About 10 years ago when I was 14 I started going to raves. You know, underground parties where drugs and alcohol were in abundance and the beats came fast and heavy. That was a long time ago it seems, too long if you ask me. Back then the DJs were all underground artists save for the select few who sold out. And they were actually good! Vinyl spun on decks and sweat poured from brows as these DJs worked their asses off to provide perfectly mixed beats with smoother than silk transitions from one song to the next. Ecstasy wasn't only a drug, it was that feeling you got when your favorite DJ got up on the decks and started hitting every mark and slamming down every beat with a perfection that only came with hours and hours of practice and an overly apparent love of music. Gone are those days it seems.
These days it seems the passion for music has gone and all that's left are a few laptop computers. DJs these days click a mouse and the next song gets played. Click a few more times and the BPM (beats per minute) speed up, slow down, and match up - just like that. No skill. No talent. No hours of practice. Just button pushing. Hell, any monkey can sit there and push a button. I'm one of those people who has the "ear". I hear beats, and I hear when the beats are off. Anything longer than 2 seconds of being offbeat I consider to be a train wreck. I'm jaded. I grew up in the Houston underground scene listening to the best-of-the-best spin. It's been a long time since I've heard someone who matches the calibre of the Houston underground DJs. Over the past month I've been listening very carefully to a regular DJ at a night club in Portland called Dirty Nightlife.
DJ A-trane has got skill. I listened to him bang out beats one after another night after night and he did it on decks! The other DJ he shared the night with probably has vision problems now due to staring at the computer monitor for so long. A-trane was all over his decks and mixers, sliding from A to B and back again, throwing down the finger pinch spin on the top of the decks to speed up his vinyl! I didn't know a lot about A-trane until I got to talking with him a little over a few nights. He's extremely passionate about the music and being a DJ. All it takes is one night of watching him spin to see he's all about the music and keeping you dancing all night long.
An excerpt from A-trane's bio:
"DJ A-trane originally from the coast, has been spinning since he was eleven years old. Now in Portland, he has brought more than his tables but also a high-energy fusion of coastal and urban styles. Although only working the Portland nightlife for a year, he has become one of the city's most sought after DJs. Playing not only the hottest cuts available, in the swankiest clubs in town, DJ A-trane brings his high energy sets to a scene that drastically needs a performer and not your typical DJ. His ability to spin all genres of music including a mash-up of hip-hop, mainstream, throwbacks, electro and hard house gives his sets a flare of originality and a very diverse way to pack his dance floors..."
I had the pleasure of getting to sit down with A-trane and have a few beers with him while we talked about his passion.
Kontraband Police: How old are you?
A-trane: 22.
Kontraband Police: Where do you live?
A-trane: Downtown Portland, grew up on the Oregon Coast in a really small town.
Kontraband Police: What made you start DJing?
A-trane: I was at my brothers' middle school dance when I was in 5th grade. I saw what the DJ was doing and thought it looked rad, even though the DJ sucked ass (I hope he's reading this right now whoever he is). Pretty much started that summer.
Kontraband Police: How long have you been DJing?
A-trane: 11 years. I actually just started chiropractic treatment because of having my head tilted to the side for so long. My X-ray is on my MySpace...ha ha...
Kontraband Police: What's your favorite genre to spin?
A-trane: Electro hip-hop probably. A lot of energy.
Kontraband Police: What's your biggest inspiration?
A-trane: Seeing DJs that just kick ass and that are creative in what they do is really inspiring. AM, A-Trak and the dude who scratched the Imperial March in a battle one time. CHECK THAT SH#T OUT!!
Kontraband Police: What are some of your accomplishments?
A-trane: Winning a DJ Competition at a 900+ venue, spinning for 2000 peeps out of town, being a top headlining DJ in Portland at age 22. I recently graduated from film school, worked on the show Trading Spouses and on a feature film with Joel David Moore (JP in Grandma's Boy), and placing in the top twelve in an international film competition as the director of photography of a short.
Kontraband Police: Where'd you go to college?
A-trane: The Art Institute of Portland
Kontraband Police: What did you major in?
