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Hardsteppers +++ @ Saphir Thu Dec 8!!
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Czarkastik replied on Sun Dec 4, 2005 @ 5:37pm |
 Coolness: 149140 | it's a MASSIVE week at mix this thursday feat.
the montreal stop of the HARDSTEPPERS current east coast tour HARDSTEPPERS (LIVE) feat. Sase One, Adam L, Kali & Regimental with a special appearance by hebe hop pioneer SoCalled (LIVE) and the city's best breaks and DnB blenders: SPACEKADET (frogland breakers, planete break) and COREY K (dna records) UPSTAIRS (en HAUT ) Top FLOOR @ Saphir 3699 St-Laurent 2-for-1 beers and free before midnight THU DEC 8TH!!!! Socalled Socalled is a musician, photographer, magician and writer based in Montreal. He was born Josh Dolgin in Ottawa, Ontario and raised just north, in Chelsea, Quebec. As a kid he was always in musicals and drew cartoons for the Ottawa Citizen. He hated soccer. He was bribed by his mother to continue piano lessons until high school, then he picked up the accordion. He wrote for the newspaper and played in any kind of band – salsa, gospel, rock, funk – then discovered MIDI and hip hop. He worked with rappers, he made madd beats, he got into studios. He graduated from McGill and made a 50 minute animated film for the Canada Council, meanwhile writing for Hour Magazine and performing. He has now appeared on a dozen recordings as pianist, singer, arranger, rapper, writer and producer. He rocks the machine with in David Krakauer’s Klezmer Madness!, sings with Toronto-based Beyond the Pale, performs with home-base band Shtreiml in Montreal, with LA-based the Aleph Project. He conducts the Addath Israel choir for High Holidays. Socalled performs and records widely with a crew of mixed-up freaks and geniuses from around the world, including Killah Priest, Susan Hoffman-Watts, Frank London, and Irving Fields. [ www.socalledmusic.com ] 
The Hardsteppers concept has grown from a crew of DJ's and MC's during the early nineties rave scene in Montréal. Playing alongside international artists including Roni Size, Ed Rush and Optical, Carl Cox, Dieselboy, DJ Rap and Montréal's own Tiga earned them the respect of true underground music fans. The hype surrounding their 1996 mix, "Don't Fake the Break," warranted a ten out of ten rating in URB Magazine, along with a slew of cross-country gigs. They firmly established themselves as force to be reckoned with on the North American Drum and Bass scene, hosting both a three year residency at Montréal's famous Angels nightclub, and a bi-monthly event at Sona, Montréal's first afterhours club. Today the Hardsteppers have developed into a multi-faceted production team, recognized for producing reggae, hip hop, dance hall, breaks, house and drum and bass for various artists. The crew has formed into an elite group of talented, versatile and high-energy members who are able to perform both live and through the DJ medium. Chief composer and producer Sase One's (Mathieu Girard) love of British underground music and his ability to play multiple instruments has given the band its multi-dimensional flavour. Front man Kali (Hayes Thurton), from the famed Montréal group 'Kali and Dub,' has thirty years of both live and studio experience; this Juno nominated artist has shared the stage with many of the world's greatest musicians. For the Hardsteppers, he provides both lyrics and is heavily involved in all stages of the production. Sase One and Kali clicked as soon as they met, and have been writing music together ever since. Also contributing to the Hardstepper sound are artists Adam L (Adam Lipper) and Regimental (Andrew Reed). Adam L, who composes under the name 'Illson,' works on beat production with Sase One. His history of crowd pleasing DJ sets and mix tapes have made him a founding father of the Montréal drum and bass scene and a natural member of the band. Today, during Hardsteppers live performances, Adam plays the keyboards and mixes samples. Regimental, whose vocals are also featured prominently on the Hardsteppers album "Revolution", is an up and coming artist in his own right. Poised to drop his solo album in 2006, Regimental is a high-octane force that never fails to please the crowds. Together the Hardsteppers play as a full live band. They also shift gears sometimes, splitting up into separate units of two in order to play DJ sets, providing promoters with greater opportunities to present the Hardstepper sound. The Hardsteppers first album, "Revolution," is an amalgamation of sounds and textures that carves a place parallel to such acts as the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy. Their mix of dancehall, breaks and use of instrumentals make their music great for the dance floor, but more importantly, an intelligent musical voyage full of twists and turns. Their use of voice as an instrument...rolling and pulsating… provides an almost pop feel to some tunes, making them familiar and catchy. The first single "Sweet Redemption" is a rockin' dub tune that you can’t help but sing along to. Watch for the Hardsteppers video for "Sweet Redemption" in summer 2005. Lots of touring and studio time awaits the quartet in the near future, who will continue with their ongoing evolution. . [ www.hardsteppers.ca ]  |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Nitrous_N2O replied on Mon Dec 5, 2005 @ 9:17am |
 Coolness: 125560 | Them again ?
