Hex

From 2003 to 2008 I was involved with a parties series called Hex. These parties started after I had quite my involvement with the Gruis parties in Utrecht. The Hex nights found a home at OCCII in Amsterdam and had a focus in all things new wave and post-punk… from batcave to NDW to minimal electronics and often also beyond…

Many bands had their (Dutch) live debut there… or otherwise did a rare live show: Agent Side Grinder, Frustration, Schwefelgelb, Sixteens, Black Ice, Wermut, Echo West, Solitude FX, Hval Mus, It&My Computer, Cheveu, SaraLunden, Vanishing, Swann Danger, and so on…

Hex was quite legendary these days… people from Belgium, Germany and France came over just for the nights… and still nowadays I sometimes come across people who still remember these parties…

Recently some footage popped up on Youtube so I ripped it for my private archive… but I also put it online on my Youtube channel and posted it below… just for old times sake and for melancholy moments when it seems that all good things lie in the past…

M – Lesson#81

Online now is the opening dj set I did at the last ET night at Gifgrond… it is mix filled with all kinds of elektro sounds… EBM influenced, post-punk kind of and also synth pop inspired… a bit like what I used to play at the Hex parties… artists include Le Syndicat Electronique, Bastards Of Love, Bakterielle Infektion, Thorofon, Ich Bin amongst others…

You can listen to it on my mixcloud or here below…

dj M at Gifgrond

A few weeks ago I had a great time at Gifgrond… the Gifgrond ladies invited me again to curate a night at their wonderful venue and event… here is a report in Dutch by VPRO 3voor12…

I already wrote a bit about lately… now I also posted my dj set online I did after the live acts for the dance part of the event… it is a dj set of about 2 hours with loads of 80’s and also some more contemporary stuff… think in the likes of elektro-wave, synth-pop, minimal electronics and so on… long time since I did a dj set with these tunes… years and years ago, mostly during the Hex nights way back… and also did I not play for the dance floor since some time… it was great fun and there was an enthusiastic audience which made it extra nice to play these songs… enjoy!

Gifgrond…

I had a great time last saturday at Gifgrond… as always everything was just perfectly organised and the ambiance was perfect as well… all three live acts were excellent… for Onont Kombar it was just the second live show ever… and it was much more powerful as the first one… Embers proved live even more style defying as on their records… a sort of Flemish post-industrial reply to Die Antwoord… and last but not least Roberto Auser showed once again how well skilled he is in performing live with a modular synth…

Also the audience stayed this time to dance to the 80’s sound and contemporary electronic tunes like we used to play at the Hex nights in OCCII/Amsterdam… and it was cool playing these tunes again… long time ago I did this…

These photos are by Frank Janssens. Thanks to all involved in making this night one to remember!

Demo tape

Artifecal_demo Most demo’s today are send as mp3 files or are links to a private Soundcloud page… and when I started with ET I received demo’s on cd-r… but in the old days demo’s were submitted on tape… and guess what… I received a real demo tape recently…

I do not accept demo’s in general but this demo is from a musician I already work with… maybe you remember the 7″ by Artifecal released in 2011 on the now defunct Hex sublabel… so the musician behind this project sent me this tape (60 minutes long I believe) filled with demo recordings from various of his projects… and a lot of the stuff is really great… non-typical minimal synth, post-punk and new wave sounds which will appeal to all who really like the obscure side of these styles…

These are real demo’s meaning not final recordings… often without vocals still… so I am curious to get the final versions… as I am quite sure a nice record could be moulded out of these demo tracks!