A-trane: Film
Kontraband Police: What is your dream job?
A-trane: Right now? It's either spinning in Vegas or working for the Discovery Channel.
Kontraband Police: What's your favorite DJing memory?
A-trane: Oh so many...Spinning the Diesel fashion show, winning the DJ Competition, and taking a body shot off a church girl on her bachelorette party in front of all her other fellow church ladies. It was hilarious, I'm pretty sure she was rethinking marriage...
Kontraband Police: What do you think about Kontraband?
A-trane: Kontraband is freakin' awesome. Where else can people see hot chicks and people destroying themselves or their egos on one website? It's truly ninja.
It's not often you come across a well rounded DJ who knows what's going on around him and knows what he's talking about. DJ A-trane is one of those DJs. In fact, it's not often I care enough about a DJ to give the guy a second look. If you're ever in the Portland area and you're looking for a good time, check out A-trane. You won't be disappointed.
i smell!
Added: 128 days ago by sallycougar
This awesome blog is brought to you courtesy of those wonderful souls over at VICE magazine. To show how wonderful they are they'll be giving away tickets to a variety of festivals each day for the next few weeks. Click here for your chance to drink cider in a field until you're puking it through your ears.
I can say with absolute certainty that I have never had a good time at a festival. Festivals these days are for bloated marketing people in flip-flops and three-quarter-length shorts to prance about in a field twiddling one of their nipple piercings and pretending they like music so they can go into the office the following Monday and tell the girl in accounts how "f#cked up" they got.
The worst festival I've ever been to took place on a beach in the West Country. It mainly involved loads of inane bands playing torpid noise to tanned surfers in Hawaiian shirts who looked like they'd rather be watching Sublime or high-fiving their reflection in the mirror.
As bad as it was, I am sure I can imagine a festival that's at least 40,000 times worse than this. Let me now, in my mind, curate the worst festival the world has ever seen. It will feature the following...
ABHORRENT PEOPLE
It's often the people you meet and spend time with at a festival that determine how much of a good time you have. My festival (apart from bands, managers, hangers-on, PRs, grumpy oafs who stand by the side of the stage, etc.) will consist solely of human pond life. It will be a post-travelling reunion, arranged via Facebook, for teenagers who have just arrived back from Thailand on their gap year. For the entire three days, each will try to outdo the other with stories of how many dolphins they swam with, how many henna tattoos they got, how many times they "found themselves" and how many underage ladyboys they molested.
AWKWARD LOCATION
A large problem with hard-to-reach festivals is that if you decide you don't like them after a few hours it's very hard to escape. No one wants to thumb a lift to the ferry port alone with a local rapist and then take a two-hour boat ride before boarding a coach that takes 12 hours to travel 50 miles to a place that isn't really that close to where you live.
My festival will be annoyingly hard to reach. It will take place on Muck, a tiny island off the north west of Scotland. After flying in to the local airport on the shaky light aircraft, festival goers will have to hike across the North West Highlands and then ride by donkey to the village of Arisaig, because all taxis will be banned for that weekend. From here, people will have to buy rowing boats from locals in the mainland village and embark on the three-hour row across the unforgiving Sea of the Hebrides, flinging viciously randy seals off the boat as they attempt to clamber onboard.
UNSUITABLE DRESS CODE
Festival fancy dress is so funny. Laugh out loud. Ha ha ha. My three-day marathon of mental torture will also have a dress code: the Borat mankini and platform shoes. Every pleb who pays to come to my festival will have to wear these clothing carbuncles. Not so bad, you're thinking? Well, the event will take place in the freezing depths of winter when the island is lashed with thick snow and battered by gale-force winds. The entire population of fun-seekers will have to huddle together in a gigantic pack in a desperate attempt not to die from hypothermia when attempting to move from tent to tent.
