11-11-11 was a magical day for NYC’s music scene. Plaid and the Gamelan Dhara Swara played at LPR, it was the first night of the Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival, Paco Osuna was spinning at Good Units, and MiM0$a was rocking out at Webster Hall alongside Alex English. Energy levels were high and HiFi was on a mission to catch as much music possible for the eve.

Le Passion Rouge was first on the list. We made our way through the doors with plenty of time to down a few Vodka-RedBulls during happy hour. As happy hour concluded, the Gamelan Dharma Swara took the stage. This 15+ person group performs the music and dance of Bali in the NYC area. Gamelan was dressed in beautiful authentic Indonesian attire and played a myriad of instruments that I can not name. An orchestra of percussion, woodwinds, and xylophone-like instruments was spread across the stage. Their structured tunes sounded atonal and chaotic, yet your ear could grasp the tonal center that remained audible through a maze of accidentals and modes. The group finished with two dancers acting out the story behind the music onstage. They were confronted by an evil daemon, but victoriously forced the daemon away.

Plaid took the stage next. I was unaware of what to expect from the avaunt guard Warp duo. They managed to deliver a very true representation of their studio tracks. The entire set itself felt like one long continuous song with very few rests. Much of the set had this distinct under water sound, which mirrored their opening video montage of a girl swimming and encountering a deadly octopus. Whimsical melodic lines were laid on top of structured rhythms and patterns. Soft synth lines ran back and forth from spacious simple sounds to dark and heavy drones. When looking out into the audience, their confusion was visible. Throughout the first 15 minutes of the set most everyone stood still. As time progressed, everyone started dancing to the tune of their own horn. It looked crazy, but it made sense. Plaid took the crowd on a symphonic journey through their heavy beats. A part of me wished they had jammed out in downtempo. The set was great, and overwhelmingly powerful, but the constant change from fast to slow became somewhat exhausting. However, the creation of tones produced put our ears in music heaven for the entirety of their set.

We left LPR and heading directly to Williamsburg for BEMF. Friday night was Cold. Quite frigid to say the least. We huddled on the subway for warmth all the way to the Bedford stop. After securing our wrist bands, we ran into The Cove for warmth and successfully succeeded with the disco funk beats pouring out from the decks by Nick Hook. We danced to his tunes and stared at the beautiful green lazers bouncing around the room. The Cove was not the only poppin’ place at that time. BEMF had taken over all of north Williamsburg, with showcases at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, Public Assembly, Cameo, and Zablozki’s. It was visibly obvious that The Cove was slowly but surely filling up, and by the time Hudson Mohawke took over the decks, you could barely move. The recognizable Shower Melody opened his set and the crowd went nuts. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a glimpse of Hudson, but knowing that I was dancing to a set curated Ross Birchard himself, made it all worthwhile.

In the midst of Hudon’s set, I fled over to the Music Hall of Williamsburg to catch the Fischerspooner DJ set by Casey Spooner and Lauren Flax. Casey looked dashing in his black suit with bright purple hair. He and Lauren plunged into a fresh remix Casey had made featuring Patti Smith. From there on out, deep house beats pulsated through the airwaves in the MHoW and it felt like we danced until the sun the came up. Or 3 AM. As the audience filed out, with exhausted yet elated looks on their faces. HiFi stuck around to chat one on one with Casey Spooner himself. Casey is a very kind and humble man. Sitting, talking, and drinking beers with an artist of his caliber was mind blowing, and probably one of the coolest things I have ever done. (The interview will be up in the next few days.) By 4:30 AM we stumbled back into our apartment and fell into a deep deep sleep.

11-11-11 was a magical day indeed. The music witnessed that evening was the perfect combination of the finest from BK and the UK. BEMF was as great success as well as the early show at LPR. We can’t wait for next year. Cheers.

Fischerspooner is THE band that jump started my electronic-music obsession almost ten years ago. When I was offered the chance to sit down and chat with Casey Spooner (half of the Fischerspooner duo), I gasped and squealed like an over-enthused 13-year-old girl and immediately accepted the offer. Though I tortured my brain for days on end to come up with ‘the best’ interview questions, as soon as I sat down with Casey and cracked upon a Stella, my preparation dissolved into thin air. Casey was (and is) a kind, gentle soul and easy to talk to. He looked dashing in his classic tuxedo topped off with long flowing coattails and a top hat. As soon as he removed his top hat, a head of purple hair glistened in back-stage-light and I thought, “Damn. This man is one elegant rock star.”

