It's too bad that things didn't work out for bringing in Tense and Fury8... but Belladonnakillz does some sick, sick, sick stuff. I got a chance to hear some stuff he was working on when I stayed with him last year, and I've kept in touch... the guy has got some serious talent.

...and don't even get me started on Nikadeemas. I mean... I got into playing hardcore in '93 and I figure he's got a couple of years on me. He was the man at Watts for years, and then moved onto Syntax and held things down there. It's arguable that he's done more for hardcore than anyone on this continent - and his DJing is legendary.

Satan Claus has dropped more than enough evil under the tree...

Emotional Joystick is the jizam.

Hey... ASS-tech... check the matrix number.

"What's the matrix number??"

I thought so...

in the run-off groove there should be some letters and numbers cut into the record. Depending on where it was cut there may be a name in there as well... chances are one side will have FORM12012-A and the other side will have FORM12012-B. This will allow you to tell which side is which... unless it was cut at that dodgy plant in Czechoslovakia - in which case they invent their own numbers for things... but usually have /A and /B after their own crap... which, again, allows you to tell one side from the other.

You could also sit down with a stop watch and time any of the four tracks on the record while playing it back at 0% pitch... and then ID it using the track times on the discogs site.

Got your answer yet?

for some reason I feel compelled to direct everyone to Glass' orchestration of Aphex Twin Icht Hedral (from Donkey Rhubarb)... Glass also did a bizarre remix for S'Express... wonderful stuff.

any idea what set times are looking like?

I've been keeping an eye on the dutch...
Slacknote, Eye-D, DJ Hidden

and the Australians...
Paul Blackout, Overcast, Epsilon

The Bug has also been pulling the trigger on some sick tracks lately... on a local level Black Market seldom disappoints and David Kristian has cut some of the most insane stuff I've ever heard (although he's seldom within the lines of conventional genres).

The entire back catalog of Shock Out records (ragga sublabel of Tigerbeat 6)... especially Tech Level 2's side of 003. Sick stuff.

DJ Hidden's Blast Doors Of Perception (dub)

all the Kid Kryptic stuff I've been hearing
(check out [ www.kidkryptic.com ] and
[ www.theoretic-records.com ]

on an old school tip I dug out my copy of The Void by Epsilon (Sound Sphere 003) and the foghorn bass in that cut still sounds sick.

a lot of that stuff goes for pretty ridiculous money... or rather, it did. Some guy sold a lot of 25 Nasenbluten and related records for close to $1,500 about 2 years ago. I think most of that stuff has since been repressed. I guess it's pretty frustrating for artists to see records that hardly made them any money are bringing in mad cash for collectors. I've had people offer me sick money for the Epsilon record on Sound Sphere (Bloody Fist artist releasing on a US drum'n'bass label), but I still play that record...

Juncalor put out some good stuff. I can't remember if I've got the S37 record or not (I've got an S37 record - but it's a white label and I can't remember the label off hand)... Syndicate's record on Juncalor was a fave when it came out, but I don't think it's held up all that well. The Ingler record, is pretty tight, though... thankfully I've never traded anything for dutch crap - I have been fortunate enough to trade away some dutch crap in exchange for some great records.

I don't know whether Milligan and I have styles that would mesh together... that and the guy is probably the single tightest dj I've ever seen... and I do mean ever.

Mark Verbos, Theorem, Justin Berkovi... and I'll second on Varley and Zentz.

There used to be a pretty good mix of Aussie labels out there (Rage Records, UHF, Blown...), but most of them are now defunct. Bloody Fist is still going, and Paul Blackout recently took over running Hardline... so at least those two labels are still out there.

happy hardcore is the devil's red carpet walkway to hell.... it gets all the kids hooked on the speed - and when they hit the end of the rainbow they crash land in my world.

I can get the dvd through work... which has some incredibly slick special features (multiple angles on all the scratches - plus it loops the sequences so you can sit back and scratch along until you've got the pattern down).

They had a number of collaborations... a series called Psychonavigation, and another series called Outland. There's probably more out there. A better bet than google is to go to [ discogs.com ] and see what's kicking around on there.