Nah just joking... Props to Da Hardsteppers for bringin' us wicked beats ! An a special mention to SpaceKadet for his crazy breaks. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Czarkastik replied on Mon Dec 5, 2005 @ 2:50pm |
| Coolness: 149140 | live performance feat. ADAM L, SASE ONE, REGIMENTAL and KALI two mics, two MCs, two DJs... when was the last time you saw that guillaume???????????????????? |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Nitrous_N2O replied on Mon Dec 5, 2005 @ 2:51pm |
| Coolness: 125560 | Never saw that b4 |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PitaGore replied on Mon Dec 5, 2005 @ 2:52pm |
 Coolness: 471940 | word motherfuckerz word !!
Ableton live-stylez ??? anyways its gwanna rinse .. i think i'll be there and skip Dieselboy since i just cant go to both .. i've missed saphir and its my big week out |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» BA_Baracus replied on Mon Dec 5, 2005 @ 4:18pm |
 Coolness: 121170 | lots of intoxication happenin' thursday |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PitaGore replied on Mon Dec 5, 2005 @ 5:22pm |
| Coolness: 471940 | vernissage + saphir = close to each other=massive ! |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» BA_Baracus replied on Mon Dec 5, 2005 @ 5:32pm |
| Coolness: 121170 | bigtime next doors! |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Czarkastik replied on Tue Dec 6, 2005 @ 4:31am |
| Coolness: 149140 | interesting article about SoCalled from San Fran's Jewish News Weekly:
Jewish News Weekly, San Francisco Friday March 5, 2004 Klezmer gets a jolt of yo from hip-hop Canadian by alexandra j. wall staff writer Those raised on traditional klezmer might get jolted to their feet. That’s because Josh Dolgin, part of the latest wave in the ongoing revival that first began in the ’70s, is taking the Jewish musical form to places it’s never been before. Call it, if you will, the hip-hop-ification of klezmer. Taking classic klezmer tunes and putting them to hip-hop beats is what Dolgin began doing in college — to avoid studying. “I didn’t consciously think ‘I’m going to make Jewish hip-hop,’” said Dolgin in a phone interview from Montreal. “It was more about not doing my schoolwork. It was the thing I did for fun, late at night.” Dolgin will appear numerous times during the upcoming Berkeley Jewish Music Festival: on opening night at U.C. Berkeley’s Wheeler Auditorium with klezmer clarinet virtuoso David Krakauer; with mother-and-daughter klezmer musicians Elaine Hoffman Watts and Susan Watts Hoffman at the Berkeley Richmond JCC, and in a concert for teens at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette. The festival runs from March 20 to 27. So how does a musician make the leap from hip-hop to klezmer? Even Dolgin, 27, admits it’s odd. “It’s kind of funny how rap got me into Jewish music rather than the other way around.” But he’s the kind of guy you see at thrift stores, flea markets and yard sales. You know the type, rifling through the boxes of old vinyl records for sale — he has about 4,000 — looking for old tunes to sample and set to electronic beats. One day he bought a Yiddish record — an Aaron Lebedeff album — and he couldn’t believe his ears. “He was this great Yiddish theater star from the golden age of American Yiddish theater and there were these great breaks in the record; it was a natural,” said Dolgin. “The songs were packed with these amazing loops and noises and stuff.” And from there, he kept looking for others. Dolgin wasn’t content just to sample the songs. He began to take a real interest in them. “As a musician, I wanted to know the music,” he said. In addition to his sampling, Dolgin plays numerous instruments, including the accordion. So when he attended KlezKanada, an annual camp for klezmer musicians, he slipped an example of something he had done called “Hip-Hop Seder” to clarinetist Krakauer. “Usually you give someone your demo and they don’t listen to it,” said Dolgin, who had taken a class with Krakauer. “But, like an hour later, he attacked me and said, ‘You blew my brain onto the wall,’ or something like that. It was exactly what he was looking for to really kick klezmer in the ass a little, and make it relevant for today.” Krakauer didn’t quite put it that way, but he definitely heard something in Dolgin’s creation — even some of himself. That’s because in his demo, Dolgin had sampled Krakauer. “I was completely blown away,” said Krakauer, of Dolgin’s “Hip-Hop Seder.” “This is a major work of art here, just an incredible thing. I’ve been pushing in those kinds of directions, but he’s a real pioneer and progenitor and master of hip-hop klezmer, and the spearheading person of this movement.” Krakauer’s discovery of him has definitely taken Dolgin’s career to the next level. “He’s the man, he hooked me up. Without him I’d be nothing,” Dolgin said, only half-jokingly. “He was the one who had faith in what I did, and could see that what I was doing could have appeal. He took me out of Canada and gave me exposure.” Dolgin — who often goes by his DJ moniker “Socalled” — is actually an aspiring filmmaker. He didn’t