Fujirockers: The official fansite of the Fuji Rock Festival

Last September, Keiran Hebden announced on the Four Tet blog: “I’m playing at Fabric in Room 1 on Friday and it’s a big lineup with Joe Goddard from Hot Chip, Jamie xx, SBTRKT and loads of other great acts.” Sounds suspiciously like Friday’s post-midnight lineup at the Red Marquee. Just throwing this out there: the night totally meshed and someone from Smash UK was present?

Now the next question is, how is it that a once abstract or “folktronic” musician like Four Tet – the DJ name of London native Keiran Hebden – is now playing London’s most famous dance club? Even if you’ve never been to London, you know the Fabric Live series of DJ mixes, a roster of full-on party pumpers: Goldie, LTJ Bukem, Diplo, Toddla T, A-Trak, etc, etc. But Four Tet started out in the early noughties as one of the first wave of laptop pop, a variant of indie pop or twee, which was basically electronic music for indie music geeks who are exactly the type of people who don’t go to clubs like Fabric. Hebden, who started out in a post-rock band and did his first remix for Aphex Twin, was making music in organic live mixes using non-timeline-based software. He attributed loose compositional structure and glitchy, erratic beats to “jazz influences”, which was probably a lot more acceptable than saying Karl-Heinz Stockhausen or John Cage. OK, that’s just a guess, but I think you get where the music was coming from. It was electronic music for people who listened to the Magnetic Fields or Velocity Girl or Lisa Loeb or sat on the floor at gigs of their favorite post-rock band (and also quite likely for a certain poofter named Kern). He was way more of a sound artist than a master of the decks. One really doubts he’s ever been called a “playa,” a “mack” or a one-man wrecking crew on the wheels of steel.

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UK-based Young Turks record label, also featuring Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX, is bringing bass wildfires, ethereal attitude lifestyle, some stars (to gaze at in your mind, don’t forget the Red Marquee is Fuji Rock’s only stage “inside”), and anonymity mystique to the Red Marquee’s Planet Groove session Friday night by way of London-based producer-on-the-rise, SBTRKT.

You might want to wear your mask, too, otherwise risking ostracizing awkwardness via the DJ booth as SBTRKT goes straight for your ears with laser sound knob-turning deliciousness and otherwise disorienting sound beatitudes.  (He always wears a mute-expression tribal mask with long threads of what look like woven dried rice stalks trailing down into his synth pads, Macbook, Kaossilator, and whatever other gadgets he may be playing with on any given Sunday, err, Friday.)

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There may be some proof to how good the Boys Noize DJ set was last night at Fuji Rock’s Red Marquee in my not physically being able to write anything at all until now that the sun’s both come up and gone down again. All I have down in my notebook for the show is four words: THA STADIUM RAVE SHIT! There’s just something about Europeans; they know how to pull off that kind of massive sound. The Red Marquee probably holds around 3,000 to 5,000, but this kind of music could power a party that’s triple that big. Boys Noize – or Alexander Ridha, as it says on his drivers license – certainly knows how to pull it off. On the decks, he’s like a beanpole on springs in a florescent orange b-boy cap, and he commands the action like a kid who just realized, “If I twist this knob, I can make 5,000 people jump up and down like maniacs.” Ridha is only 28. Continue Reading…

Back before most of us knew what a mashup was, Z-Trip had already moved the art of playing two different songs at once on to the next level, and closing out the Red Marquee on Friday night from 3:30 to 5am, he pulled out all the turntable tricks in what felt like basement party. Just to give an example, he cut “we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn” into the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, then segued over to the hook of House of Pain’s “Jump Around”, then a snippet of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way”, which of course led into the theme from Rocky…and that probably took all of 5 minutes. Continue Reading…

Rusko’s music video for “Hold On” (featuring Amber Coffman) just came out on June 23 in support of his new album O.M.G… Strange for a music video, this is basically a documentary about Rusko’s life on tour, in which: he takes trains, taxis and passes in front of impressive European architecture; he goes to nightclubs, rocks the party, makes the crowd bounce, unplugs his equipment, then suddenly he’s in front of a whole new crowd and rocking the party some more; at the same time, he’s also sort of doing a marketing job for his Wake the Fuck Up t-shirts and making a fashion statement out of a bed-head mohawk hairdo; Rusko’s crowd meanwhile is behind barricades, insanely happy, and in some cases wearing panda bear costumes; and all of this sort of repeats for a while, and then Rusko walks out in the street and some smiling fans wave to him and the video ends. Continue Reading…

After the trademark which was established by his remixes for Justice, Tiga, Bloc Party…etc and his debut album“Oi Oi Oi”, Boys Noize brought us a totally different atmosphere with the 2nd album “Power”. Somehow it’s just like a revolution that kicks all the mainstream Electro’asses. I’m not saying Boys Noize is a genius or what, but I’m saying he is always making his attitude. When you hear it, you’ll know that it is the Noize of da German Boy.
-Please also check BOYS NOIZE: Diplo gives a rare thumbs up by Dave.

憑藉先前的幾首混音與首張專輯Oi Oi Oi，07年Boys Noize迅速崛起。不過，或許就像牌桌上有新手運，玩久了才見真章一樣，09年第二張專輯在發行前就被視為是真正一窺其實力的作品。 Continue Reading…

AN INTERVIEW WITH BRYAN BURTON-LEWIS, WHO STILL WON’T ANSWER WHAT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO DO BETWEEN 5 AND 10AM

Who dreamed up with the idea that we needed an All-Night Fuji? And who envisioned that the dance party might possibly carry on past 5am – albeit after an inexplicable 5-hour break – in a distant, mountaintop field at an FRF extension known as Daydreaming? What originally put me on the track of Bryan Burton-Lewis was Tokyo’s red hot electro duo Dexpistols, the team of DJs Daruma and Maar, who, having blown up over the last few years in the Tokyo scene and on Fujirock stages are now getting major international props, the latest of which is headlining The Fader’s “Asia” mixtape (download it free!!!), just released last week. Within the last year, Burton-Lewis convinced Dex to go indie and help him found the Roc Trax Crew, which meant luring them away from major label BMG. But that’s just a little bit of what he’s been up to. Get the rest, including the inside story on Fujirock’s all-night party scene, in our following chat via that network of electronic chips, resistors and cables better known as the Internet: Continue Reading…

About 3am sometime in January I was in a taxi with DJ Diplo heading towards some hot springs in the mountains of north Taiwan. Diplo, which the Fujirockers crew pretty unanimously selected as one of the all-stars of FRF09 and who is currently blowing up bigtime with his Major Lazer project as it tours the US, had just played a set in a Taipei club and was being unusually candid when it came to other DJs of the realm. Most were not exactly getting what one would call a lot of love, and actually, the only other DJ to get spontaneous praise was none other than:

Boys Noize.

Diplo: “That dude, he just mixes up all kinds of strange stuff you’d never think would go together, but somehow – and I don’t know how he does it – he makes it work.” High praise indeed.
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