We are now three months into 2011 so it’s good time to reflect on what has happened so far. My gigging year kickstarted with Clinic at Tivoli and Afterhours at Playground on New Year’s Eve and Day. Both were packed and filled with regular faces from the club scene. Playing Peter Dundov’s ‘Distant Shores’ at 08:30 am at Playground and seeing a twelve minute, 120 bpm, deep, hypnotic techno trancer being a climatic moment made me believe that future of quality EDM is bright and strong. My next afterhours gig will be on 1st of May at Playground which I’m very much looking forward to.
Other event highlights include two days of water park clubbing extravaganza at Pacifique Maupiti with Chris Coco, Clinic 3rd Anniversary with Solarstone and Tomcraft, Hallmark 11th Anniversary with Roger Shah, Lange & Solarstone in March and last weekends Colors 12th Birthday with none other than Paul van Dyk blasting proper full on trance energy at 140 bpm. Souvenir from that gig is original 1993 12″ vinyl of PvD’s debut album 45RPM with his signature. There is still a trance fan boy inside of me;) It hasn’t been all Helsinki clubbing either with gigs in Levi, Hyvinkää, Vaasa and 44 hours of sailing on the Baltic Sea at GOOM all being great experiences with many new friends made on the road. Here are PvD rising some hands at Colors and Pacifique Allstars splashing some water in Serena:
I’ve also done some less traditional gigs like being responsible for lot of the music at the finnish music industry award event Emma-Gaala 2011 where I produced the opening music, played a warm up set at Barona Areena before the live TV show and DJed in the Gaala itself providing music for all the walk ins etc. What is the soundtrack of Katri Helena walking in? I ended up with Rammstein. Other less traditional but super enjoyable gig was two days of teaching DJing to 13-18 year olds at Bass Camp here in Helsinki. It was refreshing to see all the energy and excitement of the teenagers and it was also nice to see that vinyl is still doing well.
In my job at Nokia I manage the sound team of Nokia’s Design unit where my team is responsible for pretty much all the sounds (ringtones, alerts, preloaded music tracks, UI sounds etc) in all Nokia devices. It’s been interesting times there with the Nokia/Microsoft collaboration announcement. Exciting to see what comes out of that. Something like this perhaps?
On the production side things have been more busy than in a long long time. I’ve been working on my third artist album for quite a while already. When Rich Solarstone was over here we started ‘Slowmotion II’ which continues with the same hypno trance vibe as ‘Slowmotion’. Interesting detail on that is the unusual time signature of 7/8. The follow up to ‘YearZero’ with Andy Moor is still unfinished and I hope that it will be ready after Andy’s next visit to Helsinki on 30th of April. I have now over 50 (!) demo tracks ready for the album with some 5-10 strong candidates for testing out in my forthcoming live set at Laserpoint and Labyrinth’s annual Whiteout event. For that I’ve been also working on some updates of my old classics so it will interesting to see how the live set shapes up. 50/50 of old and new perhaps?
If the first three months have been energizing then the rest of year looks equally exciting. There are gigs with Infected Mushrooms, Andy Moor and Sander van Doorn, finnish special parties like Rave Saves charity event, Danceteria Birthday and Love Boat cruise (with a special summer JACK event as an afterparty), Mixxed Opening, Illusions 15th Anniversary, Pussy Club b-day and gigs around Finland in Turku (Millenium), Tampere [:reiv], Yyteri, Lahti and Kouvola (Fiilis). We have also a LOVE event coming up on July 23rd with a very special foreign guest confirmed which will be something to look forward to. As DJ Westbam put it in 1993: Forward Forever, Backwards Never.