Archive for August, 2009

Once again this legendary west coast outfit and Chris Lake team up to release over an hour of unadulterated house music. Chris is set to play San Diego's Wave House on Sunday 6th Sept… so for you all your Californians…. this is just a taster!

Download the mix from HERE

Once again Mr Lake finds himself packing his bags for a series of gigs across the beautiful South American country, Brazil. The only difference from previous trips to the place he call's his future home, is this time he's wrapped up his favourite little box which the lovely peeps over at Awdio supplied him with back at WMC 2009. For those who can't remember is first experiences during the last North American tour, this magical little piece of kit will allow Chris to stream his sets live across the internet. All you need to do is head to www.awdio.com and click 'events'. From there you can easily see what's on and what's scheduled. Last week we had a barbq at my pad and started rather early… we managed to tune into HOME in Sydney, Australia and listen to more six hours of undisturbed house-music… this shit is genius! For Chris it all kicks off tomorrow (Aug 14th) around 2am Rio time…. followed by sets from Club Anzu, Mokai, Nasala and Club Giv. So ladies and gents, there's no listen again functions… this is straight up time and place. If you miss it, it's gone! 

You'll also be able to follow his movements on twitter and hopefully we'll be able to get some decent video footage up too!

Just in case you're not familiar with the current Chris Lake sound, check out this recent mix he's done… although in Brazil, he swears the rhythm is different… so lets just see what he comes up with!

Chris Lake Podcast Mix 2009 by chrislake

While I'm doing the promotional spiel for Chris, please don't forget to get your votes in at this year's DJ Mag Top 100: http://top100djs.djmag.com/

Catch you all soon! 

Chris and his
lady take a welcome four day mini-break in beautiful Croatia. You'll hear some
of Chris' new beats doing the rounds, a little bit about his new DJ set up and
how he feel's about his up-coming tour in Brazil. For more information please
head to facebook.com/chrislake.

Sour
Grapes return to Rising Music with the massive ‘Stay For Now’.

New
on the scene and already recognized as the future in dance music, Sour Grapes
unique style of creating beats make their productions stand out, with
essentials from traditional House, contemporary Techno and other styles of
music, the trio somehow always manage to find the right formula that makes
dance floors around the world explode.

Their
ground-breaking productions have opened up eyes and ears of names like Eric
Prydz, Dave Spoon, Chris Lake, Laidback Luke, Joachim Garraud, Tocadisco and
Laurent Garnier.

Stay
For Now is a driving techno monster with a killer vocal breakdown.

The
package is backed up with Lake & Lys’ tech house rework and a fantastic
progressive remix from Sandro Monte.

Pick up your copy now!

On Saturday 1st
August the infamous Unity Day took over Hyde Park in Leeds. An 11 hour day of
various celebrations including multiple music stages was created to celebrate
the people, culture and community of LS6 following the riots in 1995. The event is paid for through grants and team
fundraising, which this year included car boots sales, gypsy and folk music
nights, jumble sales, dub sound clashes, sponsored leg waxing and various band
nights. Rising Digital's Beth went to discover the community love for a
third year running and here's what she thought of Unity Day 2009… 

"And the Lord
said let there be rain on every day I decide to go to a festival. And it did
rain, relentlessly, turning Leeds’s Hyde Park into a large muddy puddle with
the properties of a banana skin. 

Despite the
precipitation based problems there were however some redeeming factors. The
spirits of the numbers were lifted high by the lung bouncing bass of the
Iration Steppas. The crowds were skanking and smiling giving the music the full
respect it deserved and most came prepared with the correct water proof attire
enabling them to fully enjoy the day. 

 Realising you can’t
please everyone all of the time and it was better to please some of the people
most of the time they played across all sub genres – wobbling bass, deep
rolling bass, jump up, jungle. Even some garage, which was in fact terrible and
catalysed the mass exodus towards the Sub Dub tent yet again across what was
soon becoming “No mans’ land”. Nearly the entire evening was spent yo yo-ing
between the two tents only briefly pausing to chat to each other about how it
was 9 o’clock at night and the parents should really have taken their kids home
by now. 

Sadly rather
infrequently the Sub Dub boys dropped a huge drum and bass tune forcing the
crowd into body bending spasms, throwing limbs uncontrollably to the beat of
the music. Seeing this response you would have thought they would have
continued along this train of musical thought, but they didn’t, yet again
forcing the genesis of a movement back to the other arena.

From this point
onwards the night really deteriorated. There were some terrible sounds coming
from the High Pressure tent and it wasn’t just the below par selection of vinyl
from the DJ. The sound system sounded like a passing Vauxhall Nova containing
Argos’ own brand 6×9’s on the parcel shelf. 

Even though the
elements were unkind to say the least and the music was rather lackluster
according to the judges that were the crowd, the real winner was Unity Day.Everywhere we looked people were throwing loose change into the buckets of the
volunteers dispelling our overall lamentations of society, realizing the
majority of the public aren’t all that bad." 

To find out more about
Unity Day visit http://www.unityday.org.uk

It's
been a little while
since I did a full blog post, so now that
I'm sat on a flight to Budapest, I thought it was an ideal time to lay down my
thoughts on what I've been getting up to, what I like, what I don't like, some
things that are relevant, some that are not…………….  

Tonight
I am playing at a big event at Cafe del Rio, in the
Hungarian capital, called the Rio Summer Festival.  I'm very
excited about this party, as there is a massive lineup, including some trance
favorites, ATB & Marcus Schultz.  I believe I'm on before ATB tonight,
so I think that gives me license to play anything I want. Just how I like it  

Either
side of the show will be a few hours of press, and then I'll grab a few hours
rest before heading back to London. Unfortunately this week I had my Friday gig
in Cyprus cancelled, much to my disappointment. I don't have many details
on the reasons for this cancellation at the moment, but as soon as I have more
info I'll get something up on the Rising Blog about it.

