Set 39: When We Were Alive

The boom-boom beats return in another celebration of European pop and dance tunes new and old. Set 39 also includes guest stars Edward Snowden, Russell Brand, and members of the cast of Django Unchained and Debbie Does Dallas in a veritable orgy of Eurodance pleasure. Listen now or download for a rainy day. :-)

Set 33 Progress

Recording a DJ set is like breaking a stallion. It fights, it kicks, it resists, and then it rides like the wind. By the time you hear Set 33 in its final form it should be a disciplined racehorse (but no doubt some wild spirit will remain).

It will likely be about as epic as Set 32 (I recently posted that one to Soundcloud if you missed it the first time around). However, I am hoping that even tighter transitions and crazier amounts of overlap will make for a shorter set while also showcasing more tunes.

I posted a teaser flyer on this page. Yesterday my laptop crashed while I was working on the design for the final flyer in Photoshop, and then it crashed again an hour later while I was recording. The laptop seems OK now. I have been backing up my work regularly on a terabyte external hard drive, which provides a great deal of comfort in light of such woes.

Anyway, after losing an hour of recording time fussing with the unruly laptop, I got back into things--only to become frustrated that one of the tunes was just not working out. I showed it the door. Unfortunately, losing that song also meant losing some much needed momentum, and it also messed up the flow of the set. This disappointing evening/night of work concluded with me failing (after a very long and arduous hour) to get a particular transition to work.

I woke today at 5:30 AM and began thinking about other transition tunes. My particular trouble spot was a disco strings song, so I thought to myself, "Well, I just need to find a few other disco strings songs that are around 138 BPM." I came up with some good ideas, and these proved so tempting that I climbed out of bed at 6:30 AM and tried them out.

They worked beautifully. The set's momentum was actually improved and the flow was salvaged. We usually say "two steps forward, one step back"; but in the bipolar heat of recording a DJ set it feels more often like ten steps back, twenty steps forward.

So what does it sound like? Well, just as one might be reasonably successful predicting tomorrow's weather by guessing that it will probably be much like today's, yes, Set 33 features more of the same multi-national, multi-era, multi-genre spirit "EorE?" visitors are accustomed to, with the usual emotional gamut running from the deeply dumb to the oddly affecting. This is the first set I have mixed using my Pioneer CDJ turntables (after years of working with Numarks), and these have been wonderful tools (I have gotten over my earlier lament about their inability to work with extremely large thumb drives).

The set begins with some quirky "forgotten" classics from the late 80s, showcases some 90s classics alongside newer tunes, and then gallops full-throttle into the newer trash stuff. Finale is a battlefield of beats, with drum 'n' bass slugging it out with various other genres. Who will be left standing? And what will be left of them? :-D

Eurodancehits.com is Closed

25 July 2010 -- The website, which seems to have nine lives, has been restored.



As I was preparing to add (another) link to the website from my own, I discovered that Eurodancehits.com had closed in June. I don't know the details; the most I have read about the subject came from this bulletin board. The poster, who had worked extensively on the Eurodancehits.com site, advances the idea that the site's webmaster, Kris, was exhausted and disheartened after battling a barrage of homophobic comments posted to the discussion forums (a lot of HiNRG compilations were promoted on the site, including the unabashedly gay-marketed Let's Hear it for the Boy comps).

On other forums, some suggested that the site had simply withered away, rendered increasingly irrelevant as sites such as MySpace and YouTube emerged. Kris's message reads "It is time to move forward," perhaps an acknowledgement that the web site had become mired in the past. I can only speculate.

What I do know is that it was a great website. I discovered Eurodancehits.com for myself back in 2001, shortly after I had become addicted to streaming Romanian top 40 radio on the internet (which had been the gateway into my whole Euro music fixation). I was delighted by the massive body of reviews and music samples the site provided for a sound that was, at the time, brand new and extremely exciting to me.

