Sick and Twisted, Friday night

S&T is becoming a bit of a regular event for me. Which is a good thing, because it\’92s one of those excellent, little clubs which has its own scene going on with fiercely loyal regulars who are by and large a nice and friendly bunch. I generally only head up there for the industrial-ragga-jungle breakbeat stuff, rather than the doof doof DOOF gabba (gabber?) business.

And so it was that DJ Broken Yolk kicked things off with some very good cuts of the aforementioned industrial/ragga/jungle, including tracks by The Bug. A good way to warm the room up and nice to listen to at the bar whilst having a chat with Riccardo Balli and Nomex. It had been a while since we\’92d seen each other so there was a quite a bit of catching up.

Nomex had some great pictures of his battle bus – a VW Camper Van with an absurd array of loudspeakers around the outside of the roof. This has apparently gone down with some confusion and hostility when making appearances at various squat parties, though that is possibly down to the confrontational nature of Nomex’s noise. He is also working on some tracks which sound like the ultimate head fuck, but I won’t go into them until they’re safely out.

Second up was a “live” appearance from Darkside. He’d brought a desktop “tower” and monitor rather than the usual laptop and so fair play to him for lugging all that about. However the usual reservations about watching people tap away whilst swigging from a can of lager apply. This was compounded by the computer resetting itself just as things were getting into full swing, the audience cheering when the familiar sound of the Microsoft Windows “start up” jingle came through the p.a.! After that, the boy done good, it was gabber or gabber-inspired but it had a nice linearity about it which I found easier on the ear than the stuff at the Rephlex night.

DJ Balli aka Sonic Belligeranza was this month’s international guest. Me and Riccardo go back a long way. He was a stalwart of the Italian AAA and organised the 2nd Intergalactic Conference which took place in Bologna in 1998. He also put together the rather excellent Italian AAA book Anche Tu Astronauta (AAA Editions) and generally fed a load of great stuff into the network.

The Sonic Belligeranza label has pumped out 4 releases and are now setting up a sublabel for “conceptual noise” as well as the dancefloor stuff. Balli seemed in his element behind the decks and got the crowd dancing… lost them when everything became too abstract and uncompromising… got them back again! Some mad mash up tracks which incorporated Italian folk music were the highlight for me. A great start to the weekend.

Alex from Sick and Twisted took over with some nice tracks which nonetheless started to grate a little as the inevitable tiredness kicked in. The posse was back to mine for some sleep…