Gigs this Weekend!

Got a bunch more Gigs lined up for the lucky people of Newbury this weekend!

The festivities kick off on Friday night at 9pm in the Canal Bar where I'll be supplying a variety of minty fresh beats until midnight. Expect to hear lots of random tunes, the odd eighties smash hit and the Imperial March off the Star Wars soundtrack!

On Saturday I've lined up a little birthday bash in the Bricklayers for my man, DJ Stasha. We're gonna be coming from a slightly different angle for this one, setting up somewhere in the region of 5 decks with the DJ's doing 2 hour sets, so expect things to get ridiculous!
Thump promotions have kindly agreed to provide the breakbeats out in the Smoking Area, so there will be a flavour of music for virtually all tastes going on at some point throughout the evening. The curtain goes up at 8pm with final act finishing at 2am. Gonna be sickness!





And finally on Sunday, the Drum an Bass will be going down as it does every week. For one week only we'll be switching venue's to the Pig and Paper as the Critical State crew have drafted us in a for a rerun of the Bank Holiday mashup they held down there. We'll be back to normal - running it red in the Tap next week....

Barcelona 2009

So I literally just got back from Barcelona 5 minutes ago, where I've been having it since Friday. We left Newbury at around midday and made it out there with the minimum of fuss, arriving at the hotel (which was plush-as-fuck!) around 9:30pm local time. Wasn't long before we were on road hitting a restaurant and then the bars and eventually ending up at a mental beach party in the early hours of Saturday morning. The debauchery continued throughout Saturday and Sunday only ending a few hours before 6:30am (5:30am GMT) when we had to rock back to the airport and return to normality... Barcelona is a banging city, I've been to a few spots in Espagnol in the past and Barca is definitely the best one by a fair distance, Go There Now! The people were all cool as fuck, the women are all Hot! and the weather was perfect making for a badass weekend all round. I missed so much sleep and am already back at work suffering, ugghhh, gonna sleep well tonite ya knowz.
Here's a few random photo's I took on my wanderings....

Gothic Cathedral

This place is immense, the walls of the thing are all carved with mad detailing. One side seems to be quite new looking at the brickwork. The queue to get to the top is about an hour long though an i'm not waiting that long, so we're sat in a cafe across the street supping a cerveza!

Drum n Bass in the Pig And Paper

Tonight in the Pig and Paper, we got a spot of Drum and Bass going down.
Tunes commence at 8pm and go on until 12am and will be provided by the Shaolin Drunken Monk and DJ Magma.


Heavy!!

DJ J Rocc live on 1 Xtra

J Rocc is simply a wicked DJ. Hailing from LA he's been around for a minute and is currently right up there as one of my top ten DJ's. So I was well pleased to notice that he was a guest on Benji B's show on 1Xtra on Monday this week. Go listen and then someone record the show then send me the mp3...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/benjib/

http://stonesthrow.com/news/2009/06/jrocc-benjib-on-bbc-1xtra





Also on J Rocc's blog I noticed a photo of Gas Lamp Killer, who is undoubtably biting my style. He's playing in Barcelona this weekend, so I'm gonna track him down and shave his head!
Check him out:

















Shaolin Drunken Monk

Gas Lamp Killer

http://stoneyjackson.blogspot.com/

Sonar Festival This Week!

Off to the Sonar festival in Barcelona on Friday this week! The Line Up is fairly ridiculous, but I doubt I'll be watching too many DJ's instead hitting the bars and cafe's or taking a dip in the pool instead.

Hmmmm Nice, can't wait!


Here's where I'm staying:









Massive big ups to work for taking me along! :D

More Wicked New Music

This time we're rocking back into the realm of New York Funk.

This bunch are called the Budos Band and have just released this ace LP on Daptone Records.
Go Buy It

Budos Band - Hidden Hand


Budos Band - Mas O Menos



Budos Band - The Proposition


Budos Band - Ephra


Budos Band - Nobody's Bulletproof


Budos Band - Smoke Gets In...

New Tunes!

It's been a long time since I've posted any new Hip Hop up on the blog, mostly due to the fact that wicked tunes seem to be quite thin on the ground in '09. With most of our American cousins concentrating on Auto Tuning their vocals to death rather than generating a sick flow over a phat beat.

However I've got a couple of bits I like today, so without further ado here they are:

First up is Ghostface Killah, apparantly his shows in the UK this year were pretty average so I'm glad I got a chance to check him last year when he (and the Wu) rolled through the country! This is somewhat typical for Ghost but I like it:


Ghostface - Forever



And this little number boasts a verse from GFK too, here he can be found alongside Inspectah Deck and sometime Wu collaborator AZ. Beats was produced by a bunch called 'The Revelations' and it's nice too!

Wu Tang Clan - Harbourmasters



I'm a bit late on this one, as it has been doing the rounds for at least a few weeks now. Coming straight out JA this cut see's Dancehall veteran Shaggy (Oh Carolina!) in reflective mood over a lush soul backing. I'm fairly sure the sample is from The Delfonics as I reckon Ghostface also made use of it on his Fishscale LP, will check over the weekend and maybe even do a sampled by?? post... Big Tune!


Shaggy - Bad Mon Don't Cry

How is this guy still in charge?

Gordon Brown, the democratically unelected Prime Minister of the UK once again failed to do the right thing last night and is still in a job. How he thinks he has any support is a complete mystery to me and even said:
"No doubt I have much to learn about a collective way of leading the party and the government. I have to learn how to be a full-time prime minister and a full-time leader of the Labour party."
in his speech to Labour MPs last night as a reason to keep his job....

I'm sorry Mr Brown - you've had plenty of time sitting atop Westminster to learn what's right and wrong, so stop exercising a mandate you have no right to exercise and kindly leave office now.

If he had any sense of right and wrong he would have called for a General Election soon after Blair's exit in order to gain approval of his promotion to the top office from the electorate. However it seems very much to me that his fear of losing and the resulting castigation into the political wilderness puts him off letting the public choose.

So is this a democracy? Cos it doesn't taste like one to me.

Mr Brown, do the please honourable thing for once in your career and either step aside or put your popularity and policies to the test and call an election.