You know you’re a burner if…

• You start planning for Burning Man during Exodus
• The day tickets go on sale, you’re on the website repeatedly clicking “refresh” until sales opens
• You have a little vial of playa dust hung around your neck (as if you didn’t have enough of it stashed in film canisters already)
• Every time someone says “fire” or “dust” your eyes go out of focus and you sigh
• Every time someone tells you what time it is your eyes go out of focus, you sigh and mentally calculate how long it will take you to bike back to your camp from there
• You look on the web for photos taken at Burning Man hoping you’ll see a picture either of yourself or that boy/girl/ram/pixie with whom you missed a playa date
• Blinking fairy lights make you think of Burning Man before you think “Christmas”
• Your non-burner friends begin to slap you when you start telling a Burning Man story
• You’re reading this list
• You spend some time making a list like this

Speed of Sound: Mach III – Debrief

SoS: Mach 3 was BEYOND EPIC. It’s 1:30pm the next day and I am still buzzzzzzzing… The punters loved us; we had a queue outside at 1:30am while Marshall Law was playing; Mike the owner was there most of the night despite saying he was going to leave early; and he is dead-keen to have SoS back again soon. The vibe was so indescribably positive… Loads of punters thanked us for our sets and we had a full dancefloor from about 11pm until 3am. We knew we had the concept sold when there were whoops, whistles and cheers during the breakdowns…!

The concept? “Participatory, Interactive Rave.” This is our vision of Rave Culture upgraded for the 21st Century.

The S.o.S. CyberBuddha

I’ve worked in bars & restaurants for almost 15 years, so I think I can say with some authority that I know what people are looking for when we go out on the weekend: We’re looking for a sense of community—a sense of belonging. We spend hours of our time and dollars of our money on disinhibiting liquors in order to be around and make contact with other human beings in a social setting. What we’re doing with S.o.S. is overtly encouraging people to make those connections.

We sought to bring some of the founding principles of Burning Man / Kiwiburn to the rave scene of Wellington, such as participation, inclusion, radical self-expression, gifting, etc. Generally we were just looking for the kind of party we’d all like to go to, yet weren’t finding available. So we did it ourselves. We put on a free gig, and got some really friendly points of difference put into play. We sought to implement some of the Good Things that we experienced at various burns into our mainstream, “default” world; and, we sought to demonstrate that it could be done without the need for a lot of money, or fake hype, or big-name artists—just by doing what we love. This is our Sense of Community… and we invite you to be a part of it.

More photos from the night can be viewed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/50163262@N04/sets/72157624087417905/

Mixing My Perceptions, part IV: Kiwiburn 2010 Retrospective

As I babbled about here, I had a soul-ticklingly fantastic time at Kiwiburn six weeks ago, and part of that gleeful mirth came from DJing my first live gig.

I’ve had some issues since then getting various softwarez and hardwarez to work properly on my laptop, but I finally have enough stuff working to get out this mix of tunes that I played during that first set. There are one or two replacements and additions, but it gives you a flavour for what went down.

There are even mistakes! And sketchy transitions! Close your eyes, and it’s just like you’re right there, pashing people in the corner or jumping up and down, sliding around in the mud.  :)

Enjoy: http://bit.ly/cqRXKg

Flange, Reverb, Beatgrid...

Burning and Magic

Okay: I could go totally sideways in the soppy+sappy department here about all the insanely, rib-ticklingly goodvibey stuff that has been happening recently, but I’ll opt to keep it relatively simple for the sake of those of you who actually read my meandering tripe. Suffice to say that I am unbel*IEV*ably happy right now.

This may seem quite a stark contrast to some of my other posts over the last few months. Don’t worry, I still hyper-analyse everything and I still think it’s about 50/50 that we’re all going to die within the next century or so in an unimaginable environmental apocalypse, but never mind that right now. Today I am happy. Today I feel full and satisfied, and strangely optimistic about the near-to-medium-term future.

Mixing My Perception, part II

Honest, I am writing more meaty and irreverent musings on the human condition. Honest. And I know you’re all gagging for it (sarcasm), but I’m being more picky with how they sound and feel before I publish them. I have posts about The Future; Anxiety; and Right & Wrong on the board. Hang tight, I’ll get ‘em done soon enough.

For now, here’s another DJ mix I’ve recorded. For the most part, I’m fairly pleased with it, right up until 39 minutes when I try to drop a chunky, bass-heavy breaks tune in on top of a more fuzzy tech house track. Yeah, not so sharp. The two tracks could be mixed properly, but… well, not the way I did it.  :)
But other than that, it sounds… okay. And that chunky tune (Bleachin’ by Bleachin’, from the rise-and-fall-and-fall-further-storybook-of-a-club-lifestyle-junkie album Everyone Loves You, Everything’s Free) is just so good that I’m just going to not care about it — for now, anyway.

The funky 4/4 bass-line of tech house is definitely easier to mix than a lot of other genres (like breakbeat for example; I’ve recorded heaps of breaks mixes and they’re all f**ked), and IMHO there are some pretty frikken tight moments towards the end of this mix. I might have rocked the effects a bit too often, but hey, I’m just messin’ around.

I’m having more and more fun learning to mix, and the technicalities of when to drop bass, mid and treble are becoming more familiar; as is the timing for when to bring in the next tune. I’m acutely conscious that Kiwiburn is bearing down upon us (yippee!) and I hope to have the breaks mixing down-pat by then. It’s nut-down, ass-up until then.

All comments & critique is fully welcome. Hope you like it; I’ll post more as I record them.

Perception – Tech House Mix 02 (3rd January 2010)