He was eager to share his experiences and our scheduled ten-minute interview turned into an hour-long conversation. His tone was genuine, sarcastic, and informative. It was the perfect conclusion to my BEMF experience and a night I will forever remember. Below are some highlights from our conversation.

HiFi: This is your first time at BEMF in the 4 years it’s existed. What do you think of it so far?

Casey: Well, I can’t be the best judge of it since I showed up 15 minutes before my set and now it’s 4 in the morning, but I’ve always wanted to be a part of it. I’ve always thought, well “I live in Brooklyn, why can’t I be a part of it [BEMF]? I AM Brooklyn electro. I invented it!”

HiFi: Your set tonight was very disco heavy. Are you gravitating towards a deep disco sound in your solo career?

Casey: It’s really hard to get away from disco. The more you DJ, it gets so exhausting, so tiring how psychotic modern dance music is. At first it’s fun, it’s two-tonic and aggressive, all these weird screeching, screaming, noodling, computer sounds, but that’s kind of like tonight. I was doing that and then all of a sudden I wanted to play something else. Lauren and I are about to embark on a world tour next week and I wanted to play this track that we had just created. That track was very euro, very cheesy, so I did it. I played it, and then realized I couldn’t stop there. So then I started playing these electro ragas, and realized I couldn’t end there, but people were dancing so I went back to disco. It was kind of a weird set, and not what I was expecting to play, but that’s the beauty of live music.

HiFi: Are you currently creating music?

Casey: I actually started the set with a remix I produced that I literally had to go home and download the final version before I got here; it was the Patti Smith track. That was the premier; I was testing it to see how the final mix sounded. I actually wanted to play it again!

HiFi: You should have! Have you ever repeated tracks in a DJ set?

Casey: I’m so bad like that. I love to have one song and just play it over and over and over again. I DJed a friends house party and I just didn’t want to stop but I didn’t want to play anything other than these two songs so I did it, and the audience was like. “Ohhh Kay, can you please stop?”

HiFi: What tour are you about to embark on with Lauren?

Casey: Lauren and I are about to go on a DJ tour. We’re heading to Paris, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Milan, Florence, then and Athens, Greece.

HiFi: Have you performed live in South East Asia before?

Casey: No we haven’t. And everyone has always told us to go to Japan, I feel like they are my people! When we released the album on EMI, I tried very hard to get us to go over to Japan, but they only wanted us to do press in the UK and LA. I had never gone to Asia until last year and I wanted to open the market up for us over there. We DJed last year in Bangkok, Singapore, Bali, and Fuji-Rock (a big music festival in Japan). So now we’re going back and I can’t wait.

HiFi: Do you incorporate any of your solo work that you did on “Adult Contemporary” into your DJ sets?

Casey: Gosh, that’s so funny, you know I probably should. There is one remix of Faye Dunaway that could work. I’ve tried but it’s really tough. People come to the Fischerspooner DJ set wanting hard electro. So I feel obligated to stick within certain genre, obviously I’m playing ragas and Larry Levine, but that’s just because we’re at home and it’s comfortable. But when you’re headlining and playing for 2,000 people, you HAVE to play Emerge.

HiFi: Do you like your track Emerge?

Casey: I like it, but I don’t have to hear it. It’s such a cliché. But, there are songs that I love that I never get sick of. But I never would’ve imaged that I would make one of those “Underground-Cult-Hits”, but I did. So I am thankful that I got to make something like that.

HiFi: Do you prefer performing live or curating the music through a DJ set?

Casey: I am not a technical person. I hate computers, I don’t program music, I don’t know how to do anything. I never wanted to be a DJ because I grew up in Chicago and was immersed in the most amazing scene with all of these incredible DJs. I don’t feel like I transfer myself through machinery- it’s just not my thing and it makes me sleepy. The other thing is, if the music is really good and going well, the last place in the fucking world I want to be is standing behind a computer. I want to be enjoying it and dancing. I feel that right when the music gets good, I have to cue something and it makes me feel like I miss the party because I’m working. It is fun but to me it’s not as powerful as performing a live show. That is the great thing about performing with Warren [Fischer, the other half of Fischerspooner) because he’s manning the machines while I’m in-front and together we’re creating art and that art is our own world within our music.

HiFi: What is it like to tour with this world you created?

Casey: AWESOME. I fight and struggle to stay in that world. For our last record we spent two years developing the show and three years touring it, so for five years I was living in that world. But at the end of this past summer I sat down and realized, “I have performed this show and perfected it to its finest degree, and now it’s time to move on.”

HiFi: How did Fischerspooner start? Was there this small-scale alternative world that just happened when the two of you first performed together?

