From Brock Suter Sent Mon, Oct 13th 1997, 08:12
Sunday night at the troubadour, West Hollywood... Some boring trance/hardhouse dj from the uk opened and played a very linear 2 hour set. If you like that kind of stuff, it would have been ok, but no one was dancing and it was just kind of pointless. Scanner rocked the house! All he had was a little notepad mixer, a theremin, a minidisk (or it could have been dat) rolling out tracks, a small yamaha sampler, some weird pen based music thingie (looked like a pilot) and a scanner. Nice shit! Everything from lush ambient pads to fucked up jungle beats. He was constantly mixing it all up, drumming beats on the sampler, changing the scanner channel, making the theremin do it's thing and drawing on the pad thing. He played for an hour and it was very entertaining. Everyone really got into it. The whole voyeurism thing, with a few hundred people listening to peoples intimate phone calls was cool. Most people there were surprised when I told them they were all live calls. Some people are just dense I guess...scanner, get it? Most people didn't. And then came that sublime piece of shit, dj spooky. The first and what should have been last time I saw Dj Spooky was a little under a year ago. How quickly we forget! I should have been prepared for what I saw again tonight. He walked on stage, tossed down two records and just started doing WACK ASS shit over the top of scanner's last song! Thanks a lot paul... Frantic offbeat cutting and weak scratching, with no apparent logic or skill. After 5 minutes, I really wanted to go up on the stage and kick the shit out of him. He's the worst fucking excuse for a dj on the planet. I understand what he's trying to do, deconstructing beats and all that bullshit, but it doesn't make the crap he was doing on stage sound any better. It's just jacking off in public as far as I'm concerned. I do stuff like that at home where no one can see (or hear) me... After 10 minutes I was looking for my friends to tell them I was going to walk home...Every minute I stayed I got more and more pissed off at the aural bullshit I was being subjected to. At this point, I was having flashbacks to the alec empire show at the same venue. But even that didn't hold a candle compared to what was happening this time. After 20 minutes, I found my friends talking to Robin (aka Scanner). I told him I loved his bit and that I was getting the fuck out of there as quick as I could. Just then, dj spooky grabbed the mic and said that he'd like Robin to come back on stage and do a little duet with him. We all said bye to the scanman and ran out the door as fast as we could. I would have loved to hear Scanner again, but the thought of that dickhead, slicing, dicing and scratching (quite lamely I might add) over the top of Robin's music didn't make it even remotely possible. I can't tell you all what an insult it was to hear Paul Miller up there on the turntables. BULLSHIT, that's what it was. Fuck that guy... peace out, brock. ps. Sorry for the strong language, but if you can't take it, go see dj spooky, then you'll understand!