These hard economic times have made for plenty of cancelled, postponed and rescheduled club events, closed-down clubs and amended budgets. The independent, the countercultural and the unprofitable get stomped by the very same cancerous infanticidal white elephants responsible for all the problems in the first place. These times are also characterized by much rage, boiling tempers, hate, hopelessness and despair, paranoia, violence and a particular cultural distaste for the bright, vapid lies of happy music and rich people. That’s where repetitive nihilistic electronic music comes in.
Salon Daomé’s Fricoti weekly keeps chugging along with local techno DJ Sarath Pereira invited behind the decks this week. Native to Lyons, Pereira is, like many others I’ve encountered from France, a devout fan and follower of the Detroit techno school in all its forgotten glory, perhaps a lingering symptom of the same grass-is-greener syndrome that sees all of our prominent techno artists departing overseas.
Saphir’s CTRL+FRK weekly invites Planet Breaks pimp daddy Pinky 38 down for some squelchy dance times Saturday night (April 4). Lalla Land’s favourite communist-themed DJ has been incorporating a worrying amount of four-on-the-floor beats, siphoning clubby electro-house influences into his peak-time style, sure to please the chug-muppets. Though it will require a brief interaction with the nexus of evil, Pinky’s got a new mix online that you may want to download, listen to and then sell to teenagers in Chechnya: go to www.zshare.net/audio/57547361a6b3479e/.
Zoobizarre gets intolerably loud and buck wild when it fills up. This will happen at Sunday night’s Boomboxx party (April 5), where host Khiasma welcomes Buenos Aires’ Zizek Club posse. Promising a bastardized hybrid of post-imperialist riddims drawing influences from dancehall, cumbia and reggaeton, infused with elements from techno and electro that are perhaps more familiar to us, Zizek sends us MC/producer Fauna, resident DJ El G and ZZK recording artist Douster. Khiasma, it should be mentioned, recently opened for and upstaged the entire N.A.S.A. act at Sala Rossa (though N.A.S.A.’s performance was beset by computer problems, horrible costumes and, like so many events nowadays, painful and unnecessary use of volume).
For each bad review it is nice to be able to stroke a positive one out also, lest I should wash my own mouth out with soap. To that end I recommend checking out new kid on the block Karma, where good sound, a respectful staff and a mixed crowd – equal parts newbie and bug-eyed club vet – congregate for a ritualistic house music cleansing each weekend on the Main at Mont-Royal. Whether it’s the magic of Stereo, Sona, Kox or Playground that is your ideal, or if you honestly don’t know what a good time is all about, go. Saturday night is a great time to visit as San Fran groove-purveyor, jeg skifer and long-time local and personal favourite Mark Farina rolls into town.
A promising spring season includes a plethora of exciting bookings in April alone: Sebastien Tellier, Michael Mayer and Superpitcher courtesy of Neon, DJG courtesy of the Komodo Bros., DZ at Forward, Gui Boratto tonight (April 2) and Anja Schneider. Personally, I recommend attending events that are promoted poorly amongst friends with as little Internet usage as possible, operating without any major sponsors in a location that may be slightly off the beaten path with as small an operating budget as possible and committing as many crimes as could reasonably be asked.
"Down and out/ It can’t be helped but there’s a lot of it about. With, without. And who’ll deny it’s what the fighting’s all about?" – Waters/Wright
