Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Banksy hits Camden





4 new pieces all unveiled over this weekend. Quite easy to find along the Regents canal once you head off in the right direction, that is.
The decorator one seems to have upset some of the graffiti fraternity though. It appears he's gone over a very old piece that had been there for 20+ years, even though others had scrawled over it in that time.

Soulwaxmas

At the start of December a few friends and I had our annual concert thing and having seen Chemicals and Fatboy Slim in previous years it was the time of Soulwax and 2ManyDjs.


Warmup in a very empty venue was Gyratory Sound System. A sort of weird brass band trio arrangement where the trumpet seemed to get smaller as the set went on.

Next up was someone called Micky Moonlight. He was really really bad! His music was alright but as soon as he tried to mix the tracks together disaster ensued. Perhaps it was nerves but he'd have had a better response if he played the tracks one after another. I guess he wasn't that popular as I can't find any clips on youtube. People must have prefered to save the memory cards for later.



Up next was Soulwax who played a really good, if short, set. The 50 minutes or so were really good with a quite disorientating light show. The final track which seemed to be jive-bunny mix of old skool anthems went down particularly well.



Errol Alkan was up next. He was really good too! Friends are into his stuff and I hadn't really given him a chance but he did a great job getting us ready for the main event. Not sure why all the people were allowed on the stage though, none of them could dance.




2ManyDJs were up next and they were superb. Not much to look at when they play but some great visuals to go along with the mashups they were playing. A simple trick of taking the single artwork and animating it slightly in time to the music. Big tunes of the night were the MGMT tune that every DJ has been remixing this year (Kids, I think its called) and Prodigy's Out Of Space (can never go wrong with that).

But there were loads of other good tunes too. It's definitely the first set that's had me dancing to Sparks, Can, Beatles, Beethoven, amongst others.

I guess they must have impressed everyone in the Academy as even those filming it on their phones were jumping up and down, hence the poor footage.


But they do have lots of videos, used as visuals, on their youtube page.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Arturo Brachetti

Quick change artist Arturo has a show at the Garrick Theatre until January and its mind-blowing. I love trying to figure out how magic is done but this guy was too quick to figure it out. He must have gone through 100 costume changes during his show.

Tennessee

Tennessee is a landlocked state in the USA and is bordered by the following states. Kentucky to the North Virginia to the North-East Arkansa...