Wall Street Workers Sip Champagne & Watch Protests (youtube)
Interesting footage showing the increasingly huge number of Americans protesting at Wall Street..
Skrufff Top 5 (538): Stimming, Slideshow, Leonardo Gonnelli, Tom Hades, Deepgroove
This week’s top 5 includes a killer summer style electro-house remix from Phonique and a very unusual but equally excellent tech track from hotly tipped newcomers Stimming. Check below to listen to them all; also on our radio show Germany Calling on BLN.FM (every Friday night, 20.00 Berlin time; CET)
Skrufff Top 5 (538):
Stimming: Challenge The Air
Slideshow Park: Shining (Phonique Remix) (Highway Records)
LEONARDO GONNELLI: POKE T (Form Recordings)
Tom Hades: Dirt & Mud (Locomatica Remix)
Deepgroove: Creeper Very Very Wrong Indeed
Grandmaster Flash; Rapper’s Delight (RIP Sylvia Robinson)
Uber-ahead of her time New York rap pioneer Sylvia Robinson has died aged 75. These two tracks are the ones she’s best known for releasing via Sugar Hill Records….. RIP
Fantazia; Raving, We’re (Still) Raving- 20 Years On (interview)
“Loads of old ravers come come to our Fantazia parties still, I would estimate that this year’s events so far have been 50/50 old ravers to new ones. It’s amazing to shake so many hands of those that were there at the first events.”
Chatting to Skrufff this week as he finalized preparations for next weekend’s 20th birthday celebration (in Trafford Park, Manchester) event promoter Charlie Fantazia remains infectiously evangelical.
“Fantazia past and present events mean a lot to so many people. It truly was the 2nd summer of love,” he smiles, “People met their present wives and husbands at the events and made lifelong friends at the 90′s raves.”
Click for details of Fantazia The Greatest Show on Earth’; takes place on October 8 at Bowlers, Trafford Park, Manchester
The power of the parties and the enthusiasm he recalls is immediately apparent from a quick Google search of Fantazia Youtube, revealing scores of Youtube clips of tens of thousands dancing, ironically like no-ones watching (http://bit.ly/BFDGH , http://bit.ly/tgHJ0 (http://bit.ly/oKm2kY ). What’s also more than clear is the diversity of the original crowds, with black, white, young and old ravers jammed in side by side yet clearly all comfortable. (Fantazia Donnington: http://bit.ly/nM9AvO )
“The 50% that are new to Fantazia or raves are privileged,” Charlie continues. “They are getting to see the friendly atmosphere off the raves of old. No aggression, just friendly happy people. Fantazia ravers really keep to that PLUR ethos, not the hoody attitude at other raves we have been to where the menace is palpable.
We encourage our ravers to go wild with their outfits and just wear want they want, you don’t get the negative snobby vibe that is associated with the superclubs.”
Spiral Tribe; Forward the Revolution
Spiral Mark (click on the picture for more)
Push: Founding Muzik Magazine, Fighting Serious Ilness & Setting Fire to Jordan (interview)
Push today (click the picture to access his articles)
“The most bizarre situation I experienced was setting fire to Katie Price, I got chatting to her in a bar once and she asked me for a light. I must have had a new lighter or something and it must have been set very high.”
15 years after he launched seminal British dance music magazine Muzik, founding editor Push admits his memories of the era are a little hazy.
“I can’t remember when and where it happened, but I think it was somewhere in Soho,” he continues, recounting his incendiary encounter with the uber famous (in Britain) reality TV star (who at the time was better known as topless model/ glamour girl Jordan).
“As she leaned forward, a huge jet of fire shot out from the lighter and there was this horrible smell of burning hair and a squeaky scream,” he chuckles, “I think it was mainly her eyebrows that went up because her hair was in braids and pulled back from her face. Luckily she was totally hammered and seemed to soon forget about it.”
One of the first music journalists to start seriously championing acid house and techno, Push started his career with then hugely indie music magazine Melody Maker, setting up the newspaper’s first dance section in the early 90s. From Melody Maker, he left to become founding editor of Muzik, which he edited from its launch in 1995 until the end of 1998.
Notable for taking dance music and its fast-growing global culture seriously, the magazine was instrumental in launching superclub brands such as Cream and popularizing Ibiza yet also covered underground club culture and issues,successfully campaigning for free drinking water in clubs and warning of the dangers of tinnitus in one of its earliest editions.
