DjOriented

Luciano’s high profile Cadenza label has always served the needs of vinyl purists ahead of digital DJs, with releases often coming out on wax months ahead of digital.

But with the launch of Luciano’s new digital only imprint, Cadenza Lab, it is digital DJs who will get their hands on the producer’s work, and the work of Cadenza artists such as Reboot, Ricardo Villalobs, Thomas Melchior, and Loco Dice, before anyone else.

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In music videos, there has always been something of a race to the bottom. Sex sells, and directors pay very close attention to the guidelines broadcasters dictate. What’s the most amount of nakedness we can squeeze into three minutes before the watershed?

For the most part, the addition of gyrating booties and shapely midriffs to a track that has nothing to do with sex seems mightily contrived, at least to those not watching. The music channels’ under-18, mainly male, demographic of course, absolutely loves it. It’s why they’re watching in the first place.

Watch this video on Beatportal

In music videos, there has always been something of a race to the bottom. Sex sells, and directors pay very close attention to the guidelines broadcasters dictate. What’s the most amount of nakedness we can squeeze into three minutes before the watershed?

For the most part, the addition of gyrating booties and shapely midriffs to a track that has nothing to do with sex seems mightily contrived, at least to those not watching. The music video channels’ under-18, mainly male, demographic of course, absolutely loves it. It’s why they’re watching in the first place.

Watch this video on Beatportal

“The only concept I wanted it to have was to be completely true to me as a DJ and artist, and the overriding thing I always aim for in any mix compilation is that it stands up to repeat listens over the years,” so says Paul Woolford, the DJ behind Renaissance’s latest mix compilation ‘Platform’.

” I wanted to make it boldly clear what I am about as a DJ. People sometimes have pre-conceptions, and because I have not strongly associated myself with any particular record label since the 2020 Vision days, I felt the timing of this compilation was right.

“I have material forthcoming on Carl Craig’s Planet E later this year amongst other releases, but for now on this project I wanted to make an emotive mix that reflects the things that have inspired me over the years next to fresh material, such as Oni Ayhun.”

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Not content with exposing quality club music to millions of people via her BBC Radio 1 show, the delightful DJ Heidi has launched her own travelling club event series called The Jackathon.

With two successful dates already down at Berlin’s high profile Watergate club, Heidi will showcase the coolest man in dance music, Seth Troxler, at Paris’ Le Régine’s club this Saturday. The Jackathon (featuring Heidi plus guests Claude VonStroke, Jamies Jones, and Matt Tolfrey) touches down at Manchester’s Sankeys on May 2, and then on May 28, Heidi, Solomun, and Benedict Bull jack their way into London’s T-Bar. (Further dates are listed on Heidi’s MySpace page.)

As Heidi explains, “The idea behind The Jackathon kind of came about through my radio show In New DJs We Trust on Radio 1. I just wanted to showcase the music I played and the DJs I’ve had as guests and bring it to a dancefloor.

“I was tired of going out to clubs and being bored with the music. I just really wanted to see people dancing and freaking out like the people in the video I’ve made.”

What video, I hear you ask? Well, this one:

Read more on Beatportal

Not content with exposing quality club music to millions of people via her BBC Radio 1 show, the delightful DJ Heidi has launched her own travelling club event series called The Jackathon.

With two successful dates already down at Berlin’s high profile Watergate club, Heidi will showcase the coolest man in dance music, Seth Troxler, at Paris’ Le Régine’s club this Saturday.

As Heidi explains, “The idea behind The Jackathon kind of came about through my radio show In New DJs We Trust on Radio 1. I just wanted to showcase the music I played and the DJs I’ve had as guests and bring it to a dancefloor.

“I was tired of going out to clubs and being bored with the music. I just really wanted to see people dancing and freaking out like the people in the video I’ve made.”

What video, I hear you ask? Well, this one:

Read more on Beatportal

Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s 1977 disco classic ‘I Feel Love’ is currently dominating clubs across the globe. Again.

Thanks to a drum heavy techno remix by MYNC, Rhythm Masters and Wynter Gordon, the likes of Carl Cox (above) and Sven Väth (below) have been playing it out a lot, with rapturous results on the dancefloor, unsurprisingly.

Moroder’s entirely electronic backing track for ‘I Feel Love’ is often named as the starting point for house and techno, and since 1977 the track has appeared in various incarnations.

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Martyn’s unique and eclectic approach to electronic music has seem him tagged as one of dubstep’s boldest explorers, but as his recent mix for Fabric proved, the Dutch producer is infinitely more complicated.

Whilst his productions have for the most part, skulked the thin grey line between Berlin techno and moody dubstep (although his UK funky flourishes on his debut album ‘Great Lengths’ offered some surprising rays of warmth), as a DJ Martyn’s multifarious approach is closer aligned to leftfield and ambient hip hop DJs such as Flying Lotus.

His recent mix podcast for XLR8R is a prime example of the kind of complex smorgasbord of sounds Martyn likes to flirt with in the DJ booth, which he has shared with artists as diverse as Hudson Mohawke, Skream, Rusko, and Marcel Dettmann.

On the mix, Martyn’s constructs a lucid journey of beats and drifting atmospherics that quite happily jump from instrumental hip hop, to new wave pop, house, garage, techno, and even ambient.

Sometimes hot and funky, sometimes cold and lonely, Martyn’s mix is one of the best we’ve heard all year.

With so much quality alternative dance music crammed into just one hour, we had to take a peek under the hood to see how he built his mix.

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The quest is complete. The tech house holy grail is secure. For three years we chased Terry Francis, the king of Fabric’s legendary Room 2, for a DJ chart but he fought the waves of Beatport crusaders back from the Wiggle shadows with silence.

And then on one delightful spring day in Berlin, as the sun suddenly appeared after months of winter gloom, our tech house specialist Mike Chapman received an email from Francis that, low and behold, contained the elusive DJ chart.

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Here’s perhaps the first tangible trend of WMC 2010 (or maybe that’s just us desperately searching for an angle). A number of DJs have been playing classic progressive house vocal records this conference, including rather surprisingly, Loco Dice, who in this video can be seen dropping a stupendously gnarly techno remix of Celeda’s evergreen classic ‘The Underground’.

That follows Danny Tenaglia dropping an edit of John Creamer & Stephane K’s epic vocal anthem ‘I Wish You Were Here’ on Wednesday night at Parkwest nightclub.

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