friday with Flügel

Friday night was all about Roman Flügel - what a dude! Having seen him play live in Melbourne a few months ago, I was keen to hear him behind the decks at Panorama... and he nailed it. Such good fun. A lot of the tracks he played sounded distinctly like his own productions - it'd be interesting to know how much of his set was original - or remixes he's done - versus other peoples' music. Will definitely keep an eye out for any more gigs he's playing (either live or DJing - really impressed with both varieties of the Flügel performance).


Fun techno...What's not to love? : ) *

(does anyone else also think the melodic synth vibes from 3:30 are kind of similar to the horn stabs in War's 'Low Rider', in terms of rhythmic lead melodies?)

Prior to Roman was the live duo of Arto Mwambe. Having come across their stuff accidentally years ago (again, in late high-school...) - I was keen to hear how it came across live. And the result? It was raw - but that's kind of expected when it's live (and this was 24-channel-mixing-desk-live, rather than the standard Ableton + controller set-up).... (as a side-note; Roman Flügel's live-set - in Melbourne this past April - was also of a rougher, more unpolished sound, compared with his releases... but don't let that deter anyone).

While it seems the general rule-of-thumb for set-times in Berlin is around 4 hours, it tends to be much shorter for live acts. Such was the case with Arto's hour-long set. While it was good fun, and recognisable as their signature bouncy-gritty-lofi-house sound, there were a few awkward mixes... at a couple of points, it sounded like someone had loaded a synth patch too early, while it was still playing... oops!


Arto's sound (again, poor audio quality in this video):





And paying respect to Loleatta's epic voice, here's the original disco groove that the above vox are taken from:





***

As a bonus, here's Roman doing his bit for dub-techno:




And here he is getting deep, introspective and beeee-yootiful:






* big thanks to Louis Tobin for showing me this little number