Yes, there was some shit that went wrong this weekend, but I didn't create this blog as a platform to complain about when things don't work. So with that in mind, here's the good news.
I played Foambox on Friday night! This year Joe and the Hotbox boys really outdid themselves. The Foam was contained in a giant inflatable with two godzilla sized dolphin heads bursting out. Last year's foam party was total carnage and this year wasn't any different. I hung out, enjoyed Proffesor Mystery's tunes, played some Young Empires, Fool's Gold and generally had a super fun set.
I had to rush home to get back to work on animating visuals for the Eyes Like Mirrors video shoot, but I got to stick around for half of Suttner's set.
It was a really great power dose of party in a week that had been work work work up to there. And then it was back to work work work. And on Saturday it was shoot, shoot, shoot until the evening where I could finally chill, chill, chill which was when J-Dawg and I got to kill, kill, kill loads of robots.
On Sunday I was feeling pretty destroyed. Working every night of the week on the artwork for the EP, then the animation for the video and then the shoot itself had really taken it out of me. Luckily there was nothing I needed to do besides curl up with some very special furry friends.
I bought the Beasts of Burden trade ages ago, but being such a special, unique comic I've been doing my best to drag it out. I figure that, if it took 7 years to write and paint the stories in it, the least I can do is drag the thing out for a few months. Sadly, those few months came to an end with me finishing the last of these pet horror gems on Sunday morning.
After comic time I tried playing some Fallout, but honestly my brain was too tired to even make decisions like "where in the wasteland do I want to go now?". In the end i realised the only thing that would be right for me would be hanging out with my main man; Carl Sagan.
Later in the day I havd to finalise the art of the Mirrors EP before we'd send it in to the printers on Monday. After it's done Shawn and I teamed up and (almost a year since we started exploring Pandora together) finally finish the epic masterpiece that is Borderlands.
The weekend starts with disappointment. I was planning to spend Friday night at The Bioscope for their Noodle Box screening of "The Good, The Bad and the Weird". Unfortunately, after forgetting to buy tickets all week, when I finally got down to booking some the event had sold out. This left me on Friday afternoon with no plans for the night. Luckily, a few minutes after the great Bioscope disappointment, Chad called. Filling me in that he was house-sitting a place around the corner from my home, he invited me over to come hang out.
Following in the usual fashion of last minute plans for nights with no expectations, our Friday night turned out to be really fantastic affair. Inviting over a lovely collection of human beings, Chad also soundtracked the night with 5 hours of perfect chillwave. And while the human company kept us there till after 3, the most special part of the night came from hanging out with a mad cuddly cat listening to said soundtrack.
As much as I enjoyed our adventures on Friday night, I came to really regret them on Saturday morning. It wasn't hanging till so late, the great music, killer cat or having Chad tell me to shut up a hundred times that I regreted, instead it was the bottle of whiskey that went down with all this that suddenly seemed like a terrible idea. Luckily I had the best hangover cure at hand, a little film call Horton Hears a Who.
After Horton helped me forget my headache, my Saturday was made even more awesome with the help of Black Hole and Borderlands.
And a few hours later it felt like we were back at Chad's place, hearing him playing more chillwave at the launch of our new party, High Five Records.
While the mood of Chad's DJ set was identical to his soundtrack from the previous night's party, the result of playing this music was quite different. By 9 he's worked up a nice little floor and by 9:30 it's totally cooking. It's encouraging seeing how enthusiastically people are getting down to such laid back music.
Once Cam takes over and takes things in a more rock and roll direction the dancefloor erupts into very friendly, smiley, chaos. Cam plays a really bold set, placing a heavy emphasis on a live feel. Given their generally "poorer" quality, live recordings barely ever get played out by DJs on this side of the world, but right now Cam's building a whole set around them. He's found great versions of regular dancefloor anthems by TV on the Radio and We Have Band and they move the dancefloor as much as the originals ever did. Best of all there's about 8 minutes worth of pure-power from Arcade Fire tearing through two tracks that seamlessly flow out of one another.
After a good half hour of totally loosing it to Cam's set it occurs to me that I'm only going to start my set in 2 and a half hours and should probably conserve some energy for it. I head outside to get some fresh air. Hang out with Phil, Marc and various other awesomefriends. Unfortunately, the courtyard is so full of people and so loud I can't hear what's going down on the dancefloor and miss the one song I've been looking forward to dancing to all day. Earlier in the week Cam showed me a video for a song he planned to play at High Five and ever since I haven't been able to stop telling Anja how excited I am for Kimba.
