Woah! This really was a really good weekend.
It kicked off in seriously awesome ass shaking style with Reform on Thursday night. While freaking out in the middle of dancefloor of 30 odd people going nuts to 40 year old French pop music I had a small epiphany;
REFORM IS MY FAVOURITE MONTHLY PARTY GOING DOWN IN JOHANNESBURG RIGHT NOW!
I've been loving Reform since their first night, but it only struck me on Thursday during a Serge Gainsborough guitar solo that there's nothing happening in the city at the moment that I love nearly as much. There's no other party going down at regular intervals that's half as fresh or half as fun.
Needless to say getting to pick out an hour of music on the night was a total pleasure. It was such fun getting to play a set of music so radically different from the usual. The fact that I had such an enthusiastic, energetic dancefloor on the recieving end of it just made my set that much awesomer.
On Friday, over my lunch break, I bought an X-Box title I've been wanting ever since it's release last year; Tim Schafer's "Brutal Legend".
As the creative/ comedic genius behind the first two Monkey Island games, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, Tim Schafer made some of my favourite games of the 90ies. Now he's made one of my favourites of this era.
Brutal Legend is a total gem. Looses all the crap that ties other games down, creates an unrepresentedly insane fantasy world, mashes up RPG, Racing, Strategy and 3rd person hack and slash games into one incredible, funny, addictive package. This is totally why I'm so excited for what games can one day become. Something that's such an artistic achievement, that re-appropriates popular culture in this totally new way, shatters the conventions of a bunch of genres and is all the while damn fun to experience. It's awesome.
I've subsecuently also fallen in love with Scott Campbell, the game's art director.
But that's a whole other story...
On Friday night I DJed a friend's birthday. I played for about 4 hours, a pretty epic set going head to head with my main man Moe Joe. We had a lot of fun, got kinda silly at points. Like where we saw who could screw the other guy over with the shortest possible song, resulting in me (kinda) loosing, creating a weird silence and then throwing the mad distortion of early Raveonettes at the party. Fun times.
On Saturday Anja and I teammed up with Matt Suttner and Liz Dom. We ate sizzling Chinese food and went to Bounty Hunters to visit our kitten friends.
The tiniest ones now recognise that you exsist and don't just stare ahead with dead zombie eyes anymore.
This guy wouldn't sit still, but he looked like Yoda's furry, ginger cousin.
There were also badass new older kittens.
And a giant remote controlled robot.
And a lolzarific new sign.
We avoided the comic store and went home. Anja rocked a nap and I packed my stuff and headed through to the Bellavista for "Above Us Only Sky".
Back in 2005, at the end of my first proper night out after moving to Joburg, a tiny girl with pink hair and a Russian accent came over to me. She informed me that her and her friends had voted me the person that looked like he had the most fun that night and that I was therefor awarded a free bottle of hunters. I'd discover the girl's name was Anastasia and that her then boyfriend Aragorn was in fact one of the two organisers behind the party I was having so much fun at.
Fast Forward 5 years and Anastasia organised Saturday night's gig/ exhibition. Aragorn was there, helping out with the sound and logistics. He also played a beatiful set of ambient electronica as Asqus.
The night was really fantastic - Anastasia and Aragorn just seem to have this knack for pulling in the friendliest, nicest crowds and creating nights that are just exploding with good vibes. Freezing weather meant we were forced to abandon the plan to play on the roof, but the top floor of the Belavista still made a totally cool home for the great art on exhibition and the really really diverse lineup of bands.
Of course, for me, the most exciting part of the night was the 45 minutes I got to rock out with Eyes Like Mirrors.
At the start of the set we were running two projectors; Aragorn's was projecting the main visuals on a screen, while mine was looped through Aragorn's, shining onto the stage and band itself. This was an awesome idea, but it sadly resulted in Aragorn's projector over heating, 2 minutes into our first song. Cam saved the day and helped me out with turning my projector to the screen and making it the main source of visuals. Unfortunately Aragorn's projector dying seemed to cause a major malfunction for my VJing software, which then stopped recognising my keytar.
I switched from my wireless set-up to a cable running to my Mac. This solved the problem and meant that I could play the last 30 seconds of the song with the band, before quickly restarting Resolume between songs, bringing the wireless system back on line. And from there it was all awesome!
I really had the best time rocking out the the dudes. It was really just too much fun. The crowd was really great and seemed to love watching and listening to what we were doing as much as we were enjoying playing.
After our set we made our way up onto the roof. The guys had organised a bottle of champagne which we cracked in celebration of our very successful first night of ELM noise vs. Sass pictures. According to the band's facebook page I've become a member of Eyes Like Mirrors, and honestly I couldn't be more excited to be a part of what they're doing.
We spent most of the rest of the party on the rooftop. When home time came Anja and I slipped out, ordered some 1 in the morning Catz Pyjamas pizza and stayed up watching TV shows till way to late.
Sunday was another day of mostly moleing, that was highlighted by a visit to China Town. We hooked up a massive haul of tofu and chinese vegetables. Aaaaaaand we visited North's Food/ Dumpling King for lunch.
The End.
P.S. If you were wondering;
No. We did not eat Pie like Hat.
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