Shield your eyes from the first of what will hopefully be many blog posts of 2013. Hope everyone enjoyed the review blog last week, it took me a while to narrow my favourites down but I thought I picked a decently varied bunch.
Someone on my fb feed posted an interesting status on the 31st basically questioning why us merry westerners are perfectly happy to ridicule the Mayans and their calendar of doom and yet still go through the same rigmarole year after year with regards New Year's Eve. Having personally experienced many a horribly disappointing New Year's Eve since I entered adolescence (4 or 5 years ago we went to see the fireworks in London and I accidentally left all our drink plus my mates scarf on the tube and when we got back to the station a mad Albanian gentleman tried and pretty much succeeded in battering the shit out of all 6 of us) when the expectation to party like an absolute nutter set in, I can definitely see where she was coming from.
It's this form of immense pressure that lead groups to force themselves into ludicrously complicated plans which require inch-perfect timing so that you're at just the right level of drunkenness and merriment when 12 O'Clock rolls around. This year, we opted for a far more settled approach, New Years Eve in a flat with a decent amount of alcohol. I suppose at the end of the day it's about who you're with and not what you're doing.
Then, in true hipster style, while everyone sat at home nursing hangovers on New Years Day, we were out at Peckham Palais for Electric Minds, and I was witness to what may be one of the live electronic performances of the year by the magnificent Henrik Schwarz... which leads me on nicely to the subject of this week's blog.
Now as those perceptive readers may have picked up on, Henrik is most certainly not from Yorkshire, nor in fact is he even from the UK. However on a whim I checked out the notes on my iPhone the day after Peckham and found I'd written the three solitary words 'blog about Schwarz', which is kind of adorable and surely means I have to follow through with it. So if anyone thinks I'm selling out or have lost patience with the Yorkshire music scene (and to be honest I doubt whether anyone really gives too much of a shit), then we can call this the final edition of the 'end of year specials' and next week will definitely definitely be back to normal.
So first of all let's all marvel at just how much Henrik looks like Karl Pilkington.
Enough marvelling? Very good. Now, while the man on the right is a bumbling buffoon (albeit quite a funny one), the man on the left is an absolute master of his art. At half past 4 in the morning of the 2nd January, having been out since 11, me and co. were unnervingly shattered and surrounded by such a high percentage of people on MD that, with all the darting tongues and chewing jawlines, I felt like I was stuck in a room with a bunch of lizard people. Nothing could have helped renew my energy more than an hour and a half from the aforementioned German.
What's really compelling about Henrik Schwarz is the astonishing variety of his sets. His genre is techno but his background and real passion is for jazz and soul and so weaved amongst his audacious techno beats and funky basslines are some fantastic re-works of tunes by the likes of Stevie Wonder and Bill Withers (see below). The Stevie Wonder edit is particularly scintillating, and was pulled out by Henrik as part of his encore, energising beyond belief for well past six in the morning. One of my definitive highlights of the night was watching Schwarz having to use minimal persuasive techniques to get the ludicrously large and dangerously bored security guard to let him play his final song, even though his set time had expired a while back. The man is passionate beyond belief, and that's what separates him from others in his category. While it's easy for a DJ to press a few buttons and let the music do the talking, Henrik Schwarz gets lost within his own sets and almost joins the audience in the enjoyment he gets out of them.
Schwarz has now been on the scene for a good number of years and was chosen to compile the 2010 DJ Kicks album, well worth a listen if you fancy a bit of procrastination. Along with 'Feeling You' and 'Who Is He', I've also linked his Boiler Room Berlin set, very similar to the one he went for in Peckham. Hope you like.
Way past 500 views now so thanks so much to everyone who's been reading.
Much love,
Max
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