I really am gutted to have missed Kimba and then also realise Anja and I never ate the dinner we bought on the way to the party. We quickly head to the car to eat and on the way out discover the venue has reached capacity. The door is closed, only letting 1 person in for each person that leaves. In all the crazy, packed nights that have gone down at Kitchener's this is the first time I've seen this happen. Putting food in my piehole and contemplating how our gig has sold out, I slowly get over my kimba-induced depression. Head back in. Dancing some more to Cams set and telling myself there will be more Kimbas in the future I get back up to the level of joy that seems to be gushing through the party. As Ri takes over it's like it turns into euphoria.
Between dancing and catching my breath I run into old friends I haven't seen in ages and make some new ones that discovered Sassy over the internet. By the time I start my set I think I'm in the highest of spirits. Getting to play music for this wonderful crowd blast those spirits even higher.
Fools Gold, Los Camp, Saturday Looks Good to me and Jamaica all make appearances. At some point Warren comes over to tell me there's a gang of kids rocking out in a big circle, taking turns to pull shapes in the center. He says he did the running man. I feel like I've finally achieved something as a DJ. Later Warren joins me in the booth to make a surprise appearance and flawlessly mixes some Passion Pit out of the Phenomenal Handclap Band. By the end of my set I'm left the kind of sweaty mess I transformed into at Sovereign Academies.
Ash follows my sweatfest, spinning a vinyl only set that eases the party towards it's close in the most perfect way possible. It's almost 4AM and while Kitcheners has emptied out a lot, Ash has got almost everyone that's left on the dancefloor. While I'm packing up the visuals I apologise for invading his space. He says it's fine - he's just trying to get one of his turntables working. Investigate the plug -it's one of those dodgy 2 pins that isn't making proper contact. If I push back on it the turntable turns on, if I let it go it dies. Ash is running out of time so I urge him to play a song while I hold the plug in place. He does this and runs out to find another adapter, leaving me kneeling on the floor of the danceloor as kids get down all around me. It's a pretty ridiculous end to a totally fantastic evening.
On Sunday morning I'm meant to be jamming with Tennyson, but I'm in no state to do so. My voice is totally gone after 6 hours of screaming and singing on the dancfloor. I sadly cancel with the boys and climb back into bed. In the afternoon we go to Patrick and ADK's. Patrick is cooking up some insane Italian sausage pasta for us. Cue awesome times with lovely friends, killer food and the goodness that is The Hudsucker Proxy. A good end to a good good weekend.
I've realized that since starting the "Good Weekend" series of animal calls, my weekends have been pretty geeky. Following this new tradition I'm delighted to say this weekend was, by far, the most geeky one yet. Basically all I did was eat cake and play video games.
On Friday night we celebrated my friend Chris's 21st birthday. This made me feel rather old - I remember the first time I met Chris. It was at one of my first Secret parties. Chris, at the age of 15/ 16 was being led around the party by his older sister Nix - she was using him as a kind of mobile store. She's approach people to find out of they were into cute/ weird Asian accessories. If anyone said "yes", this would be Chris's cue to open up his blazer, revealing hundreds of badges, charms and broaches pinned to the inside of it. Like a shady stolen watch salesman in a film from the 1970ies. But with loads of Totoro related merchandise.
Since meeting Chris I've seen him grow taller (taller than me which NO ONE else I know has gotten right), start DJing, and change his hair about 1000 times. Now, on Friday we celebrated him being 21. To do this Chris assembled everyone at Wolves. I ate a slice of orange cake, 2 cupcakes, a slice of chocolate cake and drank two pots of tea. I listened to Chris' doubleplusgood soundtrack for the evening and caught up with old friends. It was awesome!
Anja was out of town this weekend - she flew to Cape Town on Thursday for her cousin's wedding. This left me sadly girlfriendless and lonely. Too make up for this Colin swung by with his X-Box, we fired up my newly acquired projector, linked our consoles and proceeded to spend most of the weekend racing around alien wastelands, shooting ATLAS corporation space nazis and blowing up giant desert insects.
On Saturday night Col needed to go DJ a birthday party. Luckily I wasn't alone to long - my new partners in audio visual crime, Jason, Matthew and Shannon swung by for a visit. Life without Buildings songs were listened to and Mae Shi videos were watched.
Yesterday was another day of co-op carnage, that was interrupted only for a few hours when Colin and I joined Patrick, Claire and Rachel for lunch (AKA chocolate milkshakes). After tasty beverages were consumed and crazy rain was enjoyed we went back to my place and got our game on. At 9ish we went to the airport and collected a pretty exhausted little Anja, who fell asleep during the drive back. When we got home she gave me an awesome awesome awesome present from the Cape, which was a pretty fantastic way to end a weekend of most excellent gaming and eating.
