Spent almost a week in Vienna.
A trip from Ljubljana with a train is actually really stress-free, much better then car and even plane. Especially with good company. I visited Substance recordshop, and was slightly surprised that it has a form of good old recordshop with a selection of electronic and other music. Couple of turntables and a CD player with headphone available for you to pre-listen what you want to buy. This is how we were buying music 15-20 years ago – either for DJ sets or for personal home library. How things have changed in such short time so that this kind of practice seems somewhat awkward or at least time-consuming. Everything can be pre-listened and bought online, either digitally or ordered to ship. My feeling is that a recordshop (and possibly this holds true also for bookshops) could expand its potential of a sub/cultural meeting space with events and cafe/lounge type of ambiance. In any case it was good to immerse myself into vinyl bins, do some prelistening and actually buy a small experimental 7″ by Mika Vainio “Behind The Radiators” (released by Touch in 2008). Big-ups to Substance record-shop for staying afloat in these turbulent times for market for physical recordings (althought supposedly vinyl and tape sales are going up). If you are in Vienna, please visit them.
While I was preparing for the gig, I made some nice beatport discoveries. Beta is a UK producer with updated contemporary breakbeat production which harks back at Nu School Breaks era. Very solid, somewhat deep, and still awesomely dynamic. Another one is Electric Soulside – a duo of producers from Brussels creating quite a head-on loud dynamic saturated filthy funk with plenty of releases on Lot49 and Diablo Loco among others.
So to the gig, which happened at Impulstanz Lounge @ Burgtheater’s Vestibül. The whole week was totally hot (all day temperatures above 30 even 35 degrees) so the dancefloor, which was without airconditioning or decent ventilation, was very hot and sweaty. After a completely different ‘warmup’ by Rio and some girls on iPods/iPhones, I played a dynamic mix of heavy breaks with possibly too fast transitions and cuts – and it was quite clear bodies were unprepared for this. The floor didn’t clear up, but the feeling was simply people didn’t really know how to dance to this. The bodies didn’t understand this particular code of deep funk. Somehow same old story. There’s some educating to do. Unfortunately against the trends. It was nevertheless a fun and hot gig that left me wanting for a better (or at least louder) sound system, perhaps some ventilation (i was soaked in sweat), but most importantly, the right public. But I guess I’m wanting too much. I have a lot of plans with Deviant Funk Music Club ‘platform’ though, and time will show, if they materialize.
Unfortunately the trip back was very pleasant until half way through. Before Graz there was a tremendous storm. We saw trees breaking and of course there was some damage further along the way on the rail tracks, so there were delays and changing of trains about five times. And we came home about 4 hours later than we thought.