expect that his late-night musical hobby would get him this far. But it did. “People have been really into it,” he said. “It’s been sucking me into this weird world and I’ve been flomping” — a word Dolgin made up — “all over the world, to generally positive reaction.” Krakauer took Dolgin to Krakow, Poland, last year, to play at a Jewish cultural festival, an experience that Dolgin says still “freaks me out a bit.” “It’s like the trippiest thing to imagine playing Jewish music for 20,000 Polish people in a town where there were so many Jews and now there’s so few. So I feel like a combination of an ambassador and a clown.” But at the same time, he said, “The people were so into it, it was amazing. They were totally freaked out over the music. It was really cool to try to bring some Yiddish back to those streets.” A live recording of their performance, “Krakauer: Live in Krakow,” is out on France’s Label Bleu. He also teamed up with British violinist Sophie Solomon to make “HipHopKhasane,” which came out last year and features Krakauer and other contemporary klezmer stars like Frank London playing wedding tunes. The CD on the German Piranha label landed on the European world music charts. Growing up on the outskirts of Ottawa, in Chelsea, Dolgin was the only Jewish kid in his school. The Reform synagogue where he became a bar mitzvah was 40 minutes away. He took piano lessons from childhood onward, and in elementary school, he began learning clarinet and trombone. “I started to play in weird bands in junior high,” he said, with “weird” meaning everything from salsa and gospel to folk and rock. Then, in high school, he got into hip-hop, and began rapping. The first song he wrote was called “The Jew Funk,” which included the lyric “Baruch ata Adonai motherf----r.” He also rapped the V’ahavta prayer. “I wanted to represent myself in the rap,” he said, by way of explanation. So he rapped about what he knew. “I couldn’t rap about guns and chasing police and stuff.” When asked whether his more purist colleagues have objected to what he does, he said no, giving evidence that he still plays with his more traditionalist colleagues, as he will in the Berkeley festival. “I can’t be dishonoring the music that much, as I play traditional klezmer, too. I don’t say that what I do is klezmer,” he said. “I’m just trying to do something for me and my peeps.” |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PitaGore replied on Tue Dec 6, 2005 @ 11:38am |
| Coolness: 471940 | yo thats quite something right thurr |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Czarkastik replied on Tue Dec 6, 2005 @ 4:12pm |
| Coolness: 149140 | wow... more interesting shit. this guy PIMPS the media yo... read THIS shit
The Walrus Magazine [ walrusmagazine.com ] Jew Funk [ walrusmagazine.com ] Josh Dolgin, a.k.a. Socalled, is Montreal's leading mixer of klezmer and hip hop by David Coodin with files from Sharon Drache "Rap is always about: Where am I from? What's my crew? Who are my peeps?," Josh Dolgin says. The statement seems odd considering Dolgin, twenty-eight, is a curly haired Jew with a face full of freckles who grew up on the Protestant outskirts of Ottawa, not in the burning ghettos of the Bronx. But his rap credentials are authentic, even though he speaks hip hop's vernacular with intentional irony. As a teenager, Dolgin played keyboards in a gospel band, but he was never entirely comfortable making music about Jesus. When one of the group's black musicians taught him how to make hip-hop beats in his basement, Dolgin found a genre that allowed him, surprisingly for the first time, to deal musically with his own Jewishness. The first rap he wrote, "The Jew Funk," was a playful hip-hop take on a Jewish prayer that included the line, "Baruch ata Adonai, Motherfucka!" While intentionally absurd and offensive, the lyrics express the paradox Dolgin still feels in trying to connect with his old-world roots. "I love the Hasidim, I love their music, I love the culture," he says. "[But] how can I like culture, when culture comes out of boundaries and ghettos and people sticking together and being with their own kind?" For Dolgin, or Socalled as he is known onstage, combining Jewish and black cultures came naturally, but it was always less of a social statement than a musical one. While he is well read on the two groups' sometimes tumultuous relationship in the twentieth century—Jews and blacks co-operated during the civil rights movement but fell into disagreement during the 1970s as differences sharpened on both sides—Dolgin doesn't buy the argument that his music is somehow reuniting a long-lost brethren. "I don't know Jews and blacks that are like that," he says. "I have black friends, I make music with black people. I make music with Jewish people. It's music, it's the universal language, and all that bullshit." Dolgin's latest record, this spring's The Socalled Seder, a hip-hop version of the Passover ceremony featuring one of his heroes, rap group Wu-Tang Clan's Killah Priest, is no exception: "When I met Killah Priest it wasn't like, 'How can we negotiate our Jewish and black identities and our pasts?' No, it was like, 'Listen to this.' 