INTRUSIVE SPONSORSHIP
Most festivals these days are just a cunning vehicle for product endorsement and sponsorship deals. And my festival shall be no different; the whole thing will be sponsored by a new German energy drink brand, Schickerspeed. No other liquid apart from this sickening sugary drink will be allowed on site, including water. Schickerspeed will pour from every tap. You will have to wash your hands with Schickerspeed after doing a shit. You will be forced to have the Schickerspeed logo (a grinning German Riding Pony with massive breasts) tattooed on the palm of your hand before you are allowed into the festival. Every leaf of every tree on the site will have a Schickerspeed sticker stuck to it. Each act will have to spend the first quarter and the last quarter of their set chanting, "Schickerspeed! Schickerspeed! Schickerspeed!" over and over until the entire audience has been indoctrinated and stumbles about in a daze repeating this pointless mantra.
GROSS FOOD
No catering will be allowed on site. If you are hungry you will have to dig up vegetables from the ground and cook them in the microwaves provided until they become a soggy pulp, which bursts with boiling liquid when you bite into it.
CELEBRITY DJ TENT
As I entered Bestival two years ago I stumbled into a tent where ageing DJ Tim Westwood was spinning his usual set of overplayed hip-hop hits. I informed my gullible friend that the wrinkly rap-lover would be taking part in a 24-hour DJ set, and since he only played vinyl, he'd brought along a truck filled with records, which was manned by a team of helpers backstage who brought him each 12-inch as he bellowed the title through a megaphone. She believed every word.
Tim Westwood isn't a big enough name for my festival, so instead I'll have someone really famous like Kerry Katona headlining the celebrity DJ tent. Krazy Kez, as I like to call her, will play a 24-hour set of psy-trance Atomic Kitten remixes while her disgusting cockroach of a husband and almost-as-vile mother dance naked on podiums either side. With celebs, I find the more the merrier, so I'll cram as many as I possibly can into this one tent. For maximum celebrity DJing enjoyment, at all times there will be two other celeb DJs playing songs during Krazy Kez's set-all in the same tent so the three different sets of music clash horribly with each other. Hosting the tent will be Abs from 5ive, who will freestyle in a Jamaican accent.
The tent will be a makeshift church, with the celebs performing on an altar, and everyone who isn't famous will have to kneel and pray to the celebs as they pump out their horrifying racket.
SOUND LIMITER
Every shit festival needs to have a pithy limit on the level of sound that can be emitted from on-site speakers. My festival will have a noise limit of 12db. Kings Of Leons' headlining set will be drowned out by the sound of a strong gust of wind and Calvin Harris's entire nine-hour set of his own material will be eclipsed by the sound of a low-flying moth.
WILD ANIMALS
Line-ups are pretty much the same at every festival, so each year organisers try to come up with crazy ideas to surprise and astound people, like having a festival in a zoo. My festival will be the craziest yet because I will release wild animals onto the site. To see Faithless (who will be one of my headline acts) you will have to first bludgeon a pack of polar bears to death with a bottle of poppers. To catch Zane Lowe's DJ set you will have to dive into the piranha tank that he will be chained to the bottom of.
COKE-SNORTING COMPETITION
The basic premise here is that all of the bands' managers will (very willingly) take part in a competition to see who can snort the most coke backstage during the course of the day. The winner will be the cheeky chappy who can talk the most bullshit about their utterly fourth-rate indie band to the biggest number of complete strangers, or the first person to drop dead from a heart attack.
Click here to win tickets to a host of festivals, where your experiences will be the polar opposite to that recounted above. Or maybe not, but at least you'll get in for free.
then why go these festivals? you know there are alternatives, right? i don't know a whole lot of festivals, but roskilde festival has never ever let me down
Added: 155 days ago by jampe
The festival season is upon us. The season of good will, ill-will and willed self-destruction. Of earache and brainache. So dust off the silly head-gear, bust out those multi-coloured, oversized shades that look like blinds and tell the girlfriend she really won't need a Marc Jacobs pleated dress, plus there's no room in the rucksack for it anyway because you've filled it full of high-grade mary-jane and tequila.
