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Originally posted by racing4hoes Damn I had a blast there celebrating my bday at midnight. Pleasure meeting diggerz and Inconspicuous. Thanks for coming out jbooty, tmft, and of course Zild!! -ryan

Nice meeting you, jbooty, & diggerz (finally), as well, and seeing Mr. Zild again (or hearing). Now for some thoughts:

First off, I've gotta give my compliments to the opener, Jon(E)ric. It's the first time in a while that I've heard someone open who actually seemed to know what was coming on afterwards, and it was a very good, pleasant surprise to hear, and built up nicely to set the stage.

Once Matthew Dear came on, the first hour or hour & a half...WOW. I haven't heard anything that good & that delicious in a loooong time if ever. The [good] filth that was coming out of the speakers was absolutely phenomenal, and had worked up to an absolutely euphoric level. That Pheek remix of whatever track that was (he played it in Houston, too) absolutely destroyed. Right about that time, I turned to diggerz & mentioned that if he kept up like this, this might wind up being the best set I'd heard.

Within minutes if not seconds of making that remark, someone (I'm still not entirely sure what his status was) walked up onto the stage & said something to Matthew & started turning a couple knobs on the mixer . Shortly thereafter, he took the levels down & headed into some faaaaaar more minimal stuff. I couldn't understand what was going on, and I don't think anybody else did, either. A couple minutes later, the guy went up to the stage again, turning more knobs . As he came back off the stage, he came over to us & said the cops were outside, and had told them to turn it down. At the risk of offending someone, I'll offer my 2 cents...
PAY THE FUCKING FINE!!!
It's not the DJ's responsibility to sort out venue issues. He's there to play music--not deal with police. If there's an issue with them, and they're refusing to leave, just pay the fine or pay them or whatever you have to do to sort it out. Do whatever you have to do to get them to go away without resorting to killing an amazing mood and interfering with a performance.

Now, while, on the one hand, this was truly irritating (even more so to others than to me), it impressed me even more that Matthew was able to take something like that in stride and start again from scratch and successfully build back up to that same level. It's one thing to build up energy like that once in a night--few people can even pull that off. To be able to do it twice while catering to the demands of other people is exceptional. By the end of his set, he'd gotten all the way back to where he'd been an hour or so earlier. This wouldn't have been possible, but for the fact that they'd somehow sorted out the police issue and let him kick the sound back up, but why they didn't do this sooner, I can't figure out.

In any case, I had a great time, and the first & last hours more than made up for the 20 minutes or so in the middle that had nothing to do with him, anyways. I counted a whopping 3 very minor mistakes on the night--two due to computer & one due to something with a turntable. That first hour is still one of the best hours of music I've heard, and the last one was just plain fun. There was so much stuff I'd never heard before, and so much I can't wait to get my hands on. I counted less than a handful of repeats from the night before, as well, which made it all the better. All in all, great times.


EDIT: So, I guess it was Jon(E)ric who was the one turning knobs. Well, great job opening, bad job interfering.

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Last edited by shaw on Mar-07-2007 at 22:37