Photo by Marek Richter

Feeling dirt poor, broken and a bit SAD?

There’s always at least one night that comes along in January, just when you thought ‘I’m not going out for at least another two pay cheques’ and ‘I really should rest up/drink less/stop blacking out’ and by the end of the month all of resolutions you made on the 1st seem stupid and pointless. It’s time to go out.

On 23 January, BLACKBOX have pulled together a night of dirty bass music that won’t break the bank – 3 quid before midnight down at the Concorde 2.

DJing on the night is the legendary Phil Hartnoll (Orbital), who’s apparently taken a break from gigging since the band re-formed last year.

In Room 1, there’s Coin operated Records founder Mustard Gunn playing bass heavy wonky techno,  Sicknote resident, techno anarachist Sketchy Steve, and BlackBox residents Tony Montana and Jiminy Clackett.

In Room 2, it’s all about the psy-trance, hosted by Wonkay Music, with DJs Hugoblin, Dez, Hugo Nation, DMT, and Kayaman.

They say:

Complete club transformation
Lazer and Light show
Massive soundsystem
Cheap Drinks deals all night

Saturday 23 January 2010, 11pm – 4am Concorde 2, Madeira Drive, Brighton

£3 Advance tickets – only available online at www.concorde2.co.uk
On the night : £3 Before midnight, £5 After

After working on various solo projects, brothers Phil Hartnoll and Paul Hartnoll have confirmed that they are reforming Orbital and will be playing at the Big Chill Festival in August 2009.

Brighton’s Phil Hartnoll said in a statement:

“It’s not an exercise in nostalgia – the time just seems right. Everything just seemed to fall into place. We’ve got 15 years of active service making song. If you boil that down to a 90-minute festival set you should get something thoroughly exciting from beginning to end. Let’s put some fun back into it.”

The Big Chill Festival is taking place 7-9 August 2009 at Eastnor Castle, UK. Tickets will be on sale soon.

Photo by Eliot Gill

Record label owner and deep house DJ, Magnus Asberg needs no introduction here in the UK. The 39-year-old Swedish native has been a solid part of the house and rave party scene in London and Brighton over the past 10 years, and before that in Sweden divided his time as a DJ, club owner, and professional skateboarder and snowboarder. But as I got talking to him, I learned that his love of music goes deeper than the party scene.

Magnus was first influenced by his father, a jazz musician, who introduced him to bands such as Pink Floyd (literally), as well as giving him his first record player. He recalls the first time he set his hands on vinyl and started DJing and laughs. “It was straight away! I was like six and I loved it.” He cut his teeth as a DJ at his parent’s many parties; at age 11, he broke in his first set of Technics 1200.

At 17, Magnus owned a nightclub in Sweden. Though his love at the time was hip-hop, he found he had to play the crowd-pleasing pop music of the time. It was at this time (1985) that Magnus discovered house music by accident: on the B-sides of hip-hop records. He found that the early house fit in well with the kind of pop music he was playing so he started mixing it in. As well as realising that he wanted to make house music, he deepened his knowledge of the genre by buying stacks of records on trips he made to the UK with his parents, which he said was more underground than the commercial house found in Sweden. He explains his segue from hip-hop to house: “Hip-hop I never really felt part of but house, I felt part of and I knew I was there to create it.”

Magnus made the permanent transition from Sweden to the UK in the mid 90’s, settling in the Riviera of the English south coast, Brighton. He joined forces with one of the South East’s most well-known and respected sound systems, Positive Sound System (“I was only meant to stay with them for a week!”) and continued DJing at clubs such as Fabric, Turnmills, Mass,and Berns (Sweden) to name a few plus festivals, skateboard and snowboarding competitions and parties throughout Europe (including helping to put on some of the early rave parties in France).

Magnus still DJs regularly in Brighton and London. In Brighton, you can catch his soulful to techy sets at On The House Records Late at Kabuki on Middle Street (from 3am) or the bi-monthly Positive Sounds nights at Audio. Magnus is also resident at 3am Nights at Funky Buddha Lounge and Lovestick nights. In London, he plays at Ram-a-Jojo every month at the Bedroom Bar alongside good friends Digs (DiY) and James Thomson (Juno Records).

