Month: November 2017

Hoping for England

Being a die-hard England fan is no walk in the park. The vastly underwhelming past decade or so of football has well and truly conditioned us to be deadly-efficient at sucking the tiny fragments and molecules of positivity from any situation, no matter how mortally depressing. We are in a sense much like the cacti in the desert that are able to somehow make a living in the most torrid of desert conditions. Sucking moisture from the dry sand.

Beneath the surface of habitual pessimism and the perennial ‘England are useless’ cliche, we have great hope that our national side might one day get its shit together.

A lot of this hope comes from the youth. There’s always some new kid on the block who bursts on the scene and sets the Premier League ablaze. Players like Sterling, Rashford, Ali, Stones, they seem to come around quite frequently.

Of course, we know that even if these players do develop into greats, it doesn’t mean they will do it for England. Look at Wayne Rooney, the bloke is the all time leading goalscorer, having scored more than Sir Bobby, but he’s done next to nothing in major tournaments, most of his goals coming from penalties against San Marino. He couldn’t hack it. But still, the arrival of the Messiah is always round the corner. A certain Harry Kane is stepping into those shoes nicely at the moment. He is proving to be unstoppable, and surely it won’t be long before he gets scooped up by the Galácticos and scales Alan Shearer-like heights.

But behind him and the new Tottenham wizz kids, we’ve got crop full of world beaters waiting to take their chance. Our under 17s just won the World Cup, and just about every other team below the 21s have excelled on the world stage this year. Let’s hope to God this Phil Foden lad and all of his mates get given the leg up they need. The potential is undeniably there. The signs are good. Let’s hope we don’t find a way fuck it up for them.

Every five years or so England managers are disgraced, and resign before being burned at the stake, and replaced with a whole new manager with a different ‘philosophy’ altogether. And with every new manager promises a complete squad overhaul and team revamp. This is of course a good thing.  It’s happened so many times now that one of these times the gamble has surely got to pay off. It has to happen eventually, that’s basic science. One day, the cogs will simple slide into place, and England will become a lethal footballing machine…

So we’ve been alternating between states of total, bone-crushing disenfranchisement, and latent bursts of flickering optimism. Now is certainly a period for the latter to dominate. Last night a diminished England team full of youngsters took on the world champions Germany and held them to a goalless draw at Wembley. We played pretty well in defence and attack and could easily have won the game, had we taken a few simple chances. The likes of Harry Maguire, Trippier, Abraham, Gomez and Ruben Loftus-Cheek rose to the occasion ( Ruben Loftus-Cheek. What the hell kind of name is that? It’s probably the wackiest name I’ve ever heard in my life, no word of a lie). Eric Dier is looking like everything we need in midfield right now,  John Stones is soon to become the most solid centre half in the Premier League. Vardy is a menace. Pickford has the makings of an excellent keeper. Despite the fact all of these didn’t look out of place on the night, we can’t help but think if we had super Harry last night the net would have bulged.

Watching Lingard miss that half volley inside the six yard box in the 93rd minute was typically exasperating. You’re watching it while it happens in real time and you just know it’s not going to go in. So you go up to the bar, and order a nice big pint of ale that you can’t really afford and you’re back in the real world with the rest of the shitmunchers.

Things can only get better from here and sooner or later we’re going to smash a chance like that into the roof of the net. We have the coolest manager on the planet, the best young talent, and are home to the finest league in the world. We even created this stupid game in the first place. We can’t keep letting the Germans have all the fun. It’s time for them to fuck off. They’ll surely get bored of it all soon anyway, and then it will be England’s time to take over the world…

That’s right, we always say it my fellow cacti, but there are some serious positives to suck from this England team, so get behind the lads because the good times are coming, you’d better believe it.

Afterlife is the best party in the world

Last weekend I experienced almost 16 hours under the upside down man, and after you’ve been on that journey for so long, you struggle to truly come back to Earth afterwards. 5,000 people turned up to the airport that is Printworks on Saturday to see the likes of Vaal, Recondite, Patrice Baumel, Mano Le Tough, Woo York, Tale of Us, SHDW and Obscure Shape, and more. My highlights-

On arrival Vaal was setting the scene in the Press Halls. She was playing all manner of experimental, dark and bassy sounds, which is what we have come to expect from such an enigmatic young artist. These were alongside a few classics like Polarstern from Mind Against, which never fails to drive anybody listening batshit crazy. I took delight in the fact I would be seeing another mesmerising set from her again at Part II, in 12 hours time. Patrice Baumel followed, with a much more upbeat, and bouncy set reminiscent of his prolific Voyage mix, featuring his classy new track Engage.

