JUSTICE was served!

I talked about this gig for weeks like it was the second coming of Christ... And finally, in true slacker style, I didn't make it. JUSTICE, the most high profile artist for innovative French electro-funk label Ed Banger Records, played at "too cool for me" venue Volar, a name banged about so often nowadays it was even discussed in a canto-pop song by Justin (側田).

Despite the fact that JUSTICE has one of the freshest sounds around, I ditched it... In my sad defence, all my friends bailed, and the prospect of being packed in with the beautiful set without reinforcements, nursing the wounds from a $300 cover charge, didn't really appeal. It's a shame, considering the riot JUSTICE VS Simian's We are your friends (above) made when it came out last year. A-TRAK, spinmeister and DJ for Kanye West, even spun it at the Hip-Hop mogul's Hong Kong concert.

The JUSTICE debut album is out on June 11, and judging from another single D.A.N.C.E (top), complete with a seriously cool retro video, it's gonna be fairly awesome. Another artist to check out from the label is DJ Mehdi, with his pumping Signatune (T. Bangalter Edit) that gets the blood flowing. And great video as well (above), featuring a car sound system battle so important that the challenger prays before the event!

Getting down to business!

At an MBA party it's important to ask if you will merge with anyone during the evening, and whether your acquisition will be a long or short term investment... In any case, I wasn't on the market, I was just there to DJ.

To get to the HKUST MBA party last Saturday I had to brave some serious weather. As heavy rain, lightning and all hell fell down upon Hong Kong, I decided to askew conventional wisdom and venture out into the mayhem. Well, actually, I'd signed up for it way before and with a wince attempted to lug my seriously heavy flight cases with bag and cds out onto the street to get a cab... I had a better chance of winning the mark six, with what seemed like typhoon 20 weather, it being taxi shift change time and everyone and their mother looking for a cab.

Nobody seemed to care that a poor DJ was lugging his stuff around while trying hopelessly to get a cab and at the same time attempting to keep dry. And of course, with twenty zillion people fighting for space on the street (with everyone going for the usual umbrella and building cover) it was a bit nightmarish really...

But anyway, here are some of the more memorable tracks of the evening:

The Daktaris Eltsuhg Ibal Lasiti. Great drum breaks, nice tough afro influenced funk.

Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings How do I let a good man down?. Easily one of my favourite tracks in a while. Tough and gritty soul with excellent backing from The Dap-Kings, lovely crashing symbols outro as well.

Amy Winehouse Rehab. OK, so everyone is talking about this track, but with an opening line of "They try to make me go to rehab, but I say no, no, no", what's not to like?

Cymande The message. Sweet early 1970's funk, disco, jazz from the UK with great hooks and reggae influence. Famous for their song Bra that was sampled by hip-hop group De La Soul.

Faze Action Got to find a way. When I played this, someone said really loudly "oh my God, this is disco". I thought: no it isn't, you #$#@!

Feist Sea Lion Woman. Although I consider Nina Simone to be rather untouchable, this cover of her See-Line Woman is pretty cool. Unfortunately there is something too quirky and slightly dark about Feist's tracks to play without someone thinking it is a bit "odd". But still, this went down quite well.

Micatone Yeah yeah yeah (that's the way it goes). My friend hooked me on to this jazzy downtempo dance band from Germany. Very chilled.

KC and the Sunshine Band That's the way (I like it). I played this as a feeler to see if people were up for old-skool or nu-skool stuff. When one of the oldest guys in the room came over and said "hey, this was before my time" and no one danced, I knew the answer: total mistake! Well... some people like this song...

Punjabi MC Mundian To Bach Ke. I admit this is very obvious but it still manages to get people on the move. You should have seen those Indian MBA students move!

Vanilla Ice Ice Ice Baby. Should I be ashamed? Yes, but quite frankly, who cares? I found that people really like this song still, so the original white boy rapper is still OK in my books!

Lean green disco machine

With a population of under one million, you might not expect the Dutch city of Rotterdam to be at the centre of the music world. Yet it has become something of a mecca for "green clubbing", and it may well be an initiative that clubbers worldwide should be paying attention to. International sustainability organisation Enviu has joined forces with architects Döll - Atelier voor Bouwkunst to create the Sustainable Dance Club concept.