These days, one of Magnus’s major preoccupations (not the only, mind you – he’s a busy man) is his recording collaboration with Jimmy Day (Mula/Stompa Music/Caged Baby), who is also currently part of Long Range, the new band from Phil Hartnoll (Orbital). The recording team go under the name C-Soul. Why the name? Well, “bits” didn’t gel so the duo went for something a bit more down-tempo (read: literal): “by the sea, seeing the soul, sea soul”. Something like that. Magnus and Jimmy have spent the past five years making music together, having first met earlier through friends in London in the tech house scene.

Magnus explained the process by which they worked, which sounds a bit like a nice game of tennis: first Magnus does fancy footwork on Logic with the ideas and vocals, then Jimmy comes in and destroys the court with his keyboard skills, followed by several more volleys across the net and culminating with a final arrangement. The C-Soul name has appeared on labels such as Flyagaric Trax, Is This, DiY Discs, and Suspect Package. More recent tracks feature on Magnus’s own label On The House Records (OTH), which has produced three EPs to date — “Feel It”, “Got To Be With You”, and “Watch This” – and include C-Soul’s remix handiwork.

Listen : From OTH 3 “Watch This” EP. It’s straight up-and-down house, with an edgier, tech-driven, finger-on-the-wire seam running through (but that’s just my opinion).

www.myspace.com/csoulmagnusasberg
www.onthehouserecords.com

This article was also featured on Trash Menagerie.
www.trashmenagerie.com

Words: Amy the Film Maker

I gotta say this – I’m fed up with breakbeat at the minute. I can’t stand hearing another run of the mill twisted electro bass heavy bootlegged track. Everything is seemingly put together without any real emotion and passion behind it. So this ‘Long range’ project genuinely excited me.

The main reason I have to say is purely Phil Hartnoll. With Orbital, his tracks like Halcyon proved to the world the beauty that was possible within the dance music spectrum. Chime showed everyone that the English had taken the ‘Chicago’ based house phenomena assimilated it and taken it over. All the time with the tracks of Orbital I’ve found you get the desired emotion and belief of the artist. So I was dying to see what a passionate house music pioneer could inject into an at times seemingly soul-less breakbeat scene.

Until this night the only ‘Long Range’ material I had heard was the collaboration with Aquasky (To which I was indifferent). So I was very much surprised when they started the Mac’s looping in Audio.

The opening tracks were much unexpected. Slow beats framed a delicate singer with an angelic voice that hovered just out of the reach of some vibrant electro sounding strings. Two nice melodic opening tracks, made easy listening. But I, like the rest of the crowd had whipped myself up to hear something heavy and massive straight away, so the slow start proved a little disappointing.

The main question I pose is gonna have to be was Audio a big enough venue for this sound? Standing too close to a speaker lead to missing a whole lot of range (And I’m sure the bass frequencies could have been set a little higher)…Maybe the sound they were producing would have been suited to bigger places. But this is a first live gig. So I’m sure that will come in time.

Will White performed on a set of Roland V drums. He was solid and played genuinely well. But at times I found these beats a little repetitive. Surely the main thing about breaks it the drum breakdowns? And when you listen to a breaks record anything by the plumps etc – its driven on patterns of massively varied and intelligent drums. Which leads me to ask, does the repetition of house music transfer to a live breakbeat act?

Long range’s sound comes from three Mac’s a set of roland V’drums a live Violin and a synth or two. A long way from the banks of analogue machines that the chemical brothers and Orbital of old set up with. Maybe its unfair of me to keep comparing Long Range with Orbital – but because of Hartnoll’s past this is always gonna be the obvious comparison to make.

Id be interested to see how a Long Range record would sound when dropped in the middle of a breaks set. And I’d also like to hear the project as an album and listen to the whole thing, track after track.

They definitely saved the best till last – the final track harping back to the intelligence of Halcyon, which is just what I wanted to hear.

In all honesty I enjoyed what Long Range had to offer. And I believe that they are gonna do things their way. They will bring a sensibility to their own part of the breakbeat scene which I am sure will be welcomed by old house heads and Nu-Skool breaks purists in equal amounts. I look forward to hearing the album and definitely seeing them again live.

Word – 3 0 3 t i l l i d i e X

Audio
http://www.audiobrighton.com

10 Marine Parade
Brighton
East Sussex
Tel: 01273-624343

info@audiobrighton.com

Marek the Czech

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