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Smooth Move
Chilled out at the Cloak & Dagger Saturday night for this month’s instalment of DJ Anousheh ‘s Move On Up! party. This time around she invited the Mango Kid (the frontman of Danko Jones) and Chico (who put out the first Deadly Snakes EP) as guest DJs. Normally, the night focuses on vintage reggae and soul, but the Mango Kid decided to play mainly 90s hiphop as well as dropping What Is Love by Dee-Lite.
Chico stuck more to the format, which doesn’t differ much from how he used to play at various indie rock dance parties in the 90s.
The bar was pretty packed most of the night with a mixture of indie rock kids (Tangiers’s Josh Reichmann was in attendance), roots reggae fans and random College Street walk-ins. Good wholesome fun.
Lux lets loose
By now the word electro-clash generally inspires sneers of derision, but the short-lived genre has given birth to a number of synth disco offspring, one of which is the weekly Die Lux party at the Bovine Sex Club . The resident DJs, Barbi and Gerald (aka Matrix ), throw down an evil and funky mix of post-punk disco, obscure new wave, modern electro-pop, vintage electro and anything else that’s aggressive and danceable.
Even on a winter Monday the night draws a good-sized crowd. Some are Bovine regulars, but a bunch of attendees didn’t look like they’d normally find themselves at a rock club.
Die Lux offers sporadic live performances that, since they’re rarely promoted very aggressively, usually come as a surprise. Not a lot of dancing went on last Monday, but as Toronto gets used to these angular rhythms and the weather warms up, that will probably change.
Small glitch at Glances
Late Saturday night we ended up at 99 Sudbury for a tech-house event called Stealing Glances . This film warehouse usually gets used for soulful house events it was fun to watch the techno crowd discover one of the last warehouse venues in town. Ian Guthrie and Lee Osborne were DJing short sets back and forth all night, moving between stripped-down, chugging tech-house and stuff that sounded closer to new-school breaks. They even managed to drop a Depeche Mode remix (which unfortunately strayed a bit too close to trance).
The organizers did a good job on this one. The sound was better than at a lot of clubs, they’d rented a bunch of smart lights, and the action at the door was well organized.
The people running the live video projections had some technical difficulties, and for a large part of the night the screen showed an image of their desktop as they tried to get their program working.
Not a big deal, really – video projections at parties are overrated anyway.
benjaminb@nowtoronto.com