Casey: When we first started there was no big plan. It started with Warren Fischer, Karen Fischer and I working on a film project. The film project was a pitch for a TV show that a production company asked us to do. It was kind of lame, Warren was frustrated with being a commercial director, he wasn’t making music, and he had this amazing band in Chicago called Table that made beautiful, complicated rock music. So I said to him, “You really should be making music. Why don’t we take some of this film footage, you can score original music to it, and try it as a new way to incorporate music.” That’s what we did. After a series of events, we created this song and were asked to perform it at Starbucks on Astor Place. It was me doing this experimental theater, electro, dancing act while I was speaking in an Indian accent taking personal experience and putting it into song. It was mildly offensive, sort of filthy, and the punch line was “Do you want to see it? If you like it, you try. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to try.” And we looked at each other after the performance and said, “Oh Shit! This is interesting! Let’s do this again.” From there record companies started chasing us. But I was not naive. I was thirty when we started this whole process and knew that if we were going to do this, we had to be in total control. And it was like, “No.” We signed with EMI and all of those cliché things you hear are so true. It got out of control and I thought, “What the fuck happened? I was supposed to be an artist and now I’m dealing with corporate bullshit.”

HiFi: So do you think you will put out a 4^th Fischerspooner album?

Casey: We’re talking about it now. I’m not opposed to it, but I’m so bored with the format. It’s so formulaic. So I think we will put out an album, I’m just not positive.

I can vividly pinpoint the period in my life when I started to make the transition from being an avid, raw instrumental jam band (Phish) loving teenager towards the foreign genre, dominated by machines, synthesizers, and Europeans. The electronic album I purchased that bridged this gap (in CD form of course) was Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way Baby. Thanks to MTV, I had already been exposed to the album’s two poppy earworms, Rockafeller Skank and Praise You. Though the album had been released six years prior, I could not have made this purchase at a better time in my life. I raced home to an empty house with Fatboy’s gold in my hand. I remember placing the CD into my parents sound system, turning the volume up to a teenager friendly, deafening level, laying down and pressing play. When the ambient noises of Acid 8000 came to a close, I went back to track one, and pressed play again. I was hooked.

Shockingly, I realized that these two genres had a fair amount in common, structurally and emotionally. Every member in Phish is a master of his instrument. When the band jams they abandon spoken word and create a monolithic wall of emotion through sound.  These jams take the listener on a symphonic journey to another place and time far away from where their feet are planted. (The same aberration can come when listening to jazz or classical music.) All of these ingredients are present in electronic music. As soon as I understood the symmetry within these principles, I began branching out to other electronic artist such as Fischerspooner, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Calvin Harris.

As the sun was setting on Saturday, July 2nd, we began our voyage over to Governor’s Island. Upon arrival, my heart skipped a beat when I saw the venue sign, Water Taxi Beach. For years I have been hearing how phenomenal this place is, and now I knew why. The space transports you to a beach in Europe. We were right on water, staring out upon the illuminated skylines of New Jersey, New York City, and Brooklyn. Neon palm trees lined the space where the water met the sand, and yes, the sand encouraged your feet to be bare. To the right was a large white tent with a state of the art sound system. Water Taxi Beach was filled with the perfect amount of people. No matter where you were (tent, beach, drink line, front row) there was ample space to dance and breathe. Talk about venue paradise.

James Zabiela had just taken the stage as we entered the venue. This man was high on his own energy and sported a gigantic smile on face. His set was one giant transition that succeeded in consistency: balance, BPM, volume, and symmetry.  His music was full of soul. So much of his set was dependant on the bass. The bass created melodic lines, driving four to the floor beats, mixed meter measures, and you could hear the melodic lines in the bass, with delicate overtones lightly sounding. James was also running music programs and controlling the lights through an iPad he had plugged into his sea of machines. At the end of his set he held up his MacBook Pro, turned it towards the crowd to show off the message Thank you : ).The audience roared with approval. The next message he displayed was Fatboy Slim : ) and again the audience screamed. Those two ending gestures had me smiling and clapping for a long while.

Within minutes the legendary track, Praise You, was vibrating through the crowd. Fatboy Slim took the stage sporting a Tommy Bahama, aqua blue shirt, massive grey cargo shorts, bare feet, and spiked grey hair. He looked like a character alright. Praise You faded into Put Your Hands Up in the Air and then Fatboy Slim is Fucking in Heaven. His lights and background videos were very simple yet complimentary to his tunes.

