Activision’s DJ Hero has been out for just shy of a month now and the recent reports on the games performance on the market—or lack thereof—has sparked a quite a bit of online discussion in the past few days. Prominent research company NPD Group reported last week that DJ Hero’s sales have peaked at just 122,300. And that’s across XBox, Playstation 2 and 3, and Wii formats—far lower than projected. Why is this? There are more than few opinions out there.
Joshua Glazer, Editor for DJ culture magazine URB, feels the marketing effort did little to tap into actual DJ culture. “Sure, they paid some of the top earners, like Z-Trip and DJ Shadow, to be a part of the game,” writes Glazer on Huffington Post yesterday. “But Activision’s real media buy seemed to center around TV ads featuring Jay-Z and Eminem (two acts who have very little actual connection to DJ culture) in a cynical bid for mainstream appeal.” I can see his line of thinking here, but I disagree. Especially with his new album, Jay-Z is getting a lot of play in the clubs, and why shouldn’t gamers want to come home and recreate that experience themselves? Plus DJ culture is something that most in the mainstream don’t understand. In order to overcome this, a populist game such as DJ Hero needs to be placed in the most familiar context possible.
The real reason is that DJ Hero falls short in game play. Where Guitar Hero grew into a social phenomenon, sparking get-togethers and themed club nights with people dueling it out to their favorite Santana song, DJ Hero is pretty much a one-man-show. Its attempts to have multi-player functionality ultimately fail to create the same sort of excitement that its six-stringed counterpart does. Another reason—one that’s also being put forth on gaming blogs across the web—is that regardless of the expansive catalog of songs, the tunes are inevitably chopped up, cut into and out of while playing and this doesn’t garner the same sort of familiarity with the music that other music-based games do. This is something that actual DJs are probably used to, but for anyone else who’s getting their first introduction to turntablism, the chopped effect could be seen as a turn off.
Dani Deahl, a local DJ and one of the participants in our initial DJ Hero test drive put it best: “It’s too ‘DJ’ for the layman, and not ‘DJ’ enough for the DJs.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Wicker Park’s most reliable hipster get down Rehab, every Monday night at Debonair Social Club, is finally getting proper recognition on the national stage. It made the move to Deb earlier this year from its previous home at Evil Olive. The new location helped it reaffirm its street cred amongst the spandex-loving and mustachioed masses. Now, its in the running for America’s Best Party in New York-based Paper Magazine’s annual poll. Rehab’s got some stiff competition running from Seattle, Washington, to Miami, Florida, so follow the link below to cast your vote:
Paper Magazine Nightlife Awards
If the party—in and of itself—isn’t enough to win your vote. Rehab head honcho Derek Berry has informed us that they’re going to make this Monday’s edition a nomination party complete with voting booths and free cans of PBR to all who vote.
Fever Ray itself provides a perfectly eerie Halloween soundtrack. So much so that if you piped its album out of your windows on Halloween you’d probably scare all the kiddies away and get yourself blacklisted from the next neighborhood block party. But for you super fans out there—and we know there are a lot of you—Fever Ray sold out the Metro show a few weeks back—here’s your opportunity to hear Karen Dreijer Andersson’s personal fright night favorites in this mix she did for popular electronic music site Resident Advisor.
Download Fever Ray’s Halloween mix.
Tracklisting:
01. Neil Young - Guitar Solo 1
02. Yo La Tengo - Everyday
03. Journey To Ixtlan - Corpse On The Mesa
04. Jad & David Fair - Nosferatu
05. Zola Jesus - Devil Take You
06. Bruce Haack - Mean Old Devil
07. Krause - Duo Canopolis
08. Burial Hex - Will To Chapel
09. Suicide - Ghost Rider
10. Amadou & Miriam - Ja Pense À Toi
11. Shackleton - Death Is Not Final
12. Entombed - Night Of The Vampire
13. Maddalena Fagandini - Interval Signals
14. Burundi: Musiques Traditionnelles - Chant Avec Cithare
Photos courtesy of Rez Avissar
I’ve been to a lot of shows at the Metro. And I’ve seen some weird ones. Marilyn Manson walking around on stilts in front of a Ouija board backdrop beckoning the crowd to spit on him comes to mind. Even last weekend’s Grizzly Bear show and the band’s powerful stage presence comes to mind. But none quite reached the light, costume and musical spectacle of last Saturday’s performance from Sweden’s Fever Ray—even if most of the show was covered in a thick—thick—shroud of smoke.
Read more »
DJ, record-label owner, party ambassador and all-around marketing guy David Wolstencroft—known to his fans as Trus’me—brings his global party brand D3K to Chicago’s Sonotheque tonight, for what is to be the first of a quarterly party series. Wolstencroft stormed onto the scene in 2007 with his cutting-edge productions that blended influences from the past and present of dance music, for a decidedly futuristic finished product. Mixing house, techno, Afro, boogie, disco and soul, Wolstencroft’s music has captured the attention of a wide cross-section of the dance community.
