Clubs

There are a trillion ways to hear fresh music (believe us, we counted ’em), but now, in addition to going to the clubs and record shops, checking the pirates and the print media or just watching MTV, most of them are online.

‘As a DJ, an essential part of every week is trawling through the blogs,’ says DJ Disastronaut, who has corralled ten of the most influential bloggers to DJ at Beware of the Blog at Brixton’s Dogstar on Friday. ‘Every Thursday I’ll go to some of my favourite blog sites, like Jazzfunkgreats [http://20jazzfunkgreats.blogspot.com] or On-Off [http://ondashoff.blogspot.com] or http://blog.wfmu.org, which has links to some amazing MP3 archives, or I’ll go straight to The Hype Machine [http://hypem.com], which collects all the postings that are put on the music blogs on one site.’
Feature continues

It’s the utterly diverse nature of music covered on the blogs that appeals to him: ‘That’s why I started Audiosushi [on Saturdays at the Dogstar], because I love the idea of picking out the best bits of every kind of music.’

20JazzFunkGreats

DJ Disastronaut has been musical programmer at the Dogstar for three years, but this maverick mixmaster is as likely to be found playing at indie-electro warehouse parties as he is at super-swanky new club Bungalow 8, so having a humungous library of music helps. He has around 100,000 MP3 files and a similar number of records and CDs, but he still buys records each week as well as downloading new nuggets via the blogs.

Most DJs do the same, and it’s no coincidence that many of the biggest dance tracks this summer were never pressed or released. He mentions Laidback Luke’s remix of Azzido da Bass’s ‘Dooms Night’, the Deadmouse remix of Daft Punk’s ‘Harder Faster Louder Stronger’ and myriad bootlegs as tunes that are only available online from the various blogs and fileshare sites. ‘People first became aware of a lot of the young French producers, like Justice and SebastiAn, and many other Ed Banger and Kitsuné artists, via the blogs. The whole nature of the music of producers like Sinden and Herve and Kissy Sell Out was developed online, and DJ Switch has become one of the world’s foremost remixers through the sheer volume of the trading of his tracks via the blogs.’

Nicole (PopScene)

Disastronaut reckons the three most popular trends across the music blogosphere are currently the the B-more (Baltimore) sound, indie-rock remixes and the electro-bass tunes, but what excites him most is that it is so infinitely open-ended. ‘In some ways,’ says Disastronaut, ‘the bloggers are the ultimate fan club leaders, but they’ve also become de facto promoters of music.’

You’d best go surfing and see for yourself which new talent bloggers are tipping now, because the best sites are updated daily. The most interesting bloggers are those writing about music that’s new to them too, whether it’s seven minutes or 27 years old, cutting-edge or just plain obscure. For example, Todd, who writes http://www.dalstonoxfamshop.blogspot.com and plays in the Dogstar’s first-floor room on Friday, goes to the abovementioned Oxfam outlet and buys tapes for 49p, digitises them and posts the results, from Nigerian taxi drivers’ music circa 1991 to the best Albanian marching bands…

Slutty Fringe

So, given the almost random range of music covered by these blogs, what will the Beware of the Blogs night sound like? Disastronaut hazards a guess: ‘It’ll be the musical equivalent of listening to all of the radio stations in London, mixed down to a psychotically messy canvas of ultra-rare Moravian techno masterpieces, the sounds of King Penguin [who play live] farting in Antarctica and “Blue Monday” covered by an Argentinian techno band [this one is true], and more utterly strange music.’

They’re a mixed bag, these bloggers, but by no means are they a bunch of sociopathic net nerds with no idea of what dancers like to move to. They’ve all DJed before and some, such as John Power (who writes http://hotsauce.word press.com, runs Furthur and has just launched the monthly Strobe night at the Scala), Stuart Kitten of Jazzfunkgreats and Disastronaut himself (http://disastermusic.wordpress.com) have run their own clubs for years. Kitten’s crew, writing about their Brighton club night, The Do, described the bloglife-nightlife interaction beautifully. ‘The people came, they shared our misshapen imagination, they danced to the oddball beats and they celebrated the weird like true winners should. Our favourite music never sounded better than when you jumped and wriggled and contorted yourselves to it. Doubts subsided, we knew why we were here and we knew it was meant to be this way.’

Beware of the Blog is at the Dogstar on Friday.