A-trak at Studio B in Brooklyn: Whoa!

Yesterday it was a birthday party for a few friends, originally planned for the roof top at Delancey. Unfortunately the fire marshal had other plans and shut down the roof for good until they install another fire escape (it’s been open for years without this requirement). The Delancey, however, hooked us up and bussed the party to Brooklyn’s Studio B for free and extended the free well happy hour to 2 hours.

This deal would have been sweet enough since Studio just re-opened their roof top again and the happy hour but Sat was the opening night of A-Trak‘s Infinity +1 tour – his mix goes live for purchase March 31st. Sweet!

The bar was well received saving me easily $100+ on booze for me and the lady. We were warmed up for the show and headed down for the set with DJ Mehdi and A-trak rocking the decks at the same time. Hard crunk electric beats had the crowd going nuts most of the time.

Sebastien Tellier – Kilometer (A-Trak Extended Dub)
[audio:https://www.box.net/shared/static/pvsbbsxb4o.mp3]

MSTRKRFT – Bounce feat. NORE (A-Trak Remix)
[audio:http://fakepennycomics.com/blog/MSTRKRFTfeatNORE_Bounce(A-TrakRemix).mp3]

A-Trak – Say Whoa (Boys Noize remix)
[audio:http://www.schoolofmix.com/music/sp-whoaboy.mp3]

Good times!

Thievery Corporation Show at Terminal 5, NYC 2009

Only a group that brings such a DJ mentality to their music and live shows could garner so much enthusiasm from myself. I’ve been a fan of Thievery for many years, but when you hear their albums, “down tempo”, “reggae” or ” dub” are often genres that describe various melodies and styles of their music, however, on the stage, the sound and bass liven the arena and energize the crowd to a fenzey of head bobin to booty shaken no unusual to the funkiest club scenes.

This show fucking rocked as we got there slightly early to catch the dub reggae styling of the dj to the full blown mix of Thievery’s full cast of singers, drummers, guitar/sitarists playing reggae variations, roots style to spacey dub, Afrobeat, Brazilian bosa nova, to up tempo club deep house mix of rhythms and dance beats. The live show included a high-tech video installation and a parade of singers, male and female, from places including Argentina, Brazil, Guyana, Iran and Jamaica. The lyrics were in English, French, Jamaican patois, Spanish and Portuguese, along with a chorus of “Hare Krishna.” The party continued well past the long awaited encore where ushers needed to push the crowd out. This show rocked from minute 1 till the bar was well past last call.

I hadn’t been to the former Club Exit space, and the venue really didn’t fit the vibe of the show, however, the crowd and company made this a well worthwhile show that I’ll recommend to anyone else into any near genre of styles mentioned above.

Photo credit to mis0vibes115 as all mine came out like shite