Mr Hands’ boundless energy is a wonder to behold, and there’s something wholly appropriate about the entire ritual: a more accomplished parody of rock music than the likes of Steve Coogan or Christopher Guest ever quite managed. With extra bong hits.
Spring Rave Round-Up; Your Quarterly Guide To The Empty Dance floor
This minute, without a doubt, somebody is putting way too much effort into Yahoo! Live, a webcam community of self-mutilating bedroom teens, wired up CCTV cameras and over the top (think Westwood living in his mum’s basement) hippity-hop DJs playing out to wise-cracking lurkers on a pilgrimage to collect as many screenshots of people with shoes on their head as the universe will cough up.
At a certain hour of the morning this is all amusing enough, but the absolute star of the show is horse-headed rockist Mr Hands who thrashes an air guitar about while flicking disco lights on and off for hours on end as his chat room heaves with overexcited nerds accompanying on invisible bass, waving lighters, flashing their genitilia in approval and requesting the next sweaty performance; Bohemian Rhapsody, Thriller, Stairway... he does them all. Mr Hands’ boundless energy is a wonder to behold, and there’s something wholly appropriate about the entire ritual: a more accomplished parody of rock music than the likes of Steve Coogan or Christopher Guest ever quite managed. With extra bong hits. I can see why the devil likes these monster riffs and falsetto wails so much, not to mention the ghost of Tommy Vance hanging over every rockin’ fade out. At some point this world became separated from dance music – metal-heads scuffled round one end of HMV and computer-lovers strutted about the other, stopping occasionally to exchange threatening gestures over the easy listening section. But I put it to you today that ravers are not the enemy of rockers, for theirs is the hair-metal of the electronic world, shunned by chin-strokers for putting fun first. Just like Van Halen and Iron Maiden and Slayer.
DJ Donna Summer – Panther Tracks Vol. 1 (Cock Rock Disco) http://www.myspace.com/djdonnasummer
Meet Jason Forrest, head honcho at the genre-defining Cock Rock Disco label, erstwhile host of Advanced D&D radio (where a myriad of laptop constructions met 70’s disco sleaze and poodle-headed guitar noise en route to late night hearts dotted about the planet). He’s currently tearing up Berlin with confetti-liberation crew Birthday Party, in fact wherever the beats are pounding you’ll likely find this guy up front beaming with enthusiasm. And on this, the grand reopening of his Donna Summer guise (first abandoned after barcode complications), Forrest is smashing together a decade or two of uptempo electronica into a glorious mess indeed. It’s sort of like the angel and demon sitting on your shoulder. No, more of a good twin / evil twin scenario. Actually, scratch that, what we have here is a fine example of Jekyll and Hyde. Jason approached plunderphonics with love and care. He painstakingly snipped out guitar lines and ran his thumb over the edges to squeeze out any excess Pritstick. Donna, on the other hand, chases DJ Slipmatt’s famous stage banter with a knife, swiping at it’s legs and nudges Flava Flav’s unsuspecting "yeeeah boy"s onto a bed of booty bumpin’ four to the floor trancecore. Rather than ponder the limitlessness of vibrating air molecules, Panther Tracks crams a lifetime of amateur appreciation into one sticky little scrapbook. But despite straddling the divide between John Oswald and Crazy Frog, Jekyll and Hyde remains the same man, and every sample is still handled with distinctive care, essences oozed across the mix.
It’s just that Panther Tracks plays up to an audience who demand ridiculous ’90s rave loops and proper bangin’ choons for the right here and right now. Something exactly like bounce-a-thon Such Language with its cut up monologue "pussypussypussy-pussypussypussy" and breaks which roll up the scale, then down again. And naturally DJ Donna Summer, being Jason Forrest and all, is the best candidate for such a job.
Ove-Naxx – Ovkeyashiki (Accelmuzik) http://www.myspace.com/ovenaxx
In terms of dancefloor relevence, Osaka’s Midi_Sai is only ever a bullet train away. A criminally underpublicised scene which contradicts everything people reckon they know about Japan. Sinister young ladies smash their toys together, drums take the sort of pulverisation which would send a proud tear rolling down Brian Chippendale’s cheek, mics are held at waist height (you know what I’m saying) or crammed down windpipes as MCs bawl in knowing Engrish at an unquestionably dancing crowd. Not only has the whole place been shot to the sewers with absurdity since Yamatsuka Eye drove his first JCB through a small capacity venue, the seismic waves from a nearby J-trance motion have ploughed across the ocean with enough force to kick-start an old rave revival in the West. And nestled in the heart of all this madness, Isao Sano has been dishing out the plinky-plonky workout music, snake-shot rhythm dub and ring-modulated J-pop space grime left right and centre. For this, his first full length in some time, the big question was how to combine these elements into something resembling coherence, and the answer comes so simple that my jaw actually smashed a floortile on its plummet. This could be the first dance album to ever segue in and out of genres using the escapist atmospherics of Martin Denny’s exotica blueprint (flinging the listener from one dusty anti-paradise to the next with every casual fingerwalk along the keyboard loaded with barnyard sounds). It’s a visionary move which makes the already rocking feast of sloppy klezmer and Brisbane-lilted sex-pig rappafication one of the trippiest trips of 2008 thus far.
Scotchy And Shitty – Rave Like A Headless Chicken (Wrong Music) http://www.myspace.com/wrong_music
Meanwhile, back in Blighty, it’s time to polish off that poi, get your best jump-styling trackies on and chuck a couple of alcoholic milkshakes down your throat as long-time amen warrior Henry Shitmat goes head to head with every gameboy’s number one enemy DJ Scotch Egg in part 2 of the air thumping, Bonkers-pastiching Ultimate Rave series. You can see it in the eyes of their Beano-esque caricatures spinning round and round on the label, this is gonna be proper boshty as owt mate. Scotchy throws down the gauntlet in fine style, first sacrificing Hixxy and Sharkey’s Toy Town, surely the best kept secret of Woolworths’ music department. In the new context this tune gleams, standing proud alongside Scotch Party’s jittering techno, the hilarious Scotch Goat’s Skull and a re-jiggered Bach melody with it’s batteries recharged (I’ll let you guess what that one’s called), all pounding against your eardrums like an impatient broom-wielding neighbour. Anyone who said that Scotch Egg’s live sound couldn’t be captured had better get ready to eat their words as the beeps and bleeps bubble warm throughout. In fact, so impressed am I that I’ll refrain from making a single cheap crack about power pills, 1ups or end of level bosses, even though I really want to. Side B kicks off with Shitmat’s usual barrage of blistering breaks and demented voices and gradually the paint begins to flake revealing a fine line in Phil And Fern piano jazz. Before you know it, Shitty is in full effect and throwing down that "true heaven is a place on earth", a staple of every miserable holiday camp in the history of both misery and holiday camps. Trapped between dizzying synths and pounding beats, it echoes those happy hardcore tracks which feature the DJ’s sister on perilously average vocals. A typical Wrong Music release, by the time Jive Bunny tinged and scratch-tastic closer Happy Ending has wound down you may be left wondering how such singular and exhilarating sounds as those being toasted have never quite escaped from the margins.