Absolute highlight at festivals earlier this year, Sound Pellegrino alumni and generally awesome, creative and interesting bros… Renaissance Man are bringing originality and play back to the ‘serious bizness’ of techno music.

They’ll be playing around in Australia at the following parties – do not miss out, they always come fully armed with a holster of bootlegged bombs that you’ll not hear anywhere else. For authentic ‘shit, i need to get that song but won’t remember what it was tomorrow’ moments, always rely on Renaissance Man

Dates:
10 Jun Rocket Bar – Adelaide
11 Jun Civic Underground – Sydney
13 Jun QBW – Newcastle
17 Jun Monastery – Brisbane
18 June The Epsy – Melbourne
19 June Ladida – Melbourne

Here’s a promo vid for their new EP, Babbadabba, out now on the unstoppable Made To Play label…

And here’s a special mix of “Scat Track!” They’re giving away to blogs:
Renaissance Man – Scat Track (Buried Treasure Remix)

-Mandu

Since then artists like Erol Alkan, Aeroplane, Sinden and Fake Blood have all gushed embarrassingly about how much they love this three-piece from Adelaide.

In March they announced a national tour but for some reason they didn’t manage to include a Melbourne show so I’m thankful to the tastemakers at Animals Dancing for making this show a reality. It’s this Saturday the 17th of April at the Mercat Cross, 456 Queen St in Melbourne.

To say that I’m excited by this show is a massive understatement.

Tickets via Moshtix or roll the dice on the door and supports from stablemate Knightlife, the supremely talented Andee Frost and Otologic.

To win a double pass to the show drop us a line at music@electrorash.com with the first word that comes to mind when you think of the word “swiss”. Make sure you include “The Swiss” in the subject line!

xox
Ned

P.S. Here is a mix put together especially for the show and to get you in the mood. Listen tonight, listen every night, it’ll be alright.

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Another of the good ship NME’s brands makes a splash in Australia for the end of summer. Featuring what promises to be an ‘iconic’ DJ set from a guy who was in The Smiths but wasn’t Morrissey. But with some great bands in support, I can see this being a pretty righteous party.

Sock this MpFree in your iPod. Philly Jays remixed by local Girl Talk cover band – The Yacht Club DJ’s. It’s not bad though, bit of a bleepy throw back affair on top of a popular indy jam du jour.

Philadelphia Grand Jury – The Good News (Yacht Club Djs Remix)

At the end of the day though, all I really wanna know who this Velociraptor band is playing the Brisbane leg!

Dates below the jump

THURSDAY 25TH FEBRUARY – Empire Hotel, BRISBANE
Also Appearing: VELOCIRAPTOR
Tickets avail from http://www.oztix.com.au/

FRIDAY 26TH FEBRUARY – The Hi Fi Bar, MELBOURNE
Also Appearing: LOVE CONNECTION
Tickets avail from http://www.thehifi.com.au

SATURDAY 27TH FEBRUARY – Manning Bar, SYDNEY
Also Appearing: TENNIS
Tickets avail from http://www.moshtix.com.au or

The Bicycle Film Festival rolls back into town with the launch night on the 11th of November in Sydney.

Think Nicole Kidman, BMX, fixies, bike polo and even recumbent cycling. Yes, even recumbents will be there – for better or worse. To make up for the recumbents the launch night will see Bridezilla, Jonathan Boulet, Deep Sea Arcade and Lions At Your Door take to the stage in support of the faithful pushie.

The festival was created to celebrate all thinks two wheeled through music, art, and film. It’s been running now for 9 years across 39 cities around the world with over 250,000 people expected to attend this year.

If you can’t make it to Sydney and have missed the rest of this years tour there is still the chance to catch up in other cities – including Melbourne in late November. Check out the Bicycle Film Festival website for more details.

x
Ned

P.S. Buy your tickets to the show at Moshtix!

Or ‘The New Technology’.. kinda like the ‘The Energy Never Dies’… album doesn’t hit til early 2010, so there’s still time for at least a dozen more cheesily acronym’d rekkids to hit before Christmas. Please don’t become a trend

Good excuse to have a tour, dates after the jump:

‘This New Technology’ National Tour
With Special Guests Cut Off Your Hands (New Zealand)

Saturday 31 October
The Capitol, Perth
With French Rockets
Tickets: $27.50 + BF Presale / $35 Door
Tickets available from www.midnightjuggernauts.com & www.moshtix.com.au or Moshtix Outlets

Thursday 5 November
Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle
With Seekae
Tickets: $27.50 + BF Presale / $35 Door
Tickets available from www.midnightjuggernauts.com & www.moshtix.com.au

Friday 6 November
The Metro Theatre, Sydney
With Seekae + DJs Golden Ron & Smart Casual
Lic/All ages
Tickets: $27.50 + BF Presale / $35 Door
Tickets available from www.midnightjuggernauts.com & www.metrotheatre.com.au or the Metro Theatre Box Office – 02.9550 3666

Saturday 7 November
Waves, Wollongong
With Seekae
Tickets: $27.50 + BF Presale / $35 Door
Tickets available from www.midnightjuggernauts.com & www.moshtix.com.au or Moshtix Outlets or the venue’s Bottle Shop.

