blog
20.December.2010
After over 7 hour minibus transportation and slight frustration on crossing the border we finally arrived to St. Petersburg. A city where are people as much as in whole Finland! The bus took us directly to the address where we stayed at and we were welcomed by the owner of apartment. The first plan was to do the setting up and soundcheck first and get some nutrition after, but a local heavy metal band playing in Griboedov club turned our plans vice versa. Griboedov is a duplex club with an underground party zone and upper floor separated building cafeteria/restaurant with funkier mood, working perfectly as a chilling zone after the party. Both are open over the whole night and the food is delicous!
After the heavy metal performance we were allowed to get our stuff on the stage and do the setup and soundcheck as fast as possible, since it was nearly time to start the electro event. Luckily we have set up that current gadget combination for several times now, so everything was quite easily finished. Crowd was increasing and most of them was gathered to watch the setting up and we got the first loud cheers when just a soundcheck was going on *laughter*
The first DJ's made sure that the party started with a loud banging which was great and fast uplifting for the crowd's mood. Our show started at 02:30 and lasted for one hour. The track listing was very similar to our show in Helsinki in a couple of weeks ago. We started with Human Beyond and played mostly the album tracks plus few older one. Technically the playing was good, but till the middle of the show the mood had gotten so high that one of the transistors in our light controlling unit broke down and got one or two lights to light up all the time, so we ended with the pretty new unreleased track, Infiltrator Unit. We were really taken with a great cheer so it was excellent feeling to play to highly energetic audience! Crowd was shouting "Sexy droid" from time to time but unluckily we didn't have that track ready for this show. That mistake needs to be fixed immediately! Rest of the evening was banging in full throttle till the end and the upper floor cafeteria gave us a relaxation place before ending the night.
On the next day we got a little sightseeing around the city, but it really needs several days to explore more of it. There is so much to see from science expeditions to illuminated historical buildings! The day ended with a fine cognac drinking session before the departure. We almost had a slight rush to get over the border because Visas were expiring till the midnight.
Hosting was truly great and big thanks for everything to Vadim, Pasha and their crew who we met for the first time and also to people who gave their effort to make arrangements stay in the track! See you all next time!
спасибо!
6.December.2010
Blastromen thanks every participant in Cabaret Haure, it was a great night!
Show at homebase with easy arrangements, but still the whole show was driven in full throttle. Interpreting the noise from the full crowded audience, the show obviously must have seen out good. It is truly great to perform to audience like that! The technical side worked great and implementation of our light show awoke some interest and was quite directly asked how they were made. Some information has already been published: earlier
We have found out, that some recorded video material can already be seen from: Youtube
See you again in near future! Next show in Saint Petersburg/Russia.
4.October.2010
Entering in October to warm Spain from cold Northern climate was very pleasant since it was not too hot or cold weather, just perfect! For the first time in Madrid we luckily got plenty of spare time to get a slight glimpse of the town, especially the center of it and of course the part of the town where Specka exists. Very nice town with tall buildings and even if you keep walking, you'll never get out of the lively environment.
The Specka! Small but so intimate club where the energy of the crowd can't get scattered, conversely the feeling is high all the time.
Sound check was scheduled good so everyone had plenty of time to setup the machines and test that everything works and sound is good. Although Blastromen used most of it with checking up machine synchronization, mixing and microphone/vocoder issues. In the soundcheck we noticed, that during our set it was necessary to shutdown one of the master speaker right behind us since it was giving loads of pressure to microphones. That causes unwanted massive continous noise through vocoder and destroys the lyrics. The speaker shutdown was done so there was only decent amount of distraction in vocoders. Manual live mixing of vocoder volume was still needed.
Our set started at 3:00 AM, right after Spectrums Data Forces' hard banging DJ set, outstanding electro DJing! We introduced for the first time live the album title track "Human Beyond" for the starters which seemed to be liked due to cheer it got. Also from the beginning of the whole live set we showed what we've been informing about: the new visual performance, which almost has an imagination as a limit. Unfortunately there were a lot of flickering on the other jacket's light wire at one point, but besides that visual side worked well. Other technical issue we suffered, was that the in-ear monitoring went out for some reason on the second track "Battlenet", so we had to continue the rest of the set without monitoring at all, just to hear the same master sound the audience was listening. It was not easy, but neither impossible so we managed through the set like that as well. Overally everything went well and also another new track was played in the set, "Infiltrator Unit". It was the last track and gave good banging for the last minutes before leaving the stage.
Audience feedback during the set and after was very nice! Blastromen are truly honoured of the cheer and people meeting us.
Commonly the music was good for the whole evening, thanks to all DJ's. Darxid's and Bas Madrid's live sets was honestly speaking very smashing! It was nice to see the fluency between hit tracks in Darxid's set. Bas Madrid's pure hardware use without any computer was very respectful and the tracks were very massive and got a unique sound! After our set DJ Stingray made sure, that the quality music was up till the last second of the event! Electro mixed with detroit influences techno, quality!
Thanks to all the people present! Gracias Spain and other represented countries (Malta, Russia, etc.)! Special thanks to Bas Madrid with his crew for very kind hosting and taking care everything is right in place!
27.August.2010
Computer has taken more role on controlling the visuals, which enables setting more intelligent patterns for lights to follow the music. Besides hearing dark beats, you can also sense the smell of soldering iron in Blastromen studio. Approaching gig in Madrid will bring these latest inventions alive for the first time in Blastromen's history!
06.April.2010
Our debut gig abroad was performed on 4/APR/2010 in Leipzig/Germany, presented by Blackred. After arriving to Leipzig we must admit it's really a beautiful city with old but glorious buildings and nice architecture in many aspects. Event started at 11 pm in the Superkronik -club in Plagwitz. At the very early point the electro side in the club was almost fully crowded during the stomping electro DJ set by Magnetic and Disco 69. Crowd was very energetic and in an uplifting state when we gathered around our equipment.
New intro with opening track "Blasteroids" turned out to be a good start. Actually this was the first time ever "Blasteroids" was performed alive! The set was built to be starting with technologic sounding stuff and turning to be more aggressive and darker till the end. In these terms the last track was an exception, Sky City 1000. We could have had stopped after "Concealed ancient alien dynasty" which was the second last track, because it ended with epic and aggressive mood. That could have been a good decision, because during the last track the crowd latest noticed the difficulties we were suffering. We suffered from technical problems due to messed up second synthesizer and "Sky City 1000" had the worst maltreat. We almost stopped playing in the middle of the track, because it was quite messed up. As persistent galactic guerillas we still played through the whole song trying to hide the mistakes with other elements and effects, but it was a mission impossible. The crowd didn't seem to mind, but this really taught us to improve certain things to avoid them later on in variable gig conditions.
With the visual performing we made few compromises. Normally we have controlled the blue spot lights, strobe light and smoke machine (set low behind us) by ourselves, but in the souncheck we decided to control only the jacket lights, because of unfamiliar control unit for the other lights. In our aspect this caused a bit of lack on the visual performing, but positive thing was to have more time on controlling every other stuff. As a new stuff we introduced new lights on our jacket for the first time. Those new lights matched great with certain parts of the tracklist but could have been more impressive with better adjusted and controlled smoke and strobe behind us and planned usage of the blue spot lights.
After the show and the cheer we got we had a strict timeline to catch the plane, and we feel sorry for packing the stuff off the stage in the middle of the event. After all and despite the technical difficulties the show from our view was one of the best performing situations and we had good feeling to play to energetic crowd that was few times yelling so loud that it also went through the vocoder!
Rest of the evening music supply was great! Rarely you get to hear such a continous electro hit list. Big up to DJ's! Big thanks to the audience and all the people present! Another really big thanks to Blackred & co. and honest respect for their work! These guys with their crew truly know how to host guests with warm welcome and taking care that everything is fine!
|