YYYYYYAAAAAAYYYYY!!!
This was an extra good weekend! With Friday and Monday being public holidays this one was twice as long as weekend's usually are.
As I mentioned last week there were way too many cool things going down on Thursday night. Personally I really enjoyed the party that we landed up at, The Tutus show at Tings.
I really, really love playing Tings. And it's not just because I get an awesome free meal when I do. The crowd is just always so receptive and up for a good time, something that was fantastically clear by the contorted dancefloor that the Tutus worked up over the course of their set. Needless to say taking over from where they left off was more than a pleasure. I played a power half hour set, Joe took over from me to do the same and then we rocked the rest of the evening head to head. Awesome times.
Friday and Saturday were both pretty chilled, highlighted by more Asian food, more moleing and loads more chocobos. Honestly I can't really ask for more.
On Sunday Anja and I went through to Pretoria to visit my family. On the way back we stopped off at Christian's place. He played us the 2 new Vampire 9000 recordings which are sounding seriously stellar. Since the original drummer Henre's left for China the band have followed a far less technical, more visceral direction, with the new songs sounding like a kind of wilder, dancier Errors. Too cool.
Anja, Christian and I met up with Maaike to grab something to dinner at Kung Fu Kitchen. Zuba rad times followed. After dinner we dropped by Chritian's to quickly get a great new show called "Better off Ted" and then drove back to Joburg.
I woke up pretty early yesterday morning, grabbed my keytar and macbook and drove through to Bryanston for a very special event. Yesterday marked the first ever practice for the, as yet untitled, collaboration between yours truly and the much loved champions of SA post rock - Eyes Like Mirrors. From when I first saw the band at We Own the Sky, I've been totally in love with a noise the boys rip out of their instruments. After seeing me playing visuals with Johnny Foreigner, Jason ELM asked me if I'd like to work with them on a visual set and ever since I've been dying to jam with the band. Yesterday it finally happened.
While the collaboration is still in it's infancy it was awesome rocking out with the dudes yesterday. There's still a very long way to go in terms of getting all the imagery together, but at the moment I'm thinking the collaboration will take the form of a kind of re-envisioning of Metropolis (probably my favourite film from the silent era). So far I'm mostly creating visuals out of a bunch of way cool pastel drawings by Franci, the sister of ELM bassist Shannon. I haven't done much with these awesome pictures yet, but they're already looking great over ELM's music. Even with a very limited pallet of imagery to work with I had the best time playing with the band yesterday. It wasn't just the highlight of my weekend, but probably the past month or so.
After righteous rocking out, loads of new music, 3D skateboarding, red tea and pizza I crawled through the rain back to Melville. Anja and I ate fantastic soup, invited Colin over to hang out and watched more than a 3rd of the entire season of Better off Ted. It's really really great. So great it knocked Anja unconscious, leaving Col and I free to fire up my X-Box and shoot the crap out of Skag till well past our bedtime.
Pow!
Yes, there was some shit that went wrong this weekend, but I didn't create this blog as a platform to complain about when things don't work. So with that in mind, here's the good news.
I had to rush home to get back to work on animating visuals for the Eyes Like Mirrors video shoot, but I got to stick around for half of Suttner's set.
It was a really great power dose of party in a week that had been work work work up to there. And then it was back to work work work. And on Saturday it was shoot, shoot, shoot until the evening where I could finally chill, chill, chill which was when J-Dawg and I got to kill, kill, kill loads of robots.
On Sunday I was feeling pretty destroyed. Working every night of the week on the artwork for the EP, then the animation for the video and then the shoot itself had really taken it out of me. Luckily there was nothing I needed to do besides curl up with some very special furry friends.
I bought the Beasts of Burden trade ages ago, but being such a special, unique comic I've been doing my best to drag it out. I figure that, if it took 7 years to write and paint the stories in it, the least I can do is drag the thing out for a few months. Sadly, those few months came to an end with me finishing the last of these pet horror gems on Sunday morning.
After comic time I tried playing some Fallout, but honestly my brain was too tired to even make decisions like "where in the wasteland do I want to go now?". In the end i realised the only thing that would be right for me would be hanging out with my main man; Carl Sagan.
Later in the day I havd to finalise the art of the Mirrors EP before we'd send it in to the printers on Monday. After it's done Shawn and I teamed up and (almost a year since we started exploring Pandora together) finally finish the epic masterpiece that is Borderlands.