Friday 13 November
Billboard, Melbourne
With Rat Vs Possum + DJs Nile Delta & Golden Ron
Tickets: $27.50 + BF Presale / $35 Door
Tickets available from www.midnightjuggernauts.com & Moshtix Outlets, www.moshtix.com.au or http://billboard.webtickets.com.au & Polyester Records

Saturday 14 November
Pier Live, Frankston
With Rat Vs Possum
Tickets: $27.50 + BF Presale / $35 Door
Tickets available from www.midnightjuggernauts.com & www.oztix.com.au and all Oztix Outlets and from the bar at Pelly Bar-Pier Hotel or Phonecharge 03 9783 7311

Friday 20 November
Hi Fi, Brisbane
With DZ
Tickets: $27.50 + BF Presale / $35 Door
Tickets available from www.midnightjuggernauts.com & www.oztix.com.au and all Oztix Outlets and http://tickets.thehifi.com.au

Saturday 21 November
Trackside, Canberra
Tickets available August 20 from Landspeed Records (Garema Square, Canberra City), Moshtix (call 1300 438 849, go to Moshtix outlets or www.moshtix.com.au), Ticketek (www.ticketek.com.au plus all Ticketek outlets), OzTix (call 1300 762 545, go to OzTix outlets or www.oztix.com.au )

Friday 27 November
The Gov, Adelaide
With Lady Strangelove
Lic/All ages
Tickets: $27.50 + BF Presale / $35 Door
Tickets available from www.midnightjuggernauts.com & www.moshtix.com.au or Moshtix Outlets, www.venuetix.com.au, over the bar at The Gov (11am-9pm Mon-Sat) or phone 08 8340 0744 (11am-9pm Mon-Sat)

Tickets for all shows go on sale Friday 4 September.

…is in town and we are beyond excited.

Do yourself a big favour and see the saviour of blog-electro at the controls. If you’re lucky he’ll play that Outrunners remix.

Catch him around Australia at the following spots:

7 Aug
Limelite FREMANTLE
8 Aug
Tank SYDNEY
14 Aug
Electric Circus ADELAIDE
15 Aug
The Prince Bandroom MELBOURNE

And, for your Friday, some party-starters that really caught my ear this week. Starters or stallers. Depending on where you’re headed. Like if you’re going to a wake.

Self explanatory
Frankmusik – Confusion Girl (Russ Chimes Remix)

A new version of his ‘Horny’ Evermore remix, some pounding down-tempo disco from DCUP
Evermore – Can You Hear Me? (DCUP’s Cocktail Party Remix)

Stripped back electro banger from Abstraxion
In Flagranti – Brash and Vulgar (Abstraxion Remix)

Vocal, howling and synthy dubstep from Plastician
Chew Lips – Salt Air (Plastician Remix)

And courtesy of Trumpdisco, the chart-topping smash hit record…
Fatboy Slim – Right Here Right Now (Trumpdisco Remix)

-Mandu

Duran Duran did it back in 1998 with Night Versions. Soulwax did the same in 2005 with their own Nite Versions. It is 2009 and Van She have ‘reworked’ their debut album, V, into Ze Vemixes.

‘Reworked’ is the word because Ze Vemixes doesn’t sound like the Van She Tech remixes that went out with CD singles / EPs released last year. This is a good thing.

The medical profession has for centuries been governed by the principle to first do no harm and the same should arguably apply to electronic music. If your remix isn’t an improvement or at least a tangent towards something interesting, then first do no harm to the original song.

Listening to the ‘vemixes’ of “Strangers”, “Cat & The Eye” and “Sexual City”, they don’t improve on the originals. If anything, Van She Tech have probably made them slightly worse.

Hopefully this will change once I listen to the album proper, but on the basis of the tracks I’ve heard I’d say that Van She have failed to pull off what Soulwax and Duran Duran before them pulled off so very successfully: a glorious reimagining of an original album.

Van She – Ze Vemixes teaser

Pre-order Ze Vemixes here before it hits stores from 12 June.

Van She will be touring the album through many of Australia’s major centres from 19 June with a changing blend of AJAX, Knightlife, Ted & Francis, G.L.O.V.E.S., Bag Raiders, and Dangerous Dan among others confirmed as support.

Afterthoughts
: when did an original track + remixes of the same song = an EP?
: didn’t “Sexual City” use to be “Sex City”?

