The line-up for this year’s Sasquatch! festival has been announced! Go check their website. I’m playing on Sunday May 30th. Tickets go on sale Feb 20th.
Here’s an anecdote about Sasquatch: back when I was DJing for Kanye we played this festival in May of 2005. Kanye was just a few weeks away from finishing Late Registration. I hadn’t seen him in a while because he had been in the studio for so long. He was working on “Golddigger” and felt like testing it out live that day even though it wasn’t quite finished. I knew the song before it was recorded. Now that it was coming together, I told him I wanted to lay some scratches. I said “I want to scratch on ‘Get down!’ in that part where you say ‘get down girl, go ‘head get down’.” To prove my point, when we performed the song live (for the first time, with no rehearsal) I grabbed the sample and tried that scratch in front of this festival crowd of thousands. Kanye liked it, we flew to LA a few days later and the rest is history. Check my post from 2005 that shows a pic of the festival followed by a pic of me, Ye and Jon Brion in the studio.
I just came back from a 2-day, spur-of-the-moment trip to Paris during fashion week. This wasn’t planned at all: the Infinity +1 tour starts in a few days so I was supposed to just stay home and get ready. But last Friday Kanye popped into New York for a Vanessa Beecroft art show that he helped curate, and I went to check it out and say hi to the homie. As the naked ladies were laying between the statues of naked ladies, he told me he was dipping to the airport to catch a flight to Paris. “You should come, it’ll be fun.” I gave the old “I wish I could go but my tour is about to start and I’ve got a million things to finish up” response. It was such a caricature, I was the “regular guy” in a Visa commercial who ponders the impulsive purchase for once in his life. I went home pensive, and when I woke up the next morning I thought “you know what? I’m going.”
Following my last post about Good Vibrations, we’re now on the 2nd and final weekend of the Australian traveling festival. On the agenda: Sydney and the far-away Perth. People had been hyping up this Sydney show for the whole week. This would be the bigger, badder, deffer show of the bunch. We got there, scoped out the grounds as we rode around in our buggy and saw the masses of people undulating in the huge park… yep, this was gonna be a good one.
(That’s a little deeper in Aussie slang than the obvious “g’day”)
I’m reporting live via my hotel room in Sydney. I’m out here doing the Good Vibrations festival. In Australia they have these festivals that hit multiple cities. It’s like being part of a traveling circus for 10 days. A traveling techno circus. At every one of these shows I’m doing an A-Trak & Kid Sister set in one tent and then I run over to the main tent and do the Kanye show.
We were first supposed to go to Nigeria exactly one year ago for some Kanye dates but it was canceled because Jay-Z and Beyonce had just gone and they found it dangerous. So when I found out we were going this year I was like “oh great”…. but then I thought: we’re only going for 2 or 3 days and we probably won’t see anything else than the plane, the hotel and the venue so heck, this won’t feel any different than El Paso, Texas. I wasn’t shook anymore. Then as we got closer, they told us we had to get shots against hepatitis A and thyphoid and start taking malaria pills. “How victorian!” said my girlfriend. The band was flying out on the 12th but I had booked this 10.Deep x Fool’s Gold holiday party in New York on that date. Can’t I fly out on the 13th? Isn’t the first show on the 14th? “You can fly with Kanye on the private jet,” they tell me. Alright, if you insist.
Time to dust off the ol’ pad and pen. It’s the return of Alain Blogovitch. Web-Trak 2.0. Did ya miss me? I know, I know, my online chronicles took a severe dip in 2007. But I just finished the European leg of the Glow In The Dark tour with K-Dub and I simply had to let the ink pour. It’s now or never. Walk with me.
We’ve done a couple of Kanye shows since the new album dropped, but the official tour only started with this run. Whole new show, new band, new set, new stage design, new lights, new visuals, new catering. Nu rave? Almost, with all the neon-ness.
(You should read the previoius update first, it’ll make more sense.
-Ed.)
I know it’s a little perverse to complain about flying to Asia for some Kanye West shows, but after 15 shows in 2 weeks I would have loved to stay home for just a few days. No such luck. I had to go to Japan and Kuala Lumpur for 10 days.
Doulbe-0 7 is here, ladies and gents. Best wishes to you and yours. I hope you all had a restful holiday season full of spinning dreidels and/or waterfalls of eggnog.
I’ve been meaning to announce this for about a month, so I guess this is one of those “better late than never” things: the white label for my “Step Off” track with Little Brother is in stores now! But not for long because we made very limited quantities, so hurry. Hurry, you fiends of vinyl plates!
Now back to the torrid tell-all tales of traveling and tourism.
Australia has a lot of flies in the summer. I know it’s not summertime for most of you but it’s summertime for me, in ye olde southern hemisphere.
I also know I usually start these updates like this: “let’s pick up where the last one left off; I played in this city, then I played in that city, where I got a funny picture with this rapper; two weeks later, yatta yatta bim bam boom” and I work my way towards the present point, the origin of the axis. But this time I kinda feel like just picking up where this current tour started. I’m not skipping that much in the narrative scheme. I did a couple shows, including CMJ, and there you have it. Let’s go to Australia.