It also created a new caste of fledgling superstar DJs, in putting then relatively unknown producers such as Deep Dish, Brian Transeau, Slam and Josh Wink on the cover, most of whom were then booked at the same nascent superclubs and festivals.
“I’m so proud of Muzik. It was a terrific magazine and a very successful magazine,” says Push, “It won several awards and sold over 50,000 copies a month during my time there. My personal greatest achievement was getting through the first year. I’ve never worked so hard in all my life.”
“I think the magazine’s single greatest achievement was giving dance music a sense of identity that it had never had before in the music press,” he continues.
“We took all those supposedly faceless DJs and musicians and presented them the same way that Melody Maker and NME presented rock and pop stars, and I think that was exactly what was right for the dance scene at that point in time.”
NYPD- Sweating Clubbers Could Be Bombers
New York cops have issued a new ‘Best Practices For Nightlife Establishments’ guide for nightclub owners, which includes a detailed section on how staff should identity suicide bombers.
As well as looking out for ‘two or more people communicating and trying not to be observed’, staff are advised to be suspicious of clubbers in fancy dress (‘individuals who are obviously disguised’) and ‘individuals whose speech includes stuttering, mumbling or chanting, or are hesitant or unresponsive’ (‘like every buzzed nightclub patron’ as the Smoking Gun puts it: http://bit.ly/ngyKLV ).
“There are many factors which may create suspicion of this activity,” the police guide continues.
“ (Such as) individuals with obvious signs of extreme stress or nervousness, such as bulging veins in the neck, profuse sweating, shaking hands, touching the face continuously, involuntary motions, apathy, distant stare or unfocused gazing, feeling the body continuously.”
Click to play Suicide Bomber
Laurent Garnier’s DJ Travel Tales (interview)
For unknown reasons, Facebook have been censoring Skrufff.com for over 2 months now (blocking the ‘share’ button) BUT if you click the ‘Like’ button all the way at the bottom of the article, it still works)
Bad Company (click for more)
“I have played at a gig in Detroit where a guy got shot dead outside the party. After that we all had to lie on the floor for 10 minutes waiting for the police to come while a gang was outside shooting bullets thru the windows.”
“Once I drove from Paris to Plymouth for a gig. It took me 13 or 14 hours to get there by car. And when I finally arrived at the gig, the promoter said to me ‘you are 10 minutes late . . . fuck off!’ Then he had the security guy throw me out. That was 18 years ago. I’ve never ever been back to fucking Plymouth since . . .”
Flashback (recorded immediately after a particularly gruelling overseas trip)
This week, Skrufff are launching a new series of DJ travel stories focusing on the highs and lows every international DJ experiences. Notoriously French definitive dance legend Laurent Garnier kicks off proceedings . . . .
(For more on Laurent; click here: http://www.laurentgarnier.com/ )
A British banker speaks out (youtube)
A London ‘banker’ becomes an internet sensation with his uncompromising assessment of today’s markets before admitting 24 hours later “I’m an attention seeker. That is the main reason I speak. That is the reason I agreed to go on the BBC. Trading is a like a hobby. It is not a business. I am a talker. I talk a lot. I love the whole idea of public speaking…..”
Shame….
discussing the state of global markets…..
‘Riot Tourist’ Ravers Wreck Zurich
91 people were arrested in Zurich last weekend after cops used tear gas and rubber bullets to break up a free party close to the city’s central station.
Zurich police chief Daniel Leupi described many of the ravers as ‘riot tourists’, telling reporters they’d come into to city specifically to fight cops, following two earlier battles between partygoers and police the weekend before.
British establishment commentator Max Hastings, meanwhile, warned of a new wave of ‘riot tourists’ turning in up Switzerland soon, in a polemic against Britain’s bankers, or ‘looters in suits’ as he branded them.
“Today’s bankers are moral descendants of medieval robber barons, tyrannical rural landlords, the ruthless industrialists of the 19th century. Yet one big thing is different: the entrepreneurial monsters of the past took huge personal risks to make their fortunes,” he noted in an apt assessment of the typical banker’s character.
“I believe that any banker who prefers a new life in Zurich should be offered bus vouchers to Heathrow,” he proposed, in response to threats by some to leave the UK if regulations are tightened up.
“Anybody who has spent 48 hours in a Swiss canton, except to ski, knows that a spell in the gulag would be jollier,” he added (Daily Mail; http://bit.ly/psWeUB )
Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff
