Nightflight Music

NightFlight & Fever are delighted to welcome back Luke Unabomber (Electric Chair, Manchester) for a DJ set upstairs in the The Grand Social on Bank Holiday Saturday, May 5th.

The Unabombers ran a much-loved night in the rainy city for 13 years called ‘Electric Chair’, releasing 7 mix albums of their inimitable ‘Northern Sulphuric Souling’ style – a heady brew of soul, hip hop, freaky deaky r’n’b, diva disco, house, techno and other 21st Century dancefloor slayers.

Since winding up Electric Chair in early 2008 they’ve gone on to run ‘Electric Elephant’, a 4 day festival in the Adriatic coastal town of Petrcane, a beautiful place which many people have dubbed ‘The New Ibiza’.

Next year will see it celebrate it’s 5th Year, with a heavyweight line up featuring Andrew Weatherall and Chris Duckenfield already gaining momentum…

Support on the night comes from Dublin’s finest Billy Scurry and our very own Lil’ Dave.

The ever geeky and always interesting BoingBoing crew have come up trumps again with this post of a handmade wooden coffee table designed exactly like a NES controller – that is also a fully functioning NES controller. The bang of want off it is palpable……

Check it out here – BoingBoing

As he settles into a new hometown on t’other side of the world, our man Pablo reflects on the Irish electronic underground that he’s leaving behind…..

My own decision to leave Ireland for the sunny climes of Melbourne recently was for a combination of factors – one of my best mates living here for the foreseeable with his Aussie wife and hitting the cut-off point for the 1 Year Working Holiday Visa being chief among them.

Working in the healthcare sector meant options were only going to shrink for me in that sphere in the next while too. The opportunity to laugh smugly at my mates freezing their arses off in the middle of an Irish January was obviously a major factor. I certainly didn’t leave our fair capital for lack of a decent clubbing scene though. On the contrary, I think I couldn’t have picked a worse time to leave. Reading this interview with TR-One and Kenny Hanlon, the ‘truculent facilitator’ at Apartment Records who has just released their wonderful ‘Drum Dance’ 12”, rammed the point home for me – “Things are the best they’ve been for quite a while and it’s only going to improve. You have artists, labels and collectives such as Lunar Disko, Earwiggle, All City, Automatic Tasty, Slowburn, Lerosa, Bodytonic, D1 (if they still exist or not, always hard to tell), Lakker, DeFeKt, !Kaboogie, [NakedLunch], Subtle Audio and John Daly amongst others doing their thing and doing it the way they want to”. Taken all at once, you have to say that is quite the list.

As we speak, ‘Drum Dance’ itself is sitting pretty at No 3 in Juno’s Techno chart, trailing only to heavyweights Omar S and Joy Orbison. Over the summer you had the likes of Waterford’s ‘Get Down Edits’ label and David Magnier’s London based but Dublin born label House Of Disco hitting the top spots on Juno too. Mano Le Tough is blazing a trail for himself all over the place with a unique sound that gets more sophistimucated with every release, and surely it can’t be long before Citizen Black hits hard with a bonafide house classic.

Not everything is rosy in the garden of course, with sound problems arising from a lack of knowledge – from venue owners to off hand sound engineers to – often the worst offenders! – DJ’s and promoters themselves – meaning Irish punters are simply used to putting up with middling to average to just plain shite sound, malfunctioning turntables, and at one of my last gigs in Dublin, the speakers catching fire! Watching this video just reminded me how many times I’ve walked into a Dublin DJ booth to see ( and hear ) everything just wrong. It’s relevant to digital DJ’s too, so have a look, and then most likely hang yisser heads in shame!

And for the wider picture –

Cosmo Mystic Bounce

Our biggest problem remains the licensing hours we are subjected to. Unfortunately they showcase the ultra-conservative, closed house Irish mafia strain of our society that most of us would rather not admit still exists. We should all remember how spectacularly popular that little prick Michael McDowell was for that shiny few days in the early 21st century when he was trying to push through his ‘Café Style Bars’ bill, which would have revolutionized the country’s licensing laws. And then we should remember how a bunch of pub-owning back bench TD’s quashed the bill in one fell swoop in a Dail vote. And who could forget the proposal that ALL nightclubs be closed at 1.30, the one that got the ‘Give Us The Night’ campaign going in the first place?

This writer was just back from a wondrous night at Manchester’s ‘Electric Chair’ in 2004 when that little doozy was coming through. The night had gone from 1,000 people packed at 1.30am to 200 funky souls winding it down by the time 4.30am came round. What galls me more than anything is that we don’t need the all-hours craziness of Berlin in Ireland – we just need that extra 90 – 120 minutes so that we’re not chucking people onto the streets as the night is peaking. (Slaps forehead, sighs). We all know the arguments already anyway. It won’t do us any good reiterating them because it’s a fix and we all know it’s a fix. Basically, in Hanlon’s poetic words, the Vintner’s Federation and their ‘reacharounds with the Government and Gardai mean we can’t party like the rest of Europe’. He goes on to eulogise our strong base of ‘DJs out there who’d mill most touring acts into the ground – Local talent would get so much more deserved attention from the punters if we could throw parties later into the night’. It would be nice to think that the earnest dialogues that ‘Give Us The Night’ undoubtedly have with the few TD’s who might care to give an ounce of a fuck are doing something to change this situation. Unfortunately my inner cynic tells me that whenever I do get back to Ireland there won’t be one iota of change to these ludicrous laws.

Necessity is the mother of invention, though, and it all just means that people are starting to get more and more creative with finding ways to circumnavigate these laws. It’s a well-worn cliché that as an economy dips, so the level of creativity rises, but there’s strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that this has been the case in Ireland over the last few years. The energy on Dublin’s dancefloors has been way up for my money in the last 18 months, and I feel sad I’m gonna miss where it’s going to be heading in the next 18…..

Its competition time !

We have 2 x double passes to give away for Nightflight with Steve Bug in The Grand Social next Saturday, February 4th.

To be in with a chance simply answer the following question…….

Which of the following is arguably Steve Bug’s most successful label ??

a) Poker Face
b) Poke Her Face
c) Poker Flat

Send your answers to nightflighdublin[at]gmail[dot]com with “Steve Bug Competition” in the subject line.

Good luck !