OK kids, here comes a big announcement. Are you sitting down? Of course you’re sitting down, you’re at the computer. Who computes standing up? Maybe you should get up to sit back down, just to get that “this is serious” feeling. You ready? Alright, I’m going in. (pause)

I started a new label with Nick Catchdubs. It’s called Fool’s Gold. Dust La Rock (designer of this fine website-slash-biosphere) is our art director. Big Brother Dave is somewhere behind the scenes. And we got beats for days. Nick and I (and a lot of our peers) are all in this scene of DJs and producers that sits somewhere in between rap and electronic music. Even though it spans different genres, it’s all club music in one form or another. And there aren’t really enough labels that are crystalizing that, taking it beyond the clubs and the laptops, onto the record shelves and, pardon the cheese, into history. This is for us by us, like Fubu. We’ll be A&R’ing compilations, pairing up artists, and the catalog will all have that signature look, thanks to Duster’s magic touch.

The first release is Kid Sister’s first single, “Control” (produced by XXXChange). “Damn Girl” is on the b-side, with a crazy new Juke remix by DJ Gant-Man. Gant is also doing an all-juke EP for us. We’re putting out an EP by Chicago phenoms Cool Kids (these guys are making rap bangers that sound like “6 ‘N The Mornin”-era Ice-T but updated for the hypebeast generation). I’ll be putting out my own solo projects too, starting with a bootleg 12″ of remixes taken from my Dirty South Dance mixtape. You can expect projects from GLC, Kavinsky, Trackademicks, Flosstradamus and more in the next couple of months. Yeah man. This is the part where you open a new tab and check out our myspace page: www.myspace.com/foolsgoldrecs.

By the way can I just point out that I updated this diary just 2 weeks ago and I’m already back!? Do you know how rare that is? Not to pat myself on the back because I should be on here every week but still, I’m a bit startled. I just updated the Upcoming Shows with all the SXSW and Winter Music madness. This is the first time I do SXSW so I’m going all out with 8 shows in 4 days. Gotta push the new label and the mixtape! Mom, I’m going to Texas.

Damn, and I just got back from Europe. We finished the Catch An Attitude Tour a few days ago. In the words of Mr. Sagdiev, “great success!” although the last run of 5 shows in a row was quite grueling. I don’t know if the word “grueling” originally meant “which makes you feel like gruel”, but that’s how I felt. Like gruel. (Sidebar: does “gritting” have anything to do with grits then?) All breakfast jokes aside (a side of toast… OK I’ll stop), we didn’t sleep much and we didn’t internet much. After our only real day off midway, which was spent gallivanting around London, shopping and doing laundry, we headed out to Oxford. Let’s not talk about Oxford. Every tour has its one or two disappointing shows… nuff said. The next day, after 3 hours of sleep, we took a bus to London and a flight to Copenhagen. We were pooped when we got there, but the promoters were super nice and the show was great. I think The Rub had played there before. I remember expecting Copenhagen to be good and it didn’t disappoint.

Then we went to Paris, for what was probably the most hyped night of the whole tour. On our way there we found out that there’s a Catch An Attitude SHOE! Disque Primeur and Clark magazine linked up with Le Coq Sportif and made some magic happen. They took the wonderful Paris flyer and resuscitated it… in shoe form!

We got into Paris and had dinner with Dave and the aforementioned fam, including Dabaaz who was also playing at the gig and whom I did a beat for on his new album. This dinner was up there with the Barcelona feast in terms of culinary highlights of the tour. Look up “tartiflette” on the internets to see what we were grubbin’ on. And then came the show. The whole Ed Banger posse came out (Justice, Mehdi, Busy P, Uffie), along with theFluokids ambassadors, fellow DJs from our DMC past, even friends from Montreal and, as evidenced here, the ubiquitous Cobrasnake. That night Kid Sister outshined all of us. She had Paris in the palm of her fancy-nail-adorned hand. The Rex is a big room, like over 1,000 people, so it was a pretty epic set for her. The show finished at 5am and we had an early flight so we decided to stay up. We went to see cousin Mehdi, who was also staying up for an early flight. Then we went to get free breakfast back at the hotel at 7am, and took the subway over to the Eiffel tower. I’d seen it before but never went right under it. When you’re on tour sometimes you don’t even realize where you are because you’re moving around so much. But when you’re at the foot of the Eiffel tower that shit sinks in.

Then came the home stretch which sometimes seemed completely surreal. We had to take 3 trains to get to Sheffield. When you’re running on no sleep and you pack luggage like I do, that’s no small feat. But I think the quality of the hotel (I’d even say just the view from my room) made up for all of that. It was noice. That was also Craze’s last show with us. Craze spent the whole last week of the tour without one of his suitcases because their airlines “misplaced” it and then it could never catch up with our daily conveyance. Dude is a trooper. After another 4 hour night we took another train and another flight to Berlin, which was the last Catch An Attitude show. We were picked up in the Scooby Doo van and were taken to this apartment where we were staying. I think the club owns it. There was a 2 hours blitz to catch up with whatever internetting we couldn’t do on the previous days, even though we barely had one bar of wi-fi at that spot (“neeeeeeeeerd!”), and then we had a very pleasant dinner that made us forget how shredded we were, thanks to tasty schnitzels and a lovely selection of music that included my favorite Cameo song, “Single Life”. (For reasons that I never understood, the iTunes Canadian store used to have the video for that song. They probably still have it. It’s great.) It was a good last show because it was more laid-back and improvised. I played a bunch of rare groove stuff and fast early-90s rap, because that restaurant had put me in a groovy mood, and i think it worked out quite well. I expected Berlin to be a techno crowd but it really wasn’t. And that was it for the tour! We flew back to London and the rest of the posse headed back out to the new continent.

Meanwhile I stuck around for an extra week. Spent 2 days in Paris where I caught up with my bro, visited Justice in their studio/dungeon, played the Fool’s Gold ambassador role with the Ed Banger cousins, saw my London homies from Yo-Yo and made a few more lil’ moves for upcoming releases. Then I Eurostarred it back to London, spent a few more days politicking and finally headed home. I’m not even emptying my suitcase. SXSW is in 2 days!

Oh and as if there weren’t enough links in this update, I wanted to point you to one more hyperlink. Riottt.com is an excellent website, and they have a “guest blogger page” called The Wire which now features your humble servant, me. In all honesty they just copy what’s on this fine diary (at least for now), but i’s worth checking out to see what Haze and Mister Cartoon are up to at the same time.