erol again...

last Wednesday i went to see erol alkan for the second time, in the ucd student bar. i arrived minutes before his set started, the queue was monstrously big. thankfully, as a writer for my university's newspaper, i didn't have to pay in, but it would have been worth it either way.

erol opened with his dub of the klaxons' golden scans, a track which has grown on me despite initial indifference. i thought it sounded a little bit too much like i don't feel like dancing, but having heard the original now i see what he's done. nice work. next up was justice's new track phantom, another one that's penetrated my cynical skull (not as immediately as d.a.n.c.e., which i heard yesterday). i had been hanging back for a while, but around this time i went up for some proper boogie-boogie. while at the front i got some rubbish photographs, and a decent video of the man spinning herv's remix of hi jackin, a tune so good i was still humming it on my way home from the after-party the following morning...

these tracks aside, i thought the night was a bit tame - he played for barely 90 minutes, if that, unlike the two and a half/three hours he played in october. there was a certain sense of oomph missing from the night. he finished with the same mix of vitalic followed by daft punk's one more time/aerodynamic live track, but this time there was no encore. admittedly, it was in a student bar, but for all the furore surrounding the gig - people were claiming erol was charging five figures for the night, ucd students were not permitted without a student to sign them in, despite advertising going up city-wide - one thought that the night might have ended up being a bit more, well, special.

that said, i'd jump at the chance to see him again. and will of course continue to listen to his mixes endlessly...