- Jake

Every time I look at the title of this blog, my mind flies back to the heady days of 2007; the year when electro first exploded into the mainstream, propelled forward on a wave of stomping house beats spliced with synth-rock and electroclash sensibilities. I remember thinking at the time how amazing it was that good dance music had managed to recapture melody from the all-consuming shit-mouth that was anthem trance and disco house. After all this time mired in the subwoofer, there was melody. Melody was going to save us all.

And then I’m back in the present and I think to myself ‘thank Christ, bass is back’. It was like we all hit 2008, got halfway through and realised that dance music without bass is, well Top 40 really. And we’re better than that. Fidget, kuduru, UK funky, dubstep, bassline, ghettotech – they all seem to be on a mission to bring dance music back to the dark, dirty and booty-shaking subterranean chambers where it belongs. And Melbourne promoters Strobe are welcoming it with open arms. After tearing Melbourne to shreds back in February with a Proxy/Thomas von Party double header, Strobe are taking it up a notch this Friday the 22nd with a decidedly massive triple bill featuring Jesse Rose, Zombie Disco Squad and Oliver $. And we have tickets to give away to it. See the bottom for details.

Jesse Rose should need little introduction by now. The man was one of the major players in the fidget scene when it swept the world early last year (and apparently one of the guys who coined the term as a joke in the first place), and nowadays finds himself at the forefront of this new brigade of bass-heavy house music mercenaries. Currently signed to the genre-defining Dubsided label, he’s recently completed an Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 (available here) and has a brand new album due out the day after the party. It’s called ‘What Do You Do If I Don’t?’, and best of all you get a free copy of the CD with entry. It’s stomping, surprisingly jazzy and pretty awesome, and you can check out a track that is all three of those things below.

Jesse Rose – Touch My Horn

Zombie Disco Squad are one of the pioneers of the so-called (and potentially racist…) Zulu house sound. Melding fidget with baile, bmore, hip-hop and African tribal funk, the ZDS boys push a relentless, mind-destroying brand of house music that oscillates wildly between clipped hip-hop samples, quirky synth stabs and pounding house beats. They’re just about to drop their new double A-side ‘Esperanto’/'Eurovision’ on Jesse Rose’s own Made To Play imprint and I assure you, it is reliably massive:

Zombie Disco Squad – Eurovision

And, finally, Oliver $. I must admit that up until recently I hadn’t really heard of the man, but he’s doing big things in Berlin at the moment and has a fairly esteemed position as one of Jesse Rose’s primary proteges. Straddling the fine line between booty house and minimal, Oliver $ is being championed by both sides of the spectrum due to his unique and decidedly understated approach to making some of the funkier dance music of the last year. Dubstep worthy bass, snatched vocal samples and bouncing kicks. This is just, in a phrase, fucking cool.

Oliver $ – Watcha Gonna Do

It’s all happening this Friday, May 22 at Billboards in Melbourne. Tickets are $45 and can be purchased from Moshtix and Ticketek. I can thoroughly recommend it. I’m almost positive this party is going to be batshit mental.

Even better though, we here at Electrorash have a double pass to give away to one oooooooh so lucky reader. How awesome? So awesome. Simply send an email to music@electrorash.com with STROBE in the subject line, and tell us in 10 words or less how you’re going to deal with the coming zombie invasion (the real zombies, not the Disco Squad). Get onto it! I’ll see you there.

-luke

Punks Jump Up are in Australia at the moment embarking on their first tour for music and their second for pleasure. I was lucky enough to get Dave out of bed to have a chat about what they’ve been working on, their fusion of fashion and music and what they’re plotting this time around.

So I see Punks Jump Up on the road a lot of the time and now you’re coming to Australia. How do you get time to make new music, remix other artists, run Cassette Records and do the fashion side?

Ha! Well we don’t have time for it all. Cassette Records unfortunately is dormant. We’ve changed it around so we put our music out through other peoples labels. Now we’re not bound by our time on that business side of things. We also suffered when a lot of the vinyl distributors in the UK crashed a couple of years ago – our distributor was one of them. In the end we had to decide what to concentrate on so it’s producing, remixing and our fashion label.

We took some time off over December and January playing only a couple of gigs. You get a good flow going the more time you have, having to go to Europe for a few days breaks that up and makes it more difficult.

So what’s going to be the next release?

Well we’ve written a bunch of songs and now it’s about shaping them up and cutting them out. We’re hoping to put out a few Kitsune singles.

For the album we’re working with some really cool people, vocalists, who unfortunately I can’t really talk about. At the moment it’s all about conversations with friends who’ve agreed to it but we haven’t had the lawyers in there yet. But let’s just say they’re some of the people we dreamed about working with! And they’re big!

I guess we can announce that we’ve got Joel from Shitdisco on a couple of the tracks.