After finding the site, I spent a giddy and extraordinarily happy couple of weeks digging through its archives. It was then that I was introduced to some of my all-time favorite songs, such as Mauro Picotto's "Like This Like That" and Angelic's "It's My Turn." It was where I first heard Scooter, those gleefully unapologetic village-idiots of hardcore dance whose music continues to damage my eardrums today. It also gave me my first taste of Infernal (the song was "Sunrise," a big trance tune quite unlike the more Eurodancy stuff that would follow from them). The site also taught me about pop obscurities of dubious talent such as fem@le, whose cover of J. Geils Band's "Centerfold" is...something else. The music video archives gave one a then-rare opportunity to see how European dance music was being marketed to its overseas audience. I still have several of those Real Media files burned to DVD.

I don't know him, but Kris was clearly a very accommodating person. When in 2003 I wrote in to inform him (just because I thought, hey, he might be interested) that one Scooter song on a recently-reviewed album was a reworking of Liquid's "Liquid is Liquid," he swiftly inserted my comment into the review and thanked me by name.

My favorite aspect of the site was its reviews of singles, but as time went on fewer and fewer of these were posted, until eventually, sometime in the mid-2000s I believe, the singles section ceased to be updated. This struck me as odd because dance music is a singles-driven market. That was the first time I worried about the site's future and wondered what was going on behind the scenes.

Review focus by 2006 had shifted towards compilations, and generally things there were limited to a few series: the aforementioned Let's Hear it for the Boy HiNRG series, which, to be honest, was often a little too, well, gay for my tastes, but clearly served its audience well, as shown by the series' many, many volumes. And then there were reviews of some epic Euro-trance comps. These appealed to me more. It was here, for example, that I was exposed to such awesome tracks as Dynni's "City Of Moving Waters (Robert Gitelman Remix)."

For many, the discussion forums were the site's biggest draw, but for me, after the singles reviews ceased, my favorite reason for visiting became the Euro mini mixes, which I greatly looked forward to each month. Sometimes the mixes featured classics, and other times they featured a ton of new acts I had never heard of before. The obscurity of some acts could be frustrating for a music fan; it was extremely difficult to find some of these tunes. On the other hand, successfully tracking down a Human Athletic Dance CD single after having heard it on Eurodancehits.com was, as they say, priceless.

The mixes were frantic, with songs blazing past after a couple of minutes apiece, often laced with a barrage of original samples (usually of the motivational shouted variety). This was the sort of place where (and I can't remember if it was actually featured, but it may as well have been) one would hear Dancing DJs' fantastic reworking of Roxette's "Like a Flower." That is to say (if you're not already looking for that song on YouTube), each mix was a sugar rush of pure pounding joy.

Admittedly, I found myself visiting less and less. I spent more time listening to streaming internet radio and checking the pop charts against YouTube video postings. The emergence of Web 2.0 took a toll on the site. Consider Eurodancehits.com's once-mesmerizing video archives of pixely Real Media files. These were abruptly marginalized by the rise of YouTube--a whole section of the site rendered obsolete in a single blow! As television and movie production houses are discovering, the world's attention is becoming increasingly divided. But every few months, right up until today when I found the site closed, I continued to check in on what was going on there, because the site was that important.

It's a huge loss.

I am hoping that Mr. Davis, the poster I linked to above, is not correct, that an entire website of such great musicological value (and dumb fun, which is a compliment) would be shuttered because of a single homophobe's comments.

So I would like to say, Kris, your work as both music archivist and promoter seems too important to be derailed by one hater's (or even a few haters') stupidity.

But if you have moved on because it just wasn't fun anymore, I hear you and I support that. Maybe that's our loss, but you have to live your own life for yourself. And hopefully your gain will become ours as well, if music continues to lead your heart to an even bigger and bolder venture.

In any case, huge, huge thanks for what you gave the world. The passing of Eurodancehits.com is something I will mourn like the passing of a friend. Haha, my friends will probably shudder at that! But no kidding. The site is irreplaceable.

Thanks to everyone who worked on Eurodancehits.com for a great ride.

