Well, it had to happen at some point, and with Burial being the favourite to win this year’s Mercury Prize, now is as good a time as any.

Burial has been revealed to be the dissapointingly named Will Bevan, and he lives in South London. In a message posted on his MySpace yesterday, Will had this to say:

hi

big up everyone, take care, will ( burial )

Mercifully, this will put an end to the hilarious speculation over his identity. Pitchfork reported that The Sun newspaper thought he might me Aphex Twin or Fatboy Slim - how ridiculous is that? How on earth could someone with Norman Cook’s lack of subtlety make a dubstep record this nuanced - and where the hell did they get the idea that Richard D. James had any similarities whatsoever to Burial? I despair sometimes, I really do.

It’s that time of year again… time for the DJ’s of the world to descent on London and scratch, mix, and drop their way through an exhausting competition that sees some of the world’s best turntablists competing right here in London - and tickets are now available.

The event will take place on the 26th and 27th of September at the IndigO2 arena (my Macbook’s calendar tells me that is a Friday and Saturday), and it promises to smash a few faces in and make no mistake.

For tickets and information, head on over to the DMC Website.

Interesting to note this year is that there is no limit on what technology can be used - so that means Ableton, full on sequencers, scratch-pads, CDJ’s, it’s all fair game. What do you reckon? Fair? My prediction: the competition will be full of boundless creativity going on with all the toys available to DJ’s, but the winner will be a 2 turntable + analogue mixer DJ, because he’s ‘keeping it real’.

What you’re looking at here is the ATTIGO: TT, created by Dundee University student Scott Hobbs, and it looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
With the ATTIGO, users can mix, scratch and drop beats by manipulating the waveforms using the touch-screen interface. So it’s kind of like having a robot girlfriend, except this baby doesn’t make you brush your hair and visit it’s parents. Speaking of parents, this thing is like the lovechild of a dalek and one of the guys out of Daft Punk.

There’s a video of this thing in action after the jump. Hit the link.

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Beatfactor.ro have posted an interview with Fedde Le Grand, who talks about his numerous collaborations. He is joined by Ida Corr and Camille Jones.

The whole Beatfactor website is in foreign, and I don’t speak foreign, and I’m guessing neither do my readers, but the video is in English.

I have been unable to embed the video here so far (curse you, modern technology) so you can view the video at Beatfactor’s website here.

He is so Dutch.

It may be known (or it may not) that Justice were commisioned to do a mix CD for the esteemed Fabric Live series, but it was rejected by the chaps at Fabric because, as a spokesman put it, “it made my face fall off” (I may be paraphrasing / making this up).

You may also maybe or maybe not interested to hear that back in January it was released for free on teh internetz, that in some places it’s really very good and in other places, frankly bizarre.

I’m reposting this because since January, Justice have blown up somewhat and some newer fans might be looking for this sort of thing, (and because it’s a slow news week) so because I’m a nice person I shall kindly point you to this site. Where you can download it for free. Because Fabric are douchebags. (I’m just kidding ilu Fabric please don’t ban me!

Seriously though, you can see why this was rejected. It’s not really a DJ set per se, and would be laughed off the stage at Fabric - it’s more of a collection of Justice’s various influences mixed together. It’s weird and I don’t really know what they were thinking - have they not listened to a Fabric mix before?

Highlights include Goblin’s ‘Tenebrae’ (where the sample for ‘Phantom’ came from), the Midnight Juggernauts and Surkin. Full setlist after the jump.

Lowlights: Uffie.

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Well, it seems that you guys can’t get enough of The consumate grime artist covering a song by the whitest people in pop music so, by popular demand here is the mp3 of the video I posted last week.

Clicky here to download.

Excellent Brooklyn based band The National sat down during the recent ATP Festival here in the UK to give an exclusive interview to Soundproof Magazine.

Check it out HERE.

For the uninitiated, the Warehouse Project is a 12 week dance-music extravaganza held in Manchester, UK. Despite the fact that this blog focuses on dance music in London, we reckon that any self-respecting London clubber would drop the train ticket price to Manchester for pretty much any single one of the 30+ parties running.

Performers range from Dizzee Rascal to John Digweed to an Ed Banger Records party to Erol Alkan to Simian Mobile Disco to Richie Hawtin to De La Soul and… well you get the picture. The Hacienda are running a party there for god’s sake.

The whole thing kicks off on Friday the 26th of September and the events will be held in a cavernous venue beneath Manchester Picadilly train station. If I could afford it, I would be at every single one of these events.

p.s. Rumour has it that Daft Punk will play the closing party…

Schedule:
09/26: Launch Weekend Part 1
09/27: Launch Weekend Part 2
10/03: 10 Years of Valve Soundsystem
10/04: Eat Your Own Ears Presents…
10/10: The Essential Mix Party
10/11: The Ape 3rd Birthday
10/17: Minus Presents
10/18: Live at The Warehouse Project
10/24: Subliminal Sessions
10/25: Annie Mac Presents…
10/31: TBA
11/01: Exhibitionist
11/07: Bestival Reunion
11/08: The Chibuku Party
11/14: Cocoon
11/15: Goodgreef 8th Birthday
11/21: Cadenza Records Presents…
11/22: Ape Presents… Beatdown
11/28: James Zabiela, Plump DJs, Meat Katie
11/29: Erol & Friends
12/05: The Metropolis Birthday
12/06: A Store Street Special
12/12: Squarepusher
12/13: The Warehouse Special
12/19: Boys Noize, Modeselektor, M.A.N.D.Y.
12/20: Swedish House Mafia
12/26: We Love… Boxing Day
12/27: TBA
12/28: The Hacienda Presents

Freaking unbelievable stuff.

Alright, so it’s not strictly ‘dance’ music oriented, but I thought this was worth a post. Dizzee Rascal recently appeared on Radio 1’s ‘Live Lounge’ with Jo Whiley, and performed a cover of ‘That’s Not My Name’ with rapper/singer Chrome.

Key lyrics:

“They call me blood,
They call me rude boy,
They call me Oi,
They call me ‘Mate’
That’s not my name!”

Interestingly, it’s pretty good as well as being funny. And, beyond all expectations, Mr. Rascal has managed to shoehorn in some social commentary in there as well.

Nice.

Are you a DJ? Would you like somewhere nice and fancy to host your sets, demos, mixtapes or original songs? Then maybe we can help you out, and you can help us. We’d be happy to host your mp3 files for free, if they’re any good.

The benefit of this is that you’ll have an easy website address to link to rather than http://somerandondomhostingsite.com/fdhgadghdjhgkffaghjghaghajj.html. You’ll get http://www.angelbreaks.co.uk/yoursetname.mp3, which is nice and easy to remember. We’ll create a unique page for you to put graphics on if you want, as well as tracklistings and a description that can be as long or as short as you want, and we want nothing in return - except for perhaps the odd link back to the blog (the page with your tracklisting is fine).

We can also pass your tapes on to promoters and organisers who might want to put you on at their night - or maybe we’ll put you on ourselves (and yes, we pay).

If you’re interested, send an email to Adam with a description of your music, and maybe a few links to some music, or even the whole set if it’s hosted at one of the rubbish sites Please do not try and attach the set to the email, my account will not accept a file that large.

So get going!