Still in Edinburgh. Wish I could say I've been in a flurry of social drama that's kept me from posting tunes. But mostly I've just been dossing round Dad's ripping as much of his CD collection as I can carry. This lappy's got a 320GB hard drive; how else am I gonna use it but to fill it with loads of rips? I'll find the time to actually sift through it all later. Weeks of solid listening time.
A fun thing that happened last Thursday, a tradition among me and my friends, was our mate Gabe's 'Animal Hospital', a banging nite of filthy minimal techno. This time we were boppin away in Sneaky Pete's a dirty wee box of a club in Edinburgh. The sweat was pretty much running down the walls, it was so hot in there! It wasn't quite wall-to-wall packed, but I reckon they have no aircon, and that crap smelly plastic smoke kept getting blown everywhere.
But it was some good solid hours of adrenaline fuelled dancing! We actually got there late enuff to miss Gabe's set; he was on first this time. Sam and Gregor were both pretty good, but I remember my fasvorite guy being the one in the red cap who was playing stuff a wee bit more energetic than canon minimal. We cheered at every cool breakdown n flash of chorussy melody!
Don't actually know a lot of minimal stuff by name tho. Didn't recognise anything played that nite, but I'll try to find out coz there was some pulsing silky bassline running round the room that nite.
So instead, here's a couple of my favorite ever minimal tracks. These are preper 6-in-the-morning, shut-the-curtains tunes:
I used to get these two confused coz of the titles and because I would never hear them with a clear head. But now I'm more familiar with my minimal, I reckon this mix of 'The Sky Was Pink' is my fave minimal track so far.
Towards the end of the nite I was approached by a keen kid from the Basque region who told me he was in Scotland for the summer learning Enlgish by bunking off his classes and chatting to real people instead. Sounds to me like the best way to learn! I got chatting to his mates too, and when I found out they liked drugs and were from Madrid I couldn't help but sing a bit of Ska-P to them. They laffed and danced; I reckon they appreciated the cultural exchange. So here's 'Cannabis'; "Legalegalización!":
Viva Ska-P! It's a band like this that makes me wanna learn Spanish.
Unfortunately that week there wasn't much of an afterparty, coz everyone was prepping for Rock Ness, which started the day after. But we did make it back to a friend's place for a few hours, with lots of party fodder, a decent soundsystem, and loads of vinyl. He mixed a bit of records before feeling too fucked so let Winamp play on. It must have been about four or five in the morning when this classic came on, which I'd only heard for the first time earlier the same day. I dunno whether it was deliberately played or not, but we all spontaneously got up and started moshing/flailing about with silly grins on our faces, just like these guys:
They all look high as kites in this vid as well.