'Yeah, that's funky shit.'" The sensibilities he and Killah Priest shared in the studio have historical roots: the slow birth of klezmer music in eastern Europe over the last millennium has some striking parallels with the origins of African-American hip-hop culture on the streets of the South Bronx a quarter-century ago. The exact regional ingredients that congealed into Jewish folk music in the last thousand years are unknown—Hitler's 1939 march across eastern Europe erased most traces of Jewish culture from that part of the world, making a forensic study of klezmer's roots virtually impossible. The first klezmer artists (klezmorim) happened upon the music centuries ago to distract themselves from destitution. No one knows for sure where they got their instruments, although some believe they were surplus from the Czarist army. As the klezmorim travelled through eastern Europe absorbing aspects of the musical culture around them—Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, even Greek—they were viewed by many as unorthodox, morally corrupt street people who sang in lowly Yiddish rather than Hebrew, the lofty language of prayer. Nevertheless, in tiny shtetls across eastern Europe, groups of Jews started picking up instruments and influences of their own, and a musical movement was born. When Czar Alexander iii came to power in Russia in 1881, he enacted a series of anti-Semitic laws that produced an unprecedented period of mass migration. Among the 2.5 million Jews who moved to the United States over the next forty years was Abraham Goldfaden, a formally trained musician who had tried to legitimize Jewish folk culture in Russia by creating a series of shows that combined a relatable Yiddish narrative with traditional Jewish music and humour. Goldfaden was seeking a sophistication not found in the street songs of the klezmorim. In the 1880s, his followers brought Yiddish theatre to New York City, where Jewish performers, such as Joseph Rumshinsky and Boris Thomashefsky, took the genre into the mainstream. The new Jewish music was recorded onto vinyl for the first time in 1905, and its popularity soared. Over the next two decades, thousands of Yiddish theatre records were produced in the United States. The industry flourished until the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 became law, ending open immigration from eastern Europe. Without a constant influx of new fans and musicians who spoke the language, New York's Yiddish theatre scene began to fade. By the 1940s, the early Yiddish recordings had been largely forgotten amidst the more pressing concern of survival. Although Jewish folk music experienced a resurgence during the late 1970s, when the genre name "klezmer" was first coined, the Yiddish theatre's popularity never returned to its pre-war level. By the century's end, a lot of those old Yiddish records had found their way into trash heaps all over North America. In 1996, Dolgin, then a student at McGill University, was spending much of his time trolling around yard sales and second-hand stores in Montreal looking for albums to sample when he stumbled across some of those old Yiddish records. Dolgin wasn't really interested in Jewish folk music, but he found to his amazement that the music lent itself perfectly to hip hop. "In every Yiddish theatre song," he explains, "there's a little break in the middle between verses where it has this funky little loop, so it was, like, I had to sample it." Unknowingly, Dolgin had discovered hip-hop klezmer. And his peripatetic record collecting echoed not only his Jewish forebears, but also the first hip-hop artists on the streets of the South Bronx. When hip hop's time arrived in the late 1970s, New York's underclass had endured decades of unfavourable government policy. The Cross-Bronx Expressway, a commuter road linking New Jersey and Long Island, had been constructed in the 1950s. Because the expressway's path required the demolition of 60,000 homes in one of the city's poorest neighbourhoods, 170,000 people, many of them black and Hispanic, were forced to relocate. That, combined with dwindling federal funding, reduced the South Bronx to virtual slumhood. Like the Jews of eastern Europe who picked up instruments, young people in the South Bronx looked for ways to express their frustration, as Tricia Rose documents in her 1994 book on rap music. Instead of fiddles and brass, they found discarded technological tools, and started experimenting. "They were reappropriating obsolete technology," says Dolgin. "Even taking turntables that were thrown out—they were just in the garbage—and turning them into musical instruments." Record players were transformed into interactive music-making machines, as Grandmaster Flash —one of rap music's pioneers—developed and perfected the technique of scratching. Samplers, used previously as a substitute for musicians to save time and money during expensive studio sessions, became the favoured instrument in an emerging genre that celebrated the fusion of disparate sounds. "[P]rior to rap," writes Rose, "the most desirable use of a sample was to mask...its origin, to bury its