Read more »
Listening to the latest DJ-mix from dynamic Berlin duo M.A.N.D.Y. (a.k.a. Philipp Jung and Patrick Bodmer) is always more of a treat than a task. The two head up one of Germany’s sources for the techier side of house and the housier side of techno, Get Physical Records. Home to a star-studded cast of producers and DJs that includes Booka Shade and DJ T, the label is often synonymous with the best in dance music.
Read more »
When genre tags like IDM (intelligent dance music) or minimal techno get thrown around, the qualifiers that follow rarely include lush, sexy or human. Usually pigeonholed as being sparse and cold, it all gets backed into a mechanical-feeling corner. Refreshingly, both sides of spectrum—from blood-pumping humanism to well-oiled mechanics—are given room to breathe when Texas-born, Seattle-based producer Lusine is at the controls. On his latest album for Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International, A Certain Distance, he works in the techno or IDM realm—what he’s known for—but brings a needed warmth and emotion to his sound.
Read more »
Dubstep—the U.K.’s latest bass-music obsession borne of drum ‘n’ bass and garage—has grown into such a phenomenon that the genre has garnered its own show on BBC’s Radio 1, has dedicated stages at electronic music festivals across Europe and has started making an inroads into popular culture here in the U.S.—various pop acts are incorporating it into their songs.
The genre’s most vocal spokesperson—and the woman behind its presence on the BBC and at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona— just touched down to begin her debut U.S. tour, bringing this distinctly British sound to the American masses. Mary Anne Hobbs has been involved with dubstep practically since day one. Speaking prior to the show, she recalled its early days when audiences would consist of her, the DJs and the DJ’s girlfriends. And that’s it. Now at the many regular London dubstep nights, fans will queue up down the block to get a taste of the bass. While the hype is not that large here in the U.S., the Midwest’s receptive DJ culture has given it legs here. This proved to be true at Smart Bar last night. The club wasn’t packed to the gills, but there was a respectable turnout and everyone was hyped for some low-end madness.
Read more »
Little Dragon likes to work in contrasts. It’s based in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is not the first place that comes to mind as a musical Mecca. Yet, with The Knife, José González and The Swell Session there, it has a bubbling underground electronic scene. Gothenburg’s close proximity to Oslo (Lindstrom and Prins Thomas), Stockholm (Lykke Li), and Berlin (too many greats to name here) also puts it at the center of many wonderful movements in electronic music. Then there’s the band’s name. Ahem. There’s nothing little about dragons. There’s the fact that this act, that’s relatively unknown here in the U.S., spent a good portion of 2009 touring with TV on the Radio. And, most recently, there’s the name of its sophomore release for Peacefrog, Machine Dreams, which, channeling the alternate reality of Philip K. Dick, starts playing with artificial intelligence and the conflation of man and machine.
With a solitary, modulating tone, the slumbering robot that is Machine Dreams slowly stirs on its opening track, “A New.” Undulating bass and marching band snare follow to bring things fully to life. But when lead singer Yukimi Nagano enters the track, what had seemed to be our mechanically-led near-future takes an organic turn. Read more »
The silver-haired DJ, known to dance floors around the world as D. Ramirez, is back in Chicago this weekend, holding down the top spot at Crobar Saturday 29. Ramirez came to prominence championing electro house on global scale. He’s been voted best DJ in numerous dance-music magazine polls and garnered more than 20 chart toppers in the U.K. and Europe. As the electro-house sound has started to fade from public consciousness, Ramirez has gone to great new lengths, keeping himself relevant on the club scene with explorations into deeper techno and house sounds, teaming with Mark Knight of Toolroom Records and even producing remixes for the likes of Underworld.
The promoters putting the event together have been gracious in offering us a couple of guest-list spots for his performance, and we’d like to pass those on to you, our faithful Time Out readers. All you need to do to nab the guest-list spots is sign up for our new music e-mail newsletter before midnight tonight, Thursday, August 27. Friday, we’ll notify the winners via email. E-mail promotions@timeoutchicago.com, and for clarity’s sake: by entering this giveaway contest, you will be subscribed to Audio File, Time Out Chicago’s music newsletter. Winners will be on the will-call list at Crobar.
As an extra bonus, you can wet your whistle with the new D. Ramirez August mix, which includes two versions of his new single “Satur8,” the aforementioned Underworld remix “Downpipe”—voted by the BBC’s Pete Tong as an essential new tune—and ten other heavy hitters. Check the tracklist after the jump and download it here: Read more »
