an impeccable taste for house music, but at the same time it's nice to have that belief reaffirmed every so often.

One of said tracks that Bad Boy Bill played was a Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso remix. Sebastian Ingrosso is one of the artists that consistently produces tracks I like. (some of the other artists consistently produce tracks I like are Laurent Wolf, JJ Flores & Steve Smooth, Thick Dick/E-Funk/E-smoove (aliases), H.C.C.R., Hatiras, and Josh Wink, to name a few). He favors a fuzzy-tech sound layered with multiple percussion tracks which I really like. I'll get back to him later. The second track was "Backbeat" by Macca, which is actually one of Hatiras's aliases. This track is awesome. It's a track that I heard online and immediately thought "I have to get this." It's a great peak-hour house track, i.e. one you would use to get the dance floor jumping. Sure enough, BBB threw it on and the crowd went nuts. Awesome.

About an hour or so later DJ Dan was on, and he threw on Backbeat as well. Talk about a DJ-proofed track – two of the biggest house DJs in the US (if not the world) played the same track less than two hours apart at the same party. Hell yes. So I'm listening to DJ Dan play through the track, and as he starts mixing out of it I can faintly hear the incoming track. This was my thought process during the transition: "Hmm, that incoming track sounds kinda familiar. Wait… that wouldn't happen to be Sebastian Ingrosso's "Get It Back" would it? (super-recognizable part of the intro comes in) Oh shit, it is "Get It Back!" Yeah!!! This track is awesome!" Let me give you a little background on Get It Back. Get It Back is exactly the kind of tech-house I like – catchy repeating hook, fuzzy tech sound, tribal-style percussion, and incredible breakdowns and builds. However, it really is kind of a niche track in that it won't immediately appeal to most people. Backbeat, by comparison, is exactly the kind of track that will appeal to most people, so it didn't really surprise me to hear it played at Love Parade (though hearing it twice did surprise me). If you had asked me before Love Parade which non-DJ-proofed track would I most want to hear played at a party it would have been Get It Back. So, as you can probably imagine, hearing my favorite DJ, DJ Dan, DJ-proof it for me was an amazing experience. Then, to top it all off, DJ Dan did an amazing transition: In the 1-minute breakdown in the middle of Get It Back he mixed in a spoken-word acapella (probably from some movie. I didn't recognize it) for the entire breakdown, and on top of that mixed in an acapella from Backbeat for the last 15 seconds of the breakdown. What made that transition so cool was that I knew both of the tracks being used and thus was able to recognize exactly what he was doing. Awesome. Damn, I love house music. And DJ Dan is still, by far, my favorite DJ.