-----


An interesting addendum, worth pondering if the site really is finished: CubeStat.com values Eurodancehits.com at $20,896.98. So, for any doubters out there, the site possesses more than mere sentimental value!

"Eurotrash or Eurotreasure?" DJ Set 32 Available Next Week

I haven't been posting much to this blog, my kingpigeon.com site has been in a state of suspended animation, and my journalistic endeavors have been temporarily put on hold as I have been investing hundreds of hours into the creation of a three hour and forty minute long Euro-themed DJ set which will be made available to you next week. I "test drove" it last night in order to sort out various glitches and volume issues, and having just taken that epic ride I can promise you this: it will be worth the wait.

There's nothing like a little marketing to whet your appetite. Here is the (probably) finalized flyer.

Planning Stage: Estonia

Yesterday's 2 hours of planning my DJ Eastern European Misadventure focused on the clubs of Estonia. Estonia is a country of 1.5 million. They speak Estonian, Russian, and most know some English. My friend Vaidas, who has traveled around the region, tells me that Russian is not all that commonly spoken there despite the shared border with Russia. Estonians seem to see themselves more as Scandinavians with an Eastern European swagger. Their language, to my American ears, sounds much more Scandinavian than Russian.

The Estonian music scene is fantastic. It proves that population does not have a bearing on the quality of one's pop music. You might think a country of 1.5 million would have, at best, one or two talented artists. Estonia, it turns out, has a lot of good stuff to offer. Here are some great relatively recent Estonian pop tunes:

Hannaliisa Uusma (HU?) - Sa meeldid mulle
Birgit Õigemeel - Moonduja
Laura feat. Tafenau - Lihtsad asjad

I visited TurismiWeb and went through their long list of Estonian nightclubs to find places that looked like they would fit my own DJ'ing spirit, since the whole goal of this adventure is to DJ my way through Eastern Europe. I checked out photos from the various clubs' galleries, studied their advertising, and from that selected six candidates. I sent emails out to those six yesterday. The clubs I selected are in the towns I have indicated in the map above.

The winners were:

Beach Club (Pärnu)
Club Panoraam (Tallinn)
Club Red (Viljandi)
Lifeclub (Põlvamaal)
Nightclub Oscar (Tallinn)
Ööklubi YES (Valga)

So I wrote to each one of them, included a link to my latest Eurodance mix, and now await a reply.

Prison Break: Beginning of a New Life/Total Freaking Disaster

Sometime around 2 AM on 14 November, as I stood in the parking lot of my apartment complex in my underwear hoisting and then dropping an armchair into the dumpster (much to the delight of my neighbors, one of whom opened his door to inspect my progress before slamming it shut again in rage), I realized that I had reached the point of no return.

The path to that point began with depression in middle school, which morphed into depression in high school, which turned into depression in college, which then became depression in Atlanta, which became a half-hearted suicide attempt in 1997, which became therapy in early 2009, which became a drunken me throwing out an armchair at 2 AM.

The dumpster incident sounds like the sort of thing my fictional alter-ego, a Eurotrash DJ named "Mr. Lava," would have described in his blog on my Euro-music website "Eurotrash or Eurotreasure?" But this incident was real, as am I, and this blog will describe only real things as I move towards the biggest change of my life.

The current plan: to leave Atlanta for Eastern Europe in January 2010, and to DJ my way through the part of the world that I have long found the most exciting and interesting. I also intend to write about my adventures and discoveries, both here in this blog and also for other publications.

I have little money to start with. I presume I will have no health insurance. Not sure how that works, actually; that will be next week's task to determine. I am devoting 4.5 hours a day to planning this adventure, those hours divided into categories such as: "Finding gigs in Europe," "Eurotrash music research," "Cleaning out of apartment," and the always useful "Miscellaneous."

Sounds like a stupid plan, especially when you consider how little cash I will leave with. But oddly enough this is partly why I am leaving my job in the first place. If your job pays you dirt, then you may as well find another job that pays you dirt, but that you love doing.