There's a myriad to choose from, you can go watch some hippies hugging flora and fauna, go see your favourite comedians, drink pear cider until it becomes your blood, reject money for a week, dance on the beaches of Spain or the fields of Denmark, take the kids, your parents, friends or enemies; there's Glastonbury, Burning Man, Benicassim, The Big Chill, Ozora, Bestival, Roskilde, Boom, Sziget, T in the Park, Ozzfest, Reading, Download, Creamfields - the list really is endless. It seems every possible musical genre is covered from techno folk-fusion, to experimental dubstep blues, easy listening metalcore, avant-garde country jazz, junglist Britpop and classical gabba. Make up a musical genre like I just did and I guarantee you'll find a festival playing it.
You could say the market's oversaturated, or you could just shut the f#ck up, drink some booze, say a little pray to Discordia, put some ridiculous shades on and go check out what's on in the dance tent. "Whoop, whoop" Is that the sound of the Police? It better not be, because I f#cking hate Sting.
The experience of a music festival is like falling down the rabbit hole. You wake up after 4 days of absolute filth-ridden partying, you're naked in a field/desert/river/trench/someone else's tent with your genitals covered in fluorescent paint and haunting memories of such sinful debauchery that you've earned yourself a rank in Satan's army. What to do but reach out for the nearest bottle of Wild Turkey, and use it to wash back those weird coloured pills you've found lying next to you. You fight back the gag reflex as you wash them down, stand up, your brain feeling like it's taken a train head on, and you stagger off, naked, into the desert to the sounds of fellow debauchees whooping in the distance, the sounds of joyful laughter and the peculiar noises of abandon that only a festival can unleash. It sounds like maddened jackals dressed in clown outfits, eating fairy dust, while howling for the insane. You stroll on through this human safari park, listening to the surrounding echoes of these mad, stoned fools.
You look up into the glaze of the bright sun, squint, smile, look around you at what looks like the set of a new Mad Max movie, and then dutifully follow the sounds of some thumping bass line in the distance, calling you like a Siren. You may be naked, you may've lost all your friends, your clothes, your tent, your money, your sanity and your dignity, but by Lucifer's balls, you're still going to enjoy the rest of this festival. They'll be time later to lament the loss of everything you came with. Now is the time to dance to that hallowed music like it was your saviour. To meet some day-glo hipster freak in the techno tent who's wearing a headband made from the baroque dress of a 17th century duchess and looking like Ziggy Stardust at his retirement gig. Who's frothing at the mouth and dancing like a monkey teleporting through a sandstorm, occasionally stopping to freebase amyl nitrate off a medieval dwarf's winkle pickers. Good. Times.
Or perhaps you're wandering about in a field, taking a Rabelaisian ramble, dazed and confused, crying chemical tears of joy for reasons unknown, and you pass a stall selling what looks to your mind like multi-coloured pixie brains and elves' genitals. You're staring intently at them, wondering whether they really are these things or just candy, when suddenly you hear the beautiful rhythms of Fleetwood Mac's Everywhere travel wistfully to your ears like a goddess's caress. And that's it, you start laying down some freaksome forms right there. Forget making it to see the headline act, some past it rock star playing the bongos with his testicles, while farting the lyrics to this latest comeback album with U2 guest-riverdancing on his schlong - it's happening right here, right now. That is until the song ends and you drift off, desperate to find out what that weird light on the distant hill might be, that light that's been blinking at you suggestively, willing you over like a comely minx. It's going to be a long, strange, crazed night; a night that could easily be mistaken for the manic, frenzied dreams of a drunken lunatic.
Later on while chanting with some dreadlocked hippies who smell like incense and stale urine, you'll experience what you think is true gnosis, but then realise it was just you sh#tting your pants. And now you're laughing uncontrollably, the belly laugh, the good laugh. Here come the tears again, and now you can't see as they stream down your face. Someone hands you something, then a bottle to wash it back with. So long cruel world, I'll see you for the long coach ride home...
Whatever happens, it's guaranteed you'll bring back hazy memories, some even hazier photos, a tan, puke-stained clothes and quite possible an STD. But, hey, it'll all be worth it.
If you see the glaze-eyed, haunted, mysterious-looking children-of-fesitvals wandering around train stations and coach terminals looking like frightened lost deer, be kind to them. It could've very easily been anyone of us.
i missed out on the festivities this year but i'm going to glasto next year.
Added: 88 days ago by andopolis
