Archive for November 10th, 2007

Man, Daddy Kev was off the hook spinning digital vinyl with Torq and Torq Conectiv. The crowd was head-bobbin, totally into it. It was like a miniclub goin’ on in there. The music is thumpin’ hard, and I’m off to go check out some more now.

Lori

Hey folks,

It’s Lori here. Well, I’m mostly here (mentally, at least). My co-workers and some industry peeps stayed up really late debating/discussing the state of the music industry and the state of hip-hop. It was a great, intense conversation until the wee, wee hours of the morning. But it was worth it. And now we’re juiced for today.

Yesterday was just crazy here. The Beatport stage outside with the Red Bull bar was massively kick-ass. All the panels were packed. I was hanging out in the Ableton Room around 7 p.m. last night and overheard two attendees talking. One guy was all excited. He said, “This is the best day ever. I had a half day at work, and right after I came here [Remix Hotel], and this place is sick! I’m having a fuckin’ blast!” So there you have it. The best day ever. See? Today could be ANOTHER best day ever. So you’ve got to come out, okay?

See you later,

Lori

Hi again. We’re already approaching the last day of Remix Hotel, and I’m a little woozy from all the action yesterday. If you see me and I’m downing Red Bulls, it’s ’cause the four hours of sleep last night didn’t really cut it. But it was worth it. As usual, yesterday was a whirlwind. I helped judge the iStandard Producers battle,which was cool. There were a lot of great tracks. Da Grindaz, who have apparently already worked with T.I., took home the prize for their commercial radio appeal. Their tracks were really hard-hitting and definitely had hit potential. But my personal favorite was a little left of center: Soul Nana & Taka. I believe Soul Nana is from Ghana, Africa, and Taka is from Toyko, Japan, and their tracks were as diverse as their nationalities. They didn’t have the same commercial style as Grindaz, but the tracks were really cool and original. iStandard chose the eight finalists from 60 entries, so everyone who hit the stage was really talented. And man, it takes guts to get up in front of all those people and put yourself out there. The other judges (including A&R from Interscope and Atlantic) and I didn’t always agree on everything, and we made various songwriting and technical suggestions, but hopefully our comments were helpful to the producers.

So after the battle, I ran over to watch DJ Babu scratch it up in the Rane room and DJ Rap talk about making tracks in Logic in the Apple room. And finally, the “Producers, Bring Your Beats” panel was really cool. Aloe Blacc, DJ Rhettmatic, DJ Babu, MED, Charles Goodan and a couple other producers picked numbers out of a bucket and gave feedback to people on their tracks. We’ll have a ton of video to show you of everything soon. Day 1 video will hopefully roll out here in a few hours.

Today we have T-Pain, Carmen Rizzo, FreQ Nasty and a ton of other producers, musicians, DJs, etc. in the house. Come on down! –Kylee