So
now with a bit of last minute schedule shuffling, I've arranged some studio
time with Nastala, to help her finish recording her new single on her album.
It's probably one of my favourite jobs to do, working on tracks for other
artists, as it just allows me to open up my creativity, and maybe allow me to
try out ideas I wouldn’t necessarily use for
a Chris Lake track. I also have a few other projects to
finish off, so studio time is a must. Not getting to enjoy the summer in the
way I originally hoped (horizontal, with a cocktail in one hand, suntan lotion
in the other), but I'm trying to take advantage of an insanely big creativity
burst that I'm experiencing at the moment.

The
collaboration I started with Marco Lys this year has definitely been one of the
highlights of 2009 for me. He is such a great guy, with a well practiced talent
in the studio. Sonically he gets it, and he understands how I like to approach
a track. When we work together, or pretty much when I work together with
anyone, its a case of leaving me for 20-30 minutes to sit in front of a
sequencer and keyboard, load up some synths, and just create LOADS of ideas,
until I get bored or frustrated, then Lys comes in, and wreaks havoc on the
project  

Having
already released 'Violins', and now the current release 'La Tromba', We're keen
to capitalise on the attention the music is getting, so we're going to finish
off a track we started the last time Marco was in London, via the internet. We
finished Violins this way too, so we're confident it works.

The
problem we've had is that his studio in Northern Italy is too hot to work in
during the summer months, and I've been touring so much that we haven't found
any more dates to hook up together. I'm sure once September and October
comes though, we'll finish up 3 or 4 new tunes to release. Good news on La
Tromba though. The Swedish House Mafia have been going positively ape shit
about the track, so Steve has picked up the record for his Size imprint, to
release a round of remixes by himself, Dirty South and Christian Smith. I can't
wait to hear what they all do to it.

I've
also been doing a lot of remixes recently. My remix of Mini Viva – Tokyo should
be dropping soon. Big house action is the order of the day here. I uploaded a
clip of the mix on my MySpace player if you want to check it out. Other mixes I
did were for La Roux – In for the kill (USA release). I dropped this last week
at Cream, Ibiza, and the place went MENTAL. Lys and Myself did a remix of Sour
Grapes – Stay for now, Coming out on the first week of August, and we also did
the lead mix for the debut
single for 'Nelski' called Body Pop. This track smacks of a cross between XPress 2's 'Lazy' and Tom Novy's 'Your body'. HUGE!  Lastly though, I was lucky enough to get on the new remix package for Madonna's next single with Paul Oakenfold, called 'Celebration'.  I just got news 2 days ago that it
was accepted by Warners and Madonna, so I'm super happy this is coming
out.
Sounds like Madonna back to her best. Catchy stuff.  

Other than that, I've been having a good mess around with new ways I can
play out live. I mentioned at the beginning of the year I am considering doing a live show. In the mean time, I'm looking at more of an evolved DJ performance. I picked up a Jazz Mutant Lemur last week, and I've hooked this up to my MacBook pro running Traktor Pro, and running this into the Pioneer DJM800. I probably have a month of setting up to go, but early signs are that this setup is a lot of fun to play with, and allowed me to be a little more creative with how I deliver my sets.  Again, many of you will know about my hookup with www.awdio.com, where I have streamed many of my shows live through their site. With this new setup, I can record every one of my sets easily, making them available online the week after if I choose, as well as easily publishing track
listings from my shows. The downside is that I doubt I will be using controller CD's for this new setup, which means no beat-matching, but you know, I've been beatmatching for 10 years now, and it's no big deal, and proves very little. Not having to do it will allow me to do many other things, and that satisfies me much more. I'll keep you updated if I manage to work anything else exciting into my setup.

On a production tip, I've been messing with a few new pieces of gear.  I got myself the UAD2 card, which I think sounds great.  Some of the plugins are superb.  Personally, I'm really into the Roland tape delay and chorus, along with the Fairchild Compressor, and the De-esser for vocals.  My friends at Arturia have also now updated their minimoog synth to v2, and the new features turn it into a whole new monster for me.  Unfortunately,
for production, I've not found the upgrade for Ableton Live so enjoyable.  It
still feels very buggy, and a horrible sequencer to use when opening old live 7
projects in the new version.  It also doesn't run so great with my Access
Virus TI, giving a lot of latency issues, and in general, using live with
external synths, or for recording vocals, feels backwards compared to many
other sequencers on the market like Cubase and Logic.  With the new
features made available in Logic 9, I feel its time I use Ableton Live, only as
a sketchpad for my ideas, then do everything else in Logic.  

There are a couple of new pieces of kit I have my eye on though. Vengeance Soundshave just announced a new line of plug-ins, one of which I felt has been a must have for a long time:A multiband sidechain. This would allow me to sidechain a bassline against a kickdrum, only reducing the volume of certain frequencies, allowing me to push the sound louder into the mix, and without giving the bass that total 'sidechained' sound. I also tried out a demo of the 'Sawer' synth. Looks good to me. If they feel generous and give me a copy, I might even give it a full work out in of my tracks… 

The
last bit of gear I'm looking at is a re-issued AKG C12 Microphone. Nastala was
using one in a recording session a few weeks ago, and after hearing the results
from the session, I need to get one asap. The only downside is the $5000 price
tag.  

Anyway,
my flight is starting to land now; so time I wrap this up. I've got a new
iphone application being made available very soon for free, so more news on
that soon, and in the next few weeks, I'm making a brand new track freely
available for download. If you join my Facebook fan page you can keep right up
to date with everything there. 

Chris 'very
talkative today' Lake

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