It's not the same track. The Dennis Coffey one is from the early 70s... the Grand Master Flash one came much later and is a full-on vocoder overload... it might be my favourite electro track from that era.

My Bloody Valentine had a couple of tracks (Soon, To Here Knows When) that were ambient as all fuck and made it to pop radio (Brian Eno even referred to one of them as "the vaguest piece of music ever to be a hit" or something to that effect)... incredible stuff, imho.

Of course, I tend to do everything I can to ignore genres... once you have a genre you have effectively started defining what something can be, which means you've also started defining what it can't be. I tend to avoid labels that come up with genre names to describe their sound.

Twine's self-titled album on Ghostly International... and I checked out A Little Menstrual Night Music by Current 93 yesterday. It's a couple of new mixes of old material that were prepared to play before a couple of shows last year.

Listen to Scorpio by Grandmaster Flash or Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaata. Electro and hip hop were seperated at birth.

Datach'i does some pretty awesome stuff. I met him at Furthur in '99. He helped out with Unit's live set... I haven't heard the stuff that's forthcoming on Planet-µ, but people are saying it's a lot better than his older material on Caipirinha.

listen to my crap... because people here might have this idea that I only play hardcore...

[ fishead.gabber.org ]
recommended for techno heads -
My Detroit, Nostalgia Nightmare and Dirty/Beautiful

Retro is for those who have fond memories of cavernous warehouse spaces, booming kickdrums and a 303 that went on and on and on...

[ fishead.gabber.org ]

tracklisting
EAR - (something from Phenomena 256)/SFTRI
Reflection - Cube Loop (morgan geist mix)/Clear
Jaydee - Plastic Dreams (original)/R&S
Phyllyps - Trak II/Basic Channel
Rhythm & Sound - Music A Fe Rule Part 2/Rhythm & Sound
Matt Thibideau - Surface 2/Chair
Monolake - Atmosphere/Imbalance
G-Man - Quo Vadis/Swim
Scanner - Mass Observation '95 (Claude Young mix)/Nu Electronica
Matthew Dear - Lakonik/Spectral Sounds
Plastikman - Freek/NovaMute
Osborne - Daylight/Spectral Sounds
Kasso - Key West (kevin's 80s edit)/Glasgow Underground

Osborne - Daylight

noise and hardcore go together like peanut butter and chocolate...

Abelcain, Duran Duran Duran, Bombardier, Edgey, Fanny, Ed Flis, Dev/Null, Donna Summer, Aneurysm, Not Half... Emotional Joystick is a little outside this lane, but well worth checking out... I'd also recommend looking into David Kristian's broken beat work... There are also a couple of drum'n'bass labels that tilt in the right direction, specifically: Fear and Theoretic. They're putting out stuff by the likes of Atomly, Slacknote, Kid Kryptic, Eye-D and DJ Hidden (the last two have done work as The Outside Agency [on Black Monolith] and Cherry Cocaine [on Mokum])... Hidden recently started up a label called Genosha.

dude... next time someone asks me what style of music I play I'm going to tell them that "I play (insert hardest word you can think of)core."

Or maybe not... I think, on second thought I'll leave that sort of thing to Stunt Rock and his song titles like "Anyone who names their track so-and-so can kiss my such-and-such ass can kiss my (noun)(verb) ass"

The asshole thing is, as Metallica put it... sad, but true. Back to the topic, however - Merku mentioned something about looking forward to playing the same party as me, and then I noticed my name in the line-up that appears on the webpage for Party de Noel 2. I don't see Fishead or Asshole in the line-up that appears in this thread, though. So - I'm not sure what's up... Somebody care to enlighten my travel weary brain?

sorry I got your name wrong... I know how it feels. No matter how many times I point it out, some people still think fishead is spelled 'asshole'... go figure.

I'm not sure how I'm being childish... what I'm really trying to get at is that people in the hardcore scene need to start communicating, co-operating and collaborating. I think there are enough things working against us all, without all of us working against each other.

The whole thrust of my comments was "hey... I appreciate what you guys are doing, there's some other shit going on, too."

There's a new year coming and there are a lot of ways to make a better one.