Something that had stuck out to me upon arrival was the crowd. About half of the attendees were between 18-24, while the other half were between 30-25. This took me back to your typical Phish crowd. At Phish shows, you could feel the crowd’s devotion, respect, appreciation, and love for the band and the art they were creating and sharing. Lately, as electronic music has been infiltrating the mainstream, the crowds have gotten younger, more obliterated, and are present because it’s ‘the cool thing to do.’ Fatboy Slim’s audience made me feel like I was part of something musically and culturally authentic.

However, as his set progressed, I became heavily displeased. The sounds pouring out of his speakers were sounding less original. He began to sample L.M.F.A.O’s I’m in Manhattan Bitch and Cee Lo Green’s Fuck You. I remember thinking, “Is this what You want to play? Or do you think this is what the audience wants to hear?” It was very bizarre. Then, out of the blue, his set switched over to a very Tiesto-esque sound and Fatboy sounded a disgustingly loud airhorn. It was loud for louds sake. Gross. His set was not consistent. It jumped between 5 different genres the whole evening: original tracks, pop, tech-house, classic rock, and pop-electro. Towards the end of his set he sampled the Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up. For his encore, he performed I Can’t Get No Rockafeller Skank, mashing up the Rolling Stones I Can’t Get No Satisfaction and his own track Rockafeller Skank. As much as I enjoyed the beginning and ending of the set, I was very disappointed in its entirety. The crowd had also visibly diminished and emptied out by the end of the eve. We made our way back to the ferry with Mozart blasting in the background. As much as I love Mozart and classical music, I thought this outro was random and poorly placed.

Overall, I am glad that I got to see one of my idol’s perform live even if it wasn’t a mind-blowing set. James Zabiela rocked my world and I highly suggest listening to a few of his tracks if you are not familiar with him. Dance. Here. Now. produced an amazing evening and we can’t wait to see what they come out with next. Thank you again to the promoters and venue for making this event possible and we hope this tradition carries on through next year!

Photos by Cecilia Doreng-Stearns

This Friday, One Step Beyond, The Fader’s monthly party at the American Museum of Natural History, will return with live performances by The Very Best, Theophilus London and Ninjasonik. One Step Beyond, which is held in The Rose Center for Earth and Space, pairs the museum’s unique ambiance with top musical acts from around the world. Past performers include  Kanye West, Talib Kweli, Simian Mobile Disco, Switch, Matthew Dear, Jazzy Jeff, Amanda Blank and Kid Sister.

The Very Best and Theophilus London have crossed paths (so to speak) on London’s remixes of “Warm Heart of Africa” and “Julia”, and while we’ve witnessed stellar independent performances of “Julia” by both artists, we look forward to the prospect of a live collaboration. As for Ninjasonik, they’re the type of band you just have to see live.

Make sure you get your tickets in advance; the last installment of One Step Beyond - featuring Animal Collective and Fischerspooner - was completely sold out.

After the jump, catch a sneak peak of Theophilus London’s latest mixtape, I Want You, with a behind-the-scenes video from Va$htie, who is featured on the song “Flying Overseas”. The songs previewed on the video reveal a more laid-back side of London, who has clearly evolved since his last two projects, Jam! and This Charming Mixtape. Be on the lookout for I Want You when it drops this spring.

Continue Reading

This weekend is getting an early start when Dim Mak celebrates the release of Fischerspooner’s new single, “Supply & Demand”. With an open bar from 11-12 and $5 advanced tickets for the first 100 people to request an access code, there’s no excuse to miss the third installment of Dim Mak’s monthly NYC party “Cloak & Dagger“, especially when you throw in the musical stylings of Fischerspooner, Junior Sanchez, Ninjasonik and Hot Pink Delorean.

For a no-cover option on Thursday night, your best bet is to head over to “Ether” at Happy Endings where The Captain (of the Trouble & Bass Crew) will be playing a special doo-wop DJ set. We’re not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds intriguing.

If you haven’t already heard, Bassnectar is taking over Irving Plaza on Friday night, and we have the hook up on a pair of tickets and a copy of his eighth album, Cozza Frenzy. Click here to enter to win, or if you missed out, get advance tickets here. We caught Bassnectar at Street Scene in San Diego, and trust us, you do not want to miss this.

If you’re in more of a hip-hop mood, Girls & Boys is bringing The Cool Kids to Webster Hall for a special live performance. XXXChange of Spank Rock and David Berrie will also be spinning. Be sure to RSVP for $1 admission and $1 drinks before midnight.

And finally, after 5 years of radness, one party wasn’t enough of a celebration for Fixed, so on Saturday, they’re doing it all again. With a special live performance by british electronic quartet 2020 Soundsystem, JDH and Dave P are showing us just how far they can push the party.

Whew. Better get some rest… Fliers after the jump.

Continue Reading