Thanks to all of you who came out to Fatback this past weekend... I had a blast and it seems like most of you did as well. For those who didn't make it: all kinds of music, lots of folks dancing, totally rammed, one-in-one-out on the door for a long while, stayed crowded until well after the lights came on. It looks like it'll be happening again so, you know, don't sleep.
It looks like a few things are coming together in terms of my DJing, which I have been focusing a fair bit of time and attention to of late. I'm trying to figure out a distinctive sound for myself. I guess I've been doing that for several years now, having focused on playing eclectic sets when I was at Sonar and The Ottobar with Creighton, but at this point I'm trying to open things up even more. At Fatback I opened with a lengthy run of funk and soul stuff, but then burned through a doo wop 7" from 1957 (The Rays, "Daddy Cool"), "I'm A Hog for You" by The Surfaris, "I Wanna Be Sedated" by The Ramones, and "Take on Me" by A-Ha as a means of pivoting in to a short set of electro and afrobeat. Later in the evening I returned to funk and disco stuff. Afterwards, people were talking about how all over the place my set was, but they didn't seem to think that it failed to "make sense" as it emerged. And people danced. I mean, that doo wop record (which is 51 years old and appears to be an original) had people doin' it.
After my nice crate digging score of a few weeks back and my digging about 30 old 7's out of my closet and getting them sorted I have found that my sound has shifted towards funk and soul in big way (duh), but as the above indicates I'm sort of trying to fuse that with different sounds. I bought a bunch of records on Sunday, among them the recent two volume, four LP Kings of Techno compilation from BBE, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, and a short stack of 7's, mostly funk and soul. What's funny is that the Kings of... comp kind of embodies the fusion sound that I'm talking about.. It has people like Carl Craig, Alexander Robotnick, and Jeff Mills, but it also has Alice Coltrane with Pharaoh Sanders, Aretha Franklin, and The Stooges. So it seems to me that there's really something to mindfully digging in to more and more diverse sounds and finding ways to make them make sense in the moment, to make them sound and feel fresh, surprising, transgressive. And dancable. I really, really want to go further with this.
At the moment, though, I am totally exhausted. I was unable to get to sleep last night until, well, about 6:00 this morning. I saw Barton Fink at the AFI last evening (and was glad that No Country for Old Men did as well as it did at the Oscars). After the show Lukas and I hung out at the Quarry House for a bit. A combination of being out late, followed by noisy cats, followed by being annoyed/awake, followed by getting up and doing some work kept me from getting any thing like real rest. This comes on the heels of a busy week in terms of going out (Fatback, the excellent Brazilian dance night at St Ex, etc) so I could really stand a few low key evenings.
So one afternoon maybe a year and a half ago I was walking to Whole Foods to get some lunch and I saw Ralph Nader crossing 16th and P heading west as I was heading east. As I looked at him and recognized who he was he gave me this self-satisfied, "Yes! I'm Ralph Nader!" look.
I realize now that I should have given in to my lesser inclination, which was to punch him.
