bristol style

Had an excellent weekend up in Bristol for the Venn festival. I was fighting a cold off for the whole weekend, but still managed to catch some great music and have a really good time!

Me, mat and lisa all went up on saturday afternoon, and came back on sunday at 6pm, so didn't get to see all of the festival, really just saturday's events.

Philip Jeck was the highlight of saturday afternoon, really nice sound in the auditorium and quite a captivating set. Hauntology seems to be the buzzword of the moment, and i guess Philip Jeck's scratchy records found in second hand stores which evoke all sorts of strange times and places may well fall under such a categorization. Caught Infinite Livez vs Stade shortly after that, which was pretty entertaining too - a very funkadelic inspired sound and look from the whole band, and a lot of onstage energy. In fact that reminds me to try and find some recordings of theirs - its someone whose name i've seen loads but hadn't actually heard - the set was fun enough that i'd like to check out some recordings and see how they differ.

Saturday night was the main reason for going up to the festival - Peverelist and Mortiz Von Oswald, and neither disappointed. The venue for the evening was the Motion skatepark, which as venues go, and being an ex-skater, i thought was fucking excellent. It has a nice outdoor patio garden on the bank of the river, plus three of the rooms were setup for music tonite. Peverelist's set started off slowly with a classic dub skanker, almost just an introduction to get everyone's attention, before dropping into some really good dubtech sounds, from the more familiar tracks such as his own productions, his work with Appleblim (who was dancing around very happily during the whole set), and some 2562 tracks, plus a load i didn't recognise.
He was followed directly by Moritz Von Oswald who had a massive stack of classic dub 45's. Fighting off the cold, i was starting to fade a bit by then, and moved through to bar where you could still hear and feel the bass from his set. Wandered around checking out most of the other rooms after that, but we called it a night around 3am and went back to the hostel to play some pool!

Almost over the cold now i think, and been finding a good few records and downloads these past couple of days..

One of my recent obsessions has been Daru and Rena's 'Turn It On' which i mentioned briefly before on here, i think my description was something like 'flying lotus producing En Vogue' which still kinda fits, but Daru has a load of projects on the go and working with loads of different people. Last night i came across his blog - http://darujones.blogspot.com/. One of the best finds from the blog was a free mixtape you can grab from here and actually, quite a few other places round the net - if for some reason that link doesn't work just google "daru spirit soul-hop sampler". I do warn you tho - its quite on the neosoul tip, not something i go for often, but i dunno, the production is just so good you get sucked in!

Was out with Matt Spendlove recently, and he informed me about the Jahtari and Werk showcase at Plastic People this friday which looks so good! Its got disrupt, Rootah, Mikey Murka, and Actress all playing live. I visited and downloaded quite a load of releases from their site months ago, but went back today to re-explore, and grabbed a bunch of excellent free download releases - been particularly enjoying the Blue Vitriol release. Well worth an explore!

Labels: bristol, daru, daru and rena, jahtari, peverelist, plastic people, venn, werk