Kingdom and Dre Skull have teamed up with MeanRed for the new party Club Infinity which debuts April 3rd. Kingdom and Dre Skull will be playing alongside special guests Egyptrixx, Cubic Zirconia and Jubilee. This will be the release party for Egyptrixx’s Night Slugs EP and it will the official after party for Hard NYC with the T&B crew. RSVP for $5 admission.
I once bumped into Egyptrixx as I was getting off the subway on my way to a tutoring job. Recognizing him immediately as the disobedient-dubstep-turned-global-gutter-house DJ hailing from Toronto, I quickly tried to think of something nice I could fit into the two second time period before he passed me and got on the subway. Nothing came, sadly. However, a few months later, I got in touch with him through Mixpak to talk about his eclectic connections to music, Night Slugs, pho, overwrought heavy metal, grad school, and breaking down barriers in dance music.
2010 has already been a notable breakout year for Egyptrixx with the release of an outstanding EP, “The Battle For North America“, and all indications show that he’s just beginning to pick up steam.
Interview by Brendan Arnott (my text in bold)
Untold, who you recently played with here in Toronto, said something I really like: “I hope dubstep continues to be hard to pin down, disobeys its manifesto, gets called stupid names, gatecrashes other scenes, and spikes the punch, elopes, and has lots of children”. Do you feel similarly about your own music?
Egyptrixx: Haha, yes absolutely. What a great quote.
It’s quite comparatively easy and cheap to make electronic/club music right now. The software is cheap if you decide to pay for it at all, the distribution methods are largely digital and similarly cheap. These are pragmatic excuses to be experimental, of course there are intellectual reasons as well. It’s amusing to me that everything beyond the traditional guitar/bass/drums/piano configuration is considered experimental or electronic, because even those amplified instruments were considered alien and experimental in the 60′s when they first started popping up. Sonic experimentation is as much a part of making music as coming up with a clever way to say “I love my girlfriend, it sucked when she dumped me”.
It is 2010, bloggers and music fans have no idea how to describe anything anymore, and UK based Deejay Mosca sure isn’t making it easy. While Dan Hancox of the Guardian says that his music inpsires “a sense of epic grandeur befitting global house, shuddering dub echoes straight from Jamaica, Latino percussion and still undeniably UK”, I am still somewhat in the dark about what exactly comprises the hybrid sound that Mosca is putting forth in his Night Slugs Label debut “Square One EP”. I caught up with Mosca to talk about “ethno techno”, q-tips and the future of pirate radio over Gmail chat, here are the results.
Interview by Brendan Arnott, my text in bold.
Mixpak: A lot of people are gaining awareness of who you are through your debut release on the new Night Slugs label, but what have you been doing prior to this release? Can you talk about your origins in making this kind of ‘genre destroying’ music?
Mosca: I did a remix of Tempz’s “Next Hype” about a year ago, a kinda Baltimore rub with those UK funky strings off reason. I put that up on my blog and it got played on Rinse.FM and a few other places. So some guys called Kry Wolf got in touch and asked for a B-more remix of one of their first tunes, their first release on their new label called Sounds of Sumo. The tune that got put out was called “Mucky”. So that was my debut I guess, but not an original production.
So you started off as a producer before you were making the transition to DJing at clubs?
Yeah, definitely. I started with drum machines when i was about 15, I was in a band with Unknown Soulja and we didn’t have a drummer so got a drum machine, then started making jungle and hip hop and experimental stuff. I got into DJing at University, about five years ago, but the production thing has meant way more bookings.
Alex Sushon, AKA Bok Bok, is on fire these days. Between DJing London’s East Village excellent Night Slugs parties, blogging at Lower End Spasm, hosting a radio show on Sub FM, producing some of 2009′s freshest music, doing graphic design work for Fact Magazine, L-Vis 1990′s “United Groove” EP, and getting praised in Dazed & Confused’s New Media Top 50 piece, it’s safe to say that 2009 has been a pretty massive year. It’s also understandable that Bok Bok was taking a vacation in his hometown of Odessa, Ukraine when I got hold of him, where I had the opportunity to chat with him about sincerity, his recent remix for Mixpak Records (which you can purchase here), post-DJing snacks, the downfall of grime, “synth ecstasy,” The-Dream and his video design work for Simian Mobile Disco.
Exclusive interview for the Mixpak Blog by Brendan Arnott (my text in bold).
Also, peep one of Bok Bok’s favourite mixes that did for LuckyMe!
Bok Bok – Manara’s Golden Fleece Mix for LuckyMe (tracklist here)
Brendan: Your Night Slugs parties sound like they’ve been continually successful, I’m curious about what sort of things are important to you when you’re organizing this kind of night?
Bok Bok: Well, what I really wanted to do with night slugs was make a fun accessible party for people that DIDN’T compromise on music, that’s to put it simply. It’s really a dance / club music party that’s frameworked by the UK soundsystem heritage, so what’s important to me is – good, heavy but CLEAR and bass-heavy sound, a really cutting edge music policy that’s still fun, and stuff that makes people focus on what’s happening in the club, the sound and the dancing, and bond together over it and have some shared experience. Stuff like having a host on the mic, and rewinding tracks, all that stuff helps people focus on what’s going on.
