Wednesday, September 22, 2010

San Francisco reflections

san fran

Things I learnt while in San Francisco...

How much San Franciscans take pride in their coffee.

dark mural

That while Dusk and I are dithering about finally upgrading to Serrato, that you can hardly find a club in San Fran that has decks: CDs or vinyl. Ableton is the default.

That DJing with Ableton might invoke a knee-jerk “but but… it’s all pre mixed?” reaction, but instead it just shifts the parameters. The name of the game is no longer what you can hold in the mix, but what you do when you’re in it.

mission

That San Franciscans are crazy about mental icecream flavours but if you open your mouth and ask for “strawberry” in an English accent, you’ll find them high-5ing in delight.

mexican wrestling masks

Performance: how little I think about the performance side of DJ/live, versus the actual mixing and music creation. Time to buss the costume changes eh ... or indeed the Mexican wrestling masks!

sedimentary flyers

The lasting impact that Burning Man has on a generation each year. “Doomrave” FTW.

skull

That abstract hip hop, and not just the LA stuff, is the one there and that a sense of a fully developed San Francisco electronic tradition is very real.

lost

mural3

The vivid use of murals by the Latin American community around the Mission district to portray local history and struggles.

mural2

mural

ripley and the mural

That dubstep in America is not a multicultural phenomenon: a direct quote, not my observation I might add!

view from saras house

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That comment about dubstep is true, with the exception being Staten Island maybe,..www.thelatestyle.bandcamp.com

Regend said...

i'm curious about the argument. music, in its own right, is multicultural just from the stand point that it travels. it travels over the air. it reaches destinations. that destination being our ears. and the internet allows music to travel further. in LA at least, dub step elements are finding their ways into mexican regional music like Cumbia. DJ /rupture from NYC has been combining a lot of other genres and tweaking them at 70bpm's alongside Dub Step as well. the problem with American ears is that it is difficult for the audience to develop their ears. they get stuck and just stick to only one particular sound and feed of just that sound so the scene doesn't evolve. that's my take on it. i would argue that LA, because 60% of LA is of Hispanic descent, has a multicultural DUb Step scene primarily lead by 6Blocc.