beach party

I was asked by James Webb to perform at the next Beach Party event Saturday March 14, 2009.  This is an all day event starting around 11:00AM and running until dark or later. My timeslot is between noon and 2:30PM EST. I am very much looking forward to this event, since it and the series of beach parties that it belongs to, are the real deal.  The DJ lineup includes Redvoid (yours truly), Kevin Julian, Mooj, Pascal V., DJ Q, J. Webb, DJ Chang, DJ Jon, Ian, Von and possibly others not on the flyer. The main idea behind the beach party series is to provide people a chance to hear real electronica during the day, on the beach, in the sun rather than in a smoky club, late at night while giving the DJs a platform to spin the material that they value the most without concern for a particular club, promoter or event telling them what they can and cannot do. This is a welcome change of pace since here in Florida, we have beautiful weather that we Floridians often don’t take enough time to enjoy, and this format creates a kind of South Beach vibe like you might find during WMC, which I will be talking more about in the coming weeks. Since its only two more weeks until WMC now, consider this your warm up event to get yourself in the mood for South Beach.

beach parties are a great way to spend a Saturday

minimalism

The term minimalism is commonly misunderstood, and often maligned. In its truest sense, minimalism was an art movement, a form of architecture, and then finally a form of music, specifically Classical or art music. Recently this label has also been applied to electronica as well, and many questions seem to arise from the use of this term, which probably needs some clarification.

The best way to think of minimalism in the broadest sense, is as a series of concepts or ideas. Ideas drive many things, and in creative endeavors, ideas become design principles, guides or even sometimes arbitrary rule sets used to steer the process. The Mies Van Der Rohe quote “less is more” gets thrown around, and did stem from the Bauhaus architecture and design movement so it is legitimately part of the true definition of minimalism, but it is possibly not clear enough to those who do not intuitively understand it at face value. Another way to say this is “doing the more with less”, as in create the most function from the least amount of form. I like to use the term “Occam’s Razor” which fundamentally means “economy of means” or what we could all just call plain simple.

(more…)