Here’s me with my new lens…

Thanks Keith!

This past week has been my first shot at having a guest blogger.  I think it’s fun to have someone else pick the music because I am surprised by what awesome stuff get’s picked.  Keith – a SPECIAL thank you for Wednesday’s pic.  You can ask Heiruspecs how geeked out I was when I got your email and saw Sunshine People as a pick.

Next week – pics by DJ Jimmy 2 Times on some Hip Hop shit.  Stay tuned!

This is another banger of a track, nothing you’d start a set off with. It has some great Tech-House elements with a classic French feel too. (For the puritans, this is out of Belgium.) Was surprised to see a produced video for this. Interesting.

For those that followed along, hope you enjoyed some of these. It was fun for me to relive a few musical memories. Drop a comment if you feel I missed something crucial.

This is another track that is victim to the remix plague. There are dozens out there that destroy most of what is good about the original cut. Stick with the original I say. Classic never goes out of style.

Oooh, it’s even an elusive white label! Ha.

For some reason I had a hard time thinking that there could be good House out of a place like France. The Roule label eventually changed my mind. Makes sense I suppose.

I couldn’t believe this was actually on YouTube.

Official video/Radio Edit:

This track is on the level of Stardust. It’s not nearly as good musically, but every high school girl knows this track. You can’t deny it moved the floor in it’s prime and brought a smile to your face.

This particular video was a strong factor as well.

My name is Keith and I’ll be your guest song-of-the-day blogger this week. You may know me from http://www.kaizophoto.com/ or the guy with the infinite Cressida build. I was innocently jamming out to some music on my Zune last week when a song came on that I hadn’t heard in years (more on that song later this week). I sent it to Chris and told him he should use it for a daily song pick. Turned out he was planning on featuring classic House tracks this week. One thing led to another and here I am.

In the late ’90s through the early ’00s, I was involved with promoting & DJing raves and club events with Mile High and then Sound in Motion. During this same time, Chris was involved with another group doing the same thing, Family Werks. I knew a few of the other guys from that group a little bit better, but this was essentially when and how I met Chris.

I’m not a House expert. I started off spinning trance and ended my stint with more techy/progressive trance. There are probably hundreds of top ranking and crowd pleasing house tracks from this general era. Hopefully you’ll agree that the seven I pick are memorable, for better or worse.

We’ll kick it off with House Master Boyz & The Rude Boy of House: House Nation
You can’t have a classic house track without a vocal mentioning the word “house.” It’s just not possible. This was produced by Chicago’s Farley Jackmaster Funk and has some serious early ’90s synth & percussion feel to it. This is probably one of the first tracks to do so much repetition with a vocal and pull it off well, something imitated often after this. This track has more remixes than you’d believe and my favorite may not even be a remix, I can only remember hearing it. It was a mix with the piano and vocal from Marshall Jefferson’s Move Your Body over the beat and vocal of House Nation. Two ultra-catchy tracks that meshed well and my head nearly exploded. Anyways, enjoy the original:

A couple weeks ago, Keith and I went to the Wheels of Italy car show over at Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis.  I went to the Bearded Lady Bike Show with him earlier this year and hope we can keep going out to these things.  It’s a lot of fun.

As the name of the show implies, there are tons of cars/bikes from Italy.  Keith has a bias toward the bikes and you can see his (far superior) photo’s over at http://www.kaizophoto.com/.   I was in love with the new Alpha Romeo they had there.  The Maserati Gran Tourismo used to be a dream car of mine so it was awesome to see the old one parked next to the new one.  Mostly though, I came away thinking about the Detomaso.  For those who aren’t aware, that car is all American muscle in the middle of an Italian supercar chasis.

Here are some pics of what I thought were some of the coolest things there.  If it’s not Italian, it was just in the parkinglot outside.  At any good carshow, the parkinglot is basically an afterparty.  This was no exception.

^^^Peanutbutter guts!

As you can see, they come in all shapes and sizes.  Italian cars are all about style and power.  It was a blast.  I’ll definitely be going next year.  Hope you enjoyed.

So, this weekend we went up to Scott’s cabin.  It was half of TMF Opposition and Mandrew that went.  Basically, I bought 1100 rounds for the .22 that’s up there and realized that I didn’t make good on my goal to buy a hunting rifle or AR15 in time for this trip.  We also brought a ton of booze and we all pre-arranged our responsibility to cover meals.

The cabin is in Hawthorne Wisconsin and it takes about 3 hours to get there.  We had a ton of fun, wandering the logging roads by the cabin and attempting to fish.  I say attempt because I finally bought fishing gear and had an expirament with how tangled I can get the line to be. (Did you read that Asha?  Call me instead of texting… LOL).  We went up to the south shore of Superior, which from what I could see is far more beach like than the north shore is on the whole.

At any rate, we drank a lot, killed wood ticks, and took a ton of photo’s along the way.  Here’s some random one’s I took.  I’m sure Keith’s photo’s will be FAR better than mine and I’ll post a link over to his site when I see them go up.   Enjoy…

We were using the telescope to sight our shots and tell if we hit targets that were too far away to see by eye.   It’s easy enough to see when you hit a can (or a can of spraypaint) but not so easy to know that you just hit a bullseye on a target in the woods on the other side of the clearing.

A RARE shot of Keith in the wild…

Bryce and his “walking stick”…

When I leaned in to get this shot, it was obvious that there were a LOT of bee’s living in the roof of this car over the back seat.  The whole car was just a constant hum.  Couldn’t see them at all though.

This old house was abandoned in the woods near Scott’s cabin.  There’s still furniture and all kinds of stuff in it.  You can’t access it from any road and it’s totally collapsed.  In the basement, you can see parts of the floor from the upstairs.

We went to the south shore and found the mouth of a river that runs by the cabin.   There was this info board talking about the lost community that used to occupy these shores and how they collapsed.  Mind you, the whole time we were there, we were drinking so…

The next morning, Keith and I – the old men of the group – woke up early and since there was no Denny’s to go to, we wandered away…

Our wandering was fun and not long.  We woke up the rest of the crew with the sounds of gunfire.  They all came up to eat and join the fun…

Ahem.

After romping through the woods, we decided to head toward the Apostle Islands and spend the afternoon in Bayfield.  We debated actually going to Madeline Island, the largest of them, but bitched out on taking the ferry accross the waters of Superior.  Moreso here than I’ve ever felt before, Superior is really a sea even if it’s technically a lake.  We could have been looking at small island nation out in the water.   I regret not taking any real pics of the sorroundings but, Bayfield is a city built on a hill facing out east toward the Islands.

Look at this Hannah;

We had fun walking around the piers and such.

We went back, drank, and slept.  The next day we made a traditional stop on the way home…  You’ll have to look up Keith’s post later for more details.