apple induced epilepsy

First time for a while that I've played in my home town, was quite nice to be able to walk to the gig.  We were playing outside, which is always pleasant when the weather holds out.  The night was drum and bass indoors and hip hop on the terrace.

Cue lots of scratching about on the record decks.  We were a little cramped in next to the DJ booth, but just about had enough room to manouvre.  Setup was fairly simple, this was Ian's gig and I was joining him - he had his customary laptop and dvd player and I just joined him with my laptop.  We were running from both outputs of the V4 with one projector on a screen dircectly opposite us and one projecting up onto the canopy which covered us and the DJ.

Managed to get some pretty nice DJ scratchy action filmed while I was there which will be cut up and filtered into clips for future gigs of this genre.

The music wasn't really my bag, but the crowd were happy and friendly and there was a good, fun vibe.  Jumping cars and boogying Jimmy Saville went down a treat.

Bit of a trek to get down to this one, but Ian and myself managed it in around 2.5-3 hours straight down the M1.  My navigation on entering St. Albans wasn't as bad as it can be, we only ended up driving up and and down the same stretch of road 3 times before I figured out where we were on the map ;)

Got into the club nice and early and got set up in around 40 minutes, I've done this venue before so had a pretty good idea of what was going where.  We setup our gear, two laptops, 3 dvd players and a switcher all running through the V4 on the balcony over looking the dance floor, one input was going to our projector which was playing against the back wall, while the other went to their distribution amp which sent it out to the five in house projectors and range of plasma screens.

The club had really pulled out all the stops for this one, they had us in providing epilepsy triggers, they had stilt walkers, dancers, a fire breather, angle grinder, and two aerial silk roll acrobats.  The music was pretty good for an Ibiza anthems and house night, and the crowd were well up for it having to be hearded out the doors when it hit the 4am curfew.

We'd managed a bit of hot swapping of cabling to allow us to strip down to a single dvd for the last 20 minutes while we packed the rest of our gear.  Only left the projectors and cabling for after the club had shut, we were out into the pouring rain for a fairly respectable 4.30am and into the hotel for around 5am.

Those of you who are observant will notice that this one was the day after the last gig we did.

We were up at 8 and out of the hotel and on the M1 for 8.30 making fairly good headway up the M1.  Got into Leeds at an earlier than planned 11.00 and had a quick geek round maplins before heading over to Stinky's for a 12am rendevouz with the Andy monster who was in bouncy high spirits.

We set up at a fairly relaxed pace, getting our gear out the way in the corner and filling the club with 3 screens - the room isn't that big maybe 30ft square with ceilings no higher than a normal room, so these really filled the place.  We kept the rig simple running three laptops and a dvd player and dv player through the switcher into the mixer, to get the three outputs from a single mixer we did without the preview and used that as another output.

This was a pretty long day - 12 straight hours of banging hard house, so we took it in turns and took a fairly relaxed approach to the mixing.  Andy was on top form and spent a good long time behind the mixer, working the crowd and dancing topless at one point.  We all indulged in a little boogying at one point or another.

The crowd were really friendly and up for it with around 150-200 of them going for it hammer and tongs in a little sweatbox of a room at it's height.  We got some really good comments and feedback on what we'd done with the promoter being particularly enthusiastic.

Got home for around 1am and collapsed.