I hate labelling music, too... but I think hardcore is more of an approach than a genre... and, for the record, the line-up for the party on the 21st featured noise, hard techno, old school dutch hardcore, experimental and breakcore - in addition to speedcore.

Anyhow - I'm not dissing on the party. I consider both Nikadeemas and Pete (Belladonnakillz) to be friends and I'll be at the show... it's just that there seems to be a lot of animosity between people in the hardcore scene - and ignoring (or dismissing) the contribution of other people does little to assuage that.

Anyhow... I need to finish getting records together and get some sleep before heading down to Toronto. Have a better one.

regarding the connection problems - what sort of cartridges are you using? Or, more specifically, what type of headshell... is it the original Technics headshell that came with the decks, or do you have Stanton / Ortofon / Shure models that are one piece and do away with the headshell.

I've run into a lot of people who've had problems with those (I've been using Ortofon's for almost five years without any issue) and from what I understand there are a couple of possible causes. If you remove your headshells on a regular basis the contacts in the tone-arm can become problematic. I've heard various stories about this... some say it's due to corrosion, others say that the contacts are spring mounted and 'lose their bounce'...

In any case, maybe shine a penlight in there and see if everything looks good.... if you're not using a one-piece headshell, I'd recommend checking the wire running from the headshell to the cartridge. If that doesn't fix things, then maybe take a look at the contacts. If it's not something visible, then you might be SOL - as the tone-arm assembly seems to be one of the more complicated parts of the 1200.

I'm sad to say that I've never actually caught him in action. There have been a couple of near misses. We were both at Even Furthur in '96, where I think we both were involved in a conversation with Deadly Buda and Freddie Fresh... and he was supposed to play on a bill with Miro and I in New Jersey last year (the night before he played in Montreal), but for some reason he couldn't make it. We ended up hanging out the next day, though... great guy.

Also good to see Belladonnakillz on there... I stayed with him in Toronto last summer and heard a lot of his tracks... he came up here with c64 and hung out at the Venetian Snares show a few weeks back. Hopefully I'll run into him in Toronto this weekend.

Wasn't there an all hardcore line-up less than two weeks ago? Well... Toltek played, but that was hard techno... and imho, it might not be crazy fast, but it's harder than trancecore. The Snares show at the SAT was pretty pretty damn hard as well.

That said... much respect for bringing Nikadeemas in. The guy has probably done about as much for hardcore as anyone else on this continent. It's nice to see him coming up here again.

[ music.hyperreal.org ]

I'll have so much new shit with me. It's not even funny. Just got the first two releases on AIM in the mail last night [ www.215noise.com ] Duran Duran Duran will own you all...

Grey Poopon: here's your new challenge

November 21st... I'll even dismantle a whole bunch of Snares tracks - just for you.

Get the details here...

[ www.audioterrorism.net ]
[ www.speedcore.ca ]

I'm not gonna dis on djs that primarily beatmatch... I can't even express how much respect I've got for guys like Algorithm, Mike Shannon, Adam Marshall... There are lots of different styles and lots of different ways to work it... but there are also a lot of DJs that just throw on a track and sit back and let the track work it for them - and those DJs get the gasface.

A lot of DJs don't even bother with that... they just dance around and wait for a quiet part so they can do a lame fade... the term 'branleur' describes how I feel about a lot of people who spin records... I don't know if there's a good english equivalent.

As for the Excess mix... that one was a lot of fun. Mr. Rogers as a segue to Gay still cracks me up.

David Kristian was the only gear-oriented live set... and it was a pretty sick display of headbanging breakbeat abrasion. Too bad it may be the last time he plays a lot of those tracks live.

Black Market and Venetian Snares were both using a cdj set-up + onboard effects for their performances... with impressive results.

As for the dis on djs - in general I think a lot of DJs are lazy - but there are a handful who do some pretty incredible work with other people's records. C64 is one of them - the guy is unquestionably, one of the top drum'n'bass/breakcore DJs on the continent... and when it comes to what I do - I don't so much think of myself as playing other people's records... I think I'm working with them.

broute mon osti de rondelle! c'est ce soir!