Spring is the best time of year in Athens. Athens comes alive with house parties, and uptown is bumping every night as graduating seniors make the best of their last days in fantasy land. Fest Season kicks off this Saturday with the High Street block party, aptly named “High Fest”. We are hosting the unofficial High Fest tonight at The Union – a Cumulus Entertainment DUB101 event featuring a lineup packed with Ohio-based talent – Slave (Kent, OH), Elton Mack (Dayton, OH) and Columbus’ own Kingpin, co-founder of the Ohio Stand Up blog. Local support comes from DJ Technician and Capt PlannedIT.
Slave (aka David Timko) recently had his interpretation of the Star Wars Imperial March, Dubstep Strikes Back, featured on Dubstep.net. Check out his SoundCloud page for more mixes and originals.
We are excited to welcome San Antonio-based DJ/Producer Crizzly, known as the king of crunkstep, to The Union in Athens on April 5th for a special DUB101 event. Having headlined Electric Daisy Carnival in Dallas and Las Vegas, and with appearances at SXSW and Electric Forrest, Crizzly is without a doubt the biggest electronic music act ever to perform uptown in Athens. He’ll be joined by two of Ohio’s dubstep heavyweights – Carma from Columbus and Thunder St. Clair from Cleveland. Athens is the first stop on Crizzly’s mini tour through Ohio. He’ll be at Skully’s in Columbus on Friday and at JB’s in Kent on Saturday.
It’s a non-stop party weekend for us. We have our first Dave Rave of the spring this Saturday at The Union featuring DJ B-Funk. On Friday night in Athens, a few of our DJ friends from Columbus are coming to town for WHOMPAGE PRESENTS: EARGASMSII at Red Brick.
It’s Miami Music Week, and that means all the world’s top DJs flock to Miami for a crazy weekend of partying and dropping new music. Ultra Music festival is the biggest event this weekend, but there’s more to MMW than Ultra. The Swedish House Mafia is hosting their own two-night music festival, and just about every big name DJ is playing out in Miami this weekend.
For those of you who didn’t make it to Ultra Music Festival this year, they are showing the UMF documentary Can U Feel It at movie theaters across the country tonight only. If you are in Athens, you can catch it at the Athena Grand at 8pm tonight. For the first time ever you’ll be able to watch Ultra from the comfort of your living room. YouTube has a FREE live HD stream http://youtube.com/UMFTV.
Russian producer Arty is one of DJ B-Funk’s favorite trance producers. He’s part of the new school of trance producers helping make the genre fun again. His remix of Ferry Corsten’s Punk released more than a year ago is still sitting in the Beatport Top 100. His latest release Trio is out now on Axtone.
On Saturday, we are excited to welcome two rising stars of Columbus’ huge bass music scene – Magua and networkEDM – to Athens for a special Dave Rave bass music event in Athens called Wobble on the Bricks.
Magua is part of My Best Friends Party, and is a resident DJ for their Thump and Le Boom! parties. He’s also opened for many of the big name DJs who have come through Columbus including Crizzly, Lucky Date, Marty Party, KOAN Sound, Gemini, Helicopter Showdown, Sluggo, Hulk, NastyNasty, The Werks, Hot Mess, Digiraati, Roevy, Trevor Lamont, and many others.
networkEDM is a duo made up of Bryan Keller and Matt Cremean, both long-time electronic music fans who decided to take their passion for EDM to the next level with DJing. They are a part of the Push Production crew in Columbus and have shared the stage with Bassnectar, Porter Robinson and Eliot Lipp. While their taste in electronic music has its roots in trance, house and electro, we expect to hear the harder electro/complextro side of networkEDM when they visit Athens.
Somewhere between Breaks, Dubstep, Jungle, Dub, and Drum & Bass lives the well-mixed groove of Future Jungle. This style moves your legs just as much as it makes you bounce your head, which is a huge breath of fresh air in a city that dances by throwing their arms up and shuffle about. Lets face it, Dubstep has made most clubbers and ravers lazy dancers, we need some movement.
Drum and Bass has always been too fast of an EDM genre for me, I love the house rhythm with all of my being, if I want fast I’ll listen to speed metal. Drumstep almost hits the spot but still has the transformer-rape sound that is hard for me to listen to for an extended amount of time.
Now entering Future Jungle, with the perfect equilibrium of speed, filth and groove. I have to give a big shout out to RadioKillaz for making me privy to this new movement. Making me aware of groups like Yoof, Vinyl Junkie, Warrior One, and Sub Slayers to name a few.