identity. Rap producers have inverted this logic, using samples as a point of reference, as a means by which the process of repetition and recontextualization can be highlighted and privileged." For Dolgin, the only real difference between early hip-hop and klezmer artists was the technology available at the time. "I think it's almost purely historical," he says. "We had these new technologies of computers and keyboards. Well, people were going to try to make music with them, and the music that came out of it was this thing called hip hop. That's sort of what was happening in eastern Europe. They were taking the best parts of Ukrainian music and Romanian music and Russian music, and they were sampling it, basically, and looping it and making it their own. Hip hop just lays it bare—you see the cut and hear the cut." Dolgin now owns between 4,000 and 5,000 records, and finds himself on the vanguard of hip hop's sampling culture. His merging of hip hop and klezmer has attracted attention from all over the world and has helped him rediscover his Jewish roots, though he is circumspect about his attraction to Judaism: "Why did I have to wait 'til I found Yiddish before I really found a voice for myself? I was not a singer before, but when I started to hear these Yiddish songs, I thought, 'Oh, now I wanna sing.' Isn't that absurd?" At a klezmer workshop in 2000, he so impressed world-renowned clarinet player David Krakauer that he was hired on the spot to write hip-hop beats for Krakauer's music. Soon after, British violinist Sophie Solomon contacted him to collaborate on an album. The result, 2003's HipHopKhasene (hip-hop wedding), is a reinvention of the Jewish marriage ceremony. Many of the album's rap lyrics are about coming to terms with Jewish tradition in modern secular society: Sure it's a fucked up institution, economic solution to socialized absolution Hype the hetero norms, it's just ancient psychic residuals But folks are sentimental and they'll always need their rituals Plus as a concept it's dated, ketubah outmoded and faded Power-politicking nepotism cheapest way to get related. Last year, HipHopKhasene won the German Record Critics' Award for best world music album. Peering out from behind his nerdy glasses, Dolgin epitomizes North America's diasporic makeup. He knows he is lucky to live in a society where he doesn't have to be marked as a Jew unless he wants to be. The tensions that tug at cultures from both sides—nationalism and racism on one, tradition and belonging on the other—are constant preoccupations, but Dolgin never lets himself lose sight of the music. His next album, tentatively called Ghettoblaster, will deal with the idea of blasting out of all kinds of ghettos, including the one the industry places him in by pigeonholing his records as Jewish music. In the meantime, Dolgin will continue collecting and mixing together fragments from wherever he finds them. Only now he can do it on a much larger scale: "I can go to Los Angeles and record gospel singers singing this Yiddish song that I got them to write words for. Then I go to Montreal and get my southern Indian drumming friend to play the drums, and then I get David Krakauer to play a Jewish solo, and then I go to the studio and edit it all together. They're all playing together, and they're making one song. You know what I mean?" |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Corey_K replied on Wed Dec 7, 2005 @ 7:15pm |
 Coolness: 96590 | Tryin to decide what flavours should i be droppin' d&b-wise... any suggestions?
Corey |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» flo replied on Wed Dec 7, 2005 @ 8:18pm |
 Coolness: 146460 | dark and heavy dnb :) |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» SPACEKADET replied on Wed Dec 7, 2005 @ 10:58pm |
 Coolness: 49790 | old school jungle please |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» jas_nasty replied on Wed Dec 7, 2005 @ 11:30pm |
 Coolness: 56625 | timesluts NOW |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PitaGore replied on Thu Dec 8, 2005 @ 11:06am |
| Coolness: 471940 | Corey, after an all-anthems set like last week-end, i suggest you should go with the funk now ...so many liquid funk choons out and i bet u have 'em all ... |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Czarkastik replied on Thu Dec 8, 2005 @ 4:28pm |
| Coolness: 149140 | 10-12 SPACEKADET
12-2 HARDSTEPPERS!!! 2-3 COREY K with a special live set by SoCalled at his discretion. he has to get his mojo runnin peace n luv! |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» regimental911 replied on Thu Dec 8, 2005 @ 5:08pm |
 Coolness: 134405 | yo ,i was told it was 1 -2........
i gotta change my schedule around or what. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» jas_nasty replied on Thu Dec 8, 2005 @ 9:48pm |
| Coolness: 56625 | boom
im on my way |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PitaGore replied on Fri Dec 9, 2005 @ 12:30pm |
| Coolness: 471940 | i suck donkey balls
missin' every fuckin hype event i'm lookin forward to ... |
Hardsteppers +++ @ Saphir Thu Dec 8!!
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