Working with scientists at the Technical University in Delft, Holland, and a range of commercial and technical partners, the team aims create a club with a “regenerating” dancefloor (right) that harnesses energy from clubbers jumping up and down, toilets flushed completely with rainwater and clubbers' sweat (naaaasty), light fixtures on the wall that are powered by “human heat” and plenty of “biological” beer (like what kind of biological? Gulp…)

The project will mix this technology with more common green energy like wind turbines, solar energy, LED lighting and smart “energy saving acoustics”. Will they succeed? Only time will tell… but they kicked off the concept with the Critical Mass club night in Rotterdam in 2006 (right), which will be followed by an upcoming event in Amsterdam that will see the launch of "Trees for Dance", where you can calculate your CO2 “dance foot print” and help pay for the planting of trees that will compensate for your hedonism.

Hopefully the successful implementation of this concept will spark something much bigger… and with the amount of energy spent clubbing worldwide on any given night, it is clearly a concept that global clubbers could get in the groove for.

Wham! Bam! Worldwide jam!

It's pretty rad and out now, eJamming AUDiiO lets musicians jam together online in real time. That means a guitarist in Nigeria, bassist in Germany, DJ in Canada, drummer in Russia, vocalist in Thailand, flute player in Brazil (OK, you get the point yes?) can meet online, form a band, and start playing together immediately like a United Nations supergroup! But does it come with an online translator as well? How do you say "that sounded like crap, you're fired" in Thai?

Seriously though, you can also record sessions, exchange locally recorded tracks and simultaneously record audio and MIDI, meaning you can mix "real instruments" with "digital instruments" like synthesizers and drum machines. From their demo video, it doesn't sound that bad at all.

Having said this, the programme (right) imposes a delay on each musician's instrument according to bandwidth of the user and distance between users. So your proximity to other players and upload speed will determine how much delay there is. A free to download eJamming AUDiiO beta version has been running for about a month, and around 2,700 musicians in 99 countries have signed up already. The subscription service will start in a few weeks for around US$15 per month, so get cracking and check out for free if rocking with Egyptians or Laotians is your kind of thing. I probably will, and apparently you get a discount on subscription if you provide feedback, so it's just a matter of writing "those Bulgarians didn't like my sound... I'm devastated!" and you're through... BOOM!

To start with, it's best to avoid playing with musicians more than 5,000km away, says eJamming. For all those Bolivians who want to hook it up straight away in Bangladesh, well you'll just have to wait...

Musigy also have been running online collaborations, including some pretty innovative shows at Ukraine's Koktebel Jazz Festival 2006 (right). Their "Jazz @ the Speed of Light" project included British sax star George Haslam playing in Oxford live with Russian sax legend Alexey Kozlov, who was on stage at the Koktebel Jazz Festival. Check out a TV clip on it here.

It's worth having a look at the Russian TV clip on the festival as well, though unless you speak Russian, you really have no hope of comprehending anything that's going on... Anyway, it's not my fault you don't speak Russian! One of the main attractions of this clip is the newscaster's sweet tan (above), I didn't realize it was such a sunny country, I gotta go there and get me some nice bronzing... oh baby!

Industry alarmed by ‘Crimea wave’

It’s been all over the web that cult-band The Crimea are releasing their “Secrets Of The Witching Hour'” album totally free on the web here. Not quite sure why this is such a big story though, considering thousands of artists give away music for free, millions of people rip songs online and people are exchanging music left, right, and centre on a daily basis.

The story reflects larger concerns about the future of media: will everything be totally free, not just illegally, but legally? And if so, who is going to pay for it?

The Smashing Pumpkins did exactly the same thing when they released Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music online, for free, in September 2000 against the wishes of their label Virgin Records. Almost seven years on however, the success of artists such as the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen, heavily attributed to online exposure, and the fact that less and less people actually are willing to spend money on any kind of media and rely solely on peer-to-peer downloads, has made the industry take notice.

The band were dropped by Warner Music, despite making the UK top 40 with “Lottery Winners on Acid”, selling 35,000 copies of their debut “Tragedy Rocks” (above) album in 2005, and supporting the likes of Snow Patrol, Ash, The Kings of Leon, Billy Corgan, Keane and The Get Up Kids. With this solid foundation, the band chose to self-fund the album and give it out for free, hoping that touring, merchandise and pure publicity will compensate.

Well, the stunt worked for this sad blogger, and even though The Crimea are not really my cup of tea, here’s a plug guys, just for sheer viral publicity efforts. If you are a fan of the likes of Snow Patrol, Coldplay and Keane, and enjoy the quirkiness of artists like Badly Drawn Boy, you might just like them…

Check out their White Russian Galaxy video.

And if you want the “brick and mortar” album, it’s out in record stores on May 13th.

Incidentally, the Smashing Pumpkins are releasing a new “Zeitgeist” album in July! Oh the excitement!