Last winter, the Reno, Nevada based duo made history as one of the biggest electronic music acts to visit Southeastern Ohio, where they rocked a sell-out crowd with their funky, crunky style of bass music. They are making The Union in Athens one of only three Ohio stops on their Winter 2012 tour which has them opening for Rusko in Cleveland on Feb 20 and playing at Ultra Music Festival in Miami later in March.
Love & Light recently reached two big milestones on SoundCloud – 10,000 followers and 1 million plays. Their latest track Jangin’ is available as a FREE download.
Voting has started in the Electro Beach DJ contest, and Ohio’s own DJ B-Funk is currently in first place with a chance to open for Steve Aoki at Electro Beach Puerto Vallarta. We’d appreciate your vote to help DJ B-Funk win the gig of a lifetime. You can vote once a day by following this link.
We are excited to celebrate our 2-year anniversary of Dave Rave at The Union in Athens next Saturday. We are bringing Columbus’ own roeVy to Athens to help us celebrate. We wanted to invite all our Ohio Stand Up readers to visit us in Athens this weekend.
We are also excited to announce national crunkstep act Love & Light will be visiting us in Athens Feb 15 on their Winter 2012 tour. We hosted Love & Light last year in Athens, and they got us hooked on their funky style of bass music. Matt and Ryan of Love & Light are some of the nicest, most humble musicians we’ve met, so we are looking forward to a great show.
My first exposure to the Plump DJs was their 2001 Mixmag cover CD titled Elastic Breaks. This was at the height of the breakbeat movement, and this CD was stuck on repeat for months. I rate Elastic Breaks as one of my all time favorite breaks compilation CDs, and it still sounds relevant today. The Plump DJs fell off the map for a while, but they recently came back strong with their latest release, Gobbstopper, a hard-hitting electro-acid bassline workout.
Here are some big new tunes to watch out for tonight at Dave Rave.
Nicky Romero – Toulouse (Original Mix) [Spinnin]
I was fortunate to catch Nicky Romero live at Josephine in DC last weekend, and the young Dutchman really knows how to move a crowd. His set from Josephine is available on soundcloud. Toulouse is his latest release, and this one is a bomb featuring some crazy synth and bassline action.
Christmas is a time for giving, and we wanted to share something special with you this holiday season – our favorite bootlegs of 2011. These are our favorite unreleased tracks that got the best reaction when we played them at our Dave Rave events.
Also, be sure to check out the Dave Rave podcast on iTunes, where we are counting down our favorite releases of 2011. Part one is out now, and part two will be out next week.
DJ B-Funk’s Top 5 Bootlegs of 2011
Axwell vs Ferry Corsten – Heart Is Punk (Simon D Reboot)
This is a reboot of a Swedish House Mafia mashup that’s available for download as part of a bootleg pack from Simon D. When you smash a house classic, with REM’s Losing My Religion, and a trance bomb like Ferry Corsten’s Punk. Everyone wins!
If you weren’t one of the lucky people to buy a ticket in the first ten minutes they were on sale for the Swedish House Mafia’s historic Madison Square Garden show tonight, you can still catch a live stream of the show. Visit the Swedish House Mafia web site for details. If you are a fan of dubstep and bass music, there’s plenty of big events in Ohio this weekend with Cumulus Entertainment’s big one-year anniversary show in Cleveland at The Agora and LeBOOM! 12 featuring Crizzly and Ill Atmospherics Saturday night at Skully’s in Columbus. Also tonight in Columbus, there’s a Sweatin’ party at Carabar featuring DJs Detox, Push and Pro Bono.
If you prefer to read about music and listen to it on your computer, we’ve got a round up of some hot new tracks.
Swedish House Mafia & Knife Party – Antidote (Original Mix) [EMI]
The Swedish House Mafia are getting ready to rock a sold out Madison Square Garden tonight, and you can probably expect to hear this monster track in their mix. We were a little disappointed we couldn’t get our hands on this track before Halloween because we were sure it would have caused mayhem at the Athens Halloween block party. If you haven’t heard of Knife Party yet, they are made up of Rob Swire and Gareth McGrillen of Pendulum fame. They have been taking the dance music world by storm with their unique hard electro sound. Be sure to grab their EP 100% No Modern Talking which is available as a free download.
2011 was a big year all across the board for electronic dance music. In today’s world of bedroom basproducers, we saw people like Porter Robinson go from making a track like “Say My Name” in January to going on tour with Skrillex and Zedd for the summer only a week after graduating high school. I think Kill The Noise said it best a few weeks ,”One minute you are messing around with Fruity Loops in your bedroom and the next you are doing cocaine with Paris Hilton in L.A.” Kind of laughable but true to the state of music production we lived through in 2011, as new names were popping up everywhere after simply making one track that killed it in the Soundcloud circuit.