We’d have loved to do a track with Lykke Li [after the remix of Breaking It Up] but she’s on tour all the time now and there just isn’t any time.

We’re also hoping to work with [fellow Kitsune label mate] Beni while we’re in town, we’ll definitely find some time to work together with him.

How do these colaborations come together? Is it just through the music scene or is it a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes?

Well we’ve been running a club night in London which is a good start but whenever we’ve wanted to work with someone we’ve just sent them an email or myspace and got in touch that way. Or with Zongamin we know him because he did a remix on Cassette Records and so we’ve kept in touch. He’s quite close to finishing the album, we heard one of the tracks [unreleased] and got back in touch to get the stems and get cracking.

It would be great to have a label or a manager involved but financially… The machinery the big label has got makes it hard, we love to do it like this. You get to know the people more and their is that respect for DIY. We started our own club night, we did the label, we used to run a punk fanzine – you just get out there and do these things.

Punks Jump Up play La Di Da tonight, Friday the 20th of March (mention Electrorash for cheap entry), Saturday night at Empire in Brisbane and next weekend in Perth and Sydney. Do get a feel for their set check out this promo mixtape for the Australian tour and keep an eye out for the album towards the end of the year.

Punks Jump Up – Australian Tour Mixtape

xox
ned

To give you an idea of my history my very first interview was with Calvin Harris at his hotel in Melbourne. Being the super organised guy that I am I typed up all my questions onto 2 a4 pieces of paper and brought them along to read off of if I ran out of conversation. To make matters worse I’d included a section where I illustrated to Calvin how he was following in the footsteps of AC/DC who were also born in Scotland. Suffice to say that teaching the man some Australian / Scottish music history didn’t go off the best.

With Terje the issue was that I thought his last name was pronounced to rhyme with ‘surge’. My first question actually involved me saying the word no less than five times before I was corrected. Good times.

Todd Terje is kicking off his Australian tour this Friday night in Melbourne with a show at La Di Da before heading to Sydney next week to play the first Discoasis show. La Di Da have been putting on some great shows of late with Aeroplane, Tim Sweeney and the Fromage guys so this will definitely be one not to miss this weekend.

You can read the rest of the interview below the cut where Todd talks about studying physics, retiring from music and the album he’s hoping to pump out in 2009.

Enjoy these two edits including the Fate remix featuring the sample from Stardust  Music Sounds Better. I’ve also got the Future Classic mixtape that’s been burning a hole in my ipod this week.

Brothers Johnson – Aint We Funkin Now (Todd Terje radio mix)

Chaka Khan – Fate (Todd Terje edit)

Todd Terje – Future Classic Mixtape

xox
ned

//////////////////////

Todd you seem to go by a number of different monikers. Todd Terry, Todd Terje, Disco Terje, Tango, Terje Olsen, Wade Nichols…. Why is that?

When I started I didn’t want anyone to know who I was and I didn’t want each different project I did to be associated with the last. So each of the names is a different entity really…

Have you put out any tracks under names that people don’t associate back to Todd Terje?
Ha! Well there was actually one Lindstrom remix released through Let’s Practise that was like that. People have also put out edits and attributed them to me. There was some Jarlsbourg track or something. I’ve never even heard of the original track!

So music is a full time job for you at the moment, right?
I’ve been doing music for 2 years now full time and it’s been good. But soon I think I’ll go back to being a normal person, going to bed at normal hours and not watching Family Guy all night.

Before that I was studying. Physics. I didn’t finish it but I’d like to go back and do something… Nothing to do with music, that’s a hobby for me.

You’ve got quite a big catalogue of edits which to me shows a pretty hefty music collection. Have you always been into music?
Music has always been a hobby of mine but never something I thought I would make money out of. I always just listened to music, I was a real nerd. By the time I was 18 or 20 I was DJing and very nerdy about it all. I have a big collection of music but I’ve also got a phonographic memory for these things so I can recall a lot of stuff easily.

haha I also started singing in a choir quite young…

When I “retire” I hope I can meet someone like me but a lot younger to pass it on… I don’t think there is anyone like that though, anyone that nerdy at that age living in Oslo…

So where are you getting your music from today?
Well now it’s a lot easier. I can use ebay and amazon or beatport. It’s easier but everyone also has all the same stuff.

When you’re travelling are you swapping music or on the lookout for new stuff.
Of course. But I have to say I am pretty egotistical and don’t really hand out much of my stuff but people give me music all the time. A lot of it is crap but I was in Frankfurt recently and someone gave me a La Roux 12″. It’s gold, that will serve me well for at least a couple of months. It’s a hit.

What’s coming up in 2009?
Well I hope to work on the album but I can’t promise anything. I spend a lot of time playing music and I don’t really know how to work hard. I’ve got a bit of a studio and I really want to do the album so I hope it comes together. And I’m looking forward to coming to Australia!