Then there was Kiasmos, who need no introduction. It was a live set, so the audience got the whole package, Looped, Swept, Lit, Thrown- the lot. It is always wonderful to see how much enthusiasm these two put into their sets, for them it is very much a performance. If you get the privilege of seeing these two perform live, you can expect them to be jumping around at the front of the stage, Janus Rasmussen’s, hair flopping about all over the place, elbows here there and everywhere. Standing there bathing in the glow of white and blue lights I even saw a girl crying to herself at one stage. Even I felt a bit like bawling like a baby when Bent came on. It’s emotional stuff.

Room two, The Charge Bay, was a nasty, dark little sweat-box when we got there to see Woo York. They were blasting through their devastating recent productions, such as Alien Worlds, Uranium Echoes and Afterlife’s very own Hypernova, all with electrifying acidy new sounds thrown on top in order to achieve all manner of lethal effects. You cannot beat the gallop of a Woo York beat. It picks you up and casts you into dark, magical new landscapes. The Woo York experience is so outrageous and other-worldly you barely know what to do with it but charge around like a rhinoceros on speed. This dark techno bunker seemed like the perfect location for it.

Recondite soon came on the scene, and when he’s there you know about it. With his seemingly infinite library of his own music, you have absolutely no idea what the man is going to do, but you know that you are in the hands of one of electronic music’s most esoteric geniuses. A man who only listens to his own music. Who does he think he is? In this one he teased us with classics such as Buteo, and a load of completely recondite stuff presumably from his new up and coming album. He achieved a perfect harmony between melancholy sounds from tracks like Sol, and the harder hitting stuff. He dropped Phalanx in, with force. My friend turned to me and said ‘this is the greatest track of all time’. I agreed wholeheartedly.

I’ve seen Tale of Us five times this year and every set has been completely different. Most tracks have been unidentifiable, and you wonder where on Earth they come from. Were they created by humans, or designed by some kind of divine entity and just put there like the rocks and the trees? Highlights from their closing set were new stuff from the unstoppable Mind Against, and the scintillating Fideles (another Italian duo who have burst onto the scene with their new EP released on Afterlife) playing The Tensior, those deeply computerised sounds raining down upon the crowd. They ended the same as they did in Amsterdam, with Bodzin’s thumping, glittering Strand (Afterlife) and their soul stirring and innovative edit of Hans Zimmer’s Time, eight hours of music ending on one piano note. The gratitude that Tale show at the end of every event, staying behind to clap the crowd, thanking them with hand on heart, is a wonderful thing to see and shows that they are truly grateful, seemingly in awe of their fans who have supported them in creating this mesmerising other world for us all to live in.

After getting our coats we zipped across to Shoreditch High Street via the overground to the after party at Village Underground, a simple, no-bollocks venue with one stage- a classic warehouse a bit like a cave. This is a venue that Tale of Us have no doubt become very fond of after turning up last year to debut their new night in the UK playing for eight hours non-stop. They would have been absolutely over the moon no doubt to see how their night has snowballed insurmountably over the past year.

Vaal again plucked a plethora of gems out of her hat, starting off playing ambient tracks like Hunter/Game’s Distant Storms, then later stomping through the night with tracks like The Hangar, and Barnt’s take on Monument.

Then a nice touch from the curators; Tale of Us decided to hand over the keys to the decks to SHDW and Obscure Shape to close the night. Their own set was of course impossible to truly sum up with paltry words, and was one of the most varied sets you could ever hear. Fideles, Secret Garden was a beauty, then loads of dark unrecognisable stuff. Towards the end we went back about 5 years with Skream’s Let It Go and some Trentemoller. They even threw in Another Earth, which for five minutes transported everybody to exactly that.

Cue SHDW and Obscure Shape who then proceeded to attack us with obscene stomping beats and dark, haunting sounds for two hours. They played nothing but their own stuff, and the occasional remix, like the naughty Konstantin Sibold remix of Gesang Der Toten Dinge. Their finest track though is Aus Der Tiefe Der Zeit, which they played early on to dreaming ears.

It was fantastic to see so many live sets, so many artists who believe so much in their own work and their own sound. Afterlife was created this way, achieving the perfect balance between the best live creators and performers with the most visionary, knowledgeable and skilled DJs on the scene. All with a penchant for ethereal sounds that take listeners to a dazzling new sensory universe.

To go to Afterlife is to immerse oneself in dark lights, a euphony of sounds impossible to discover elsewhere, an elated crowd, and a constantly fluctuating atmosphere bordering on the extra-terrestrial at moments. With the quality of artists you see on the bill, and the lightning speed that melodic techno (?) is progressing and evolving, every Afterlife is guaranteed to be a unique experience that nobody will forget. Afterlife is certainly the best party in the world.