Either way ,making any sort of comprehensive list of the “best” songs/releases is kind of amoral and arbitrary in my mind. So as the title suggests “Kingpin’s favorites from 2011,” this is exactly what the post intends to be. I’m sharing my favorite releases from 2011 and a short explanation as to why I think they were particularly good or noteworthy. As a DJ, I feel like I tend to keep up with music pretty well so hopefully you will find this list useful and perhaps go cop a release that you missed along the way this year. I’ve provided a hyperlink to places you can download all of this in the Artist – Release listing under the album artwork in this blog post. So without further adue, Less Go!!
The gloomy Ohio winter already has thinking about our spring break plans. If you are looking for a destination where you can catch some rays and some of the hottest electronic music acts, you should consider the recently announced Electro Beach party in Puerto Vallarta.
Brought to you by College Travel Experts and Columbus’ own Prime Social Group, the Electro Beach party will run for 42 days from February 24th to April 6th. The artist lineup is packed with super-star DJ talent including Tiesto, Avicii, Steve Aoki, Manufactured Superstars, Porter Robinson, Chuckie, Dada Life, Calvin Harris and Laidback Luke.
I have been privileged to be able to work with some of the best talent Columbus and the rest of Ohio has to offer — be it playing along side some of Columbus’s craftiest Djs and producers or planning shows and events, to interviewing some of my favorite people on this amazing scene that Ohio has to offer.
This scene wouldn’t be where it is today without people like – YOU! When I say you I don’t specifically mean anyone in particular but in our own little special ways everyone that steps foot on a dance floor, on stage or behind the scenes is somehow helping to further this amazing movement of electronic dance.
I have started this interview series to shed light on some of the people that I really feel deserve credit to helping give the scene the extra shove that it needs. It’s not just DJs or producers that make the music scene so epic — it’s everyone involved. In planning a few events myself I have seen how many people love just “being involved” with an event — glow vendors, hoopers, Vjs, promoters, dancers — and a very intricate piece of every killer show/event are the ones capturing it all: photographers & videographers. I’ve noticed one common thing amongst ravers, party-peoples, Djs, hoopers, go-go girls — we really like having our picture taken or whenever a camera is near we seem to be dying to get our fist-pumping action or our jaw-clenching smile captured candidly on camera.
That’s really unique about the power of the music scene, we are all having such a good time, dancing away every care in the world, losing inhibition, identity-free, getting lost in the moment. That’s what it all seems to be about to me sometimes… Just getting lost in moment, hoping the night will never end, hoping that “good feeling” will never die or fade.
Videography & photography play an incredibly powerful role in helping to keep “that feeling” alive. Although videos dont put us back in the exact moment – they sure seem to be an excellent reminder of that ultra-extra “good feeling”. Seeing some really epic, lazer-light infused, raw raver-energy videos following an epic show always sends a tickling chill up my spine as I mumble to myself, jaw-dropped “Oh shit – I remember that right here, face-melted for sure dude…”
I really like that feeling — how a video or epic photo can almost make you feel the raw energy of thousands of ravers hands up all at once — praising the music God in his booth “Feed us more!!!” is the expression, melted onto everyone’s faces.
Photography and videography are just as expressive, artistically-inspired and basically as powerful as the beats themselves. I give much credit to those that view countless shows – not thru their own eyes – but thru the lenses of their cameras instead. Capturing countless, heart-stopping, priceless memories – somehow aiding the raver brain by giving it a chance to categorize these slide shows of life so that they may be implanted in our brains for forever. Priceless memories.
2011 has been a huge year for electronic dance music. We are heading into the home stretch and producers keep turning out banging new tunes. We are working on a special end of year Dave Rave podcast featuring our favorite songs of 2011. We’d love to hear your picks for best dance music songs of 2011. Comment below or let us know on Facebook facebook.com/daverave or Twitter @daveravefm.
We’ve been a little behind on our song reviews, and the hot new tunes are piling up. Here are some hot new tunes that have been keeping us warm at night.
Coldplay – Paradise (Fedde Le Grand Remix) [Toolroom]
To say Fedde Le Grand has had a good year is an understatement. It seems like he’s had a song in the Beatport top ten all year long with a string of hot originals and remixes. There are a lot of good Coldplay remixes, but this one stands out as one of the best.
