The Vinyl Word

"Everyone's come back from their Chinese New Year holidays, so I guess it's about time to have a good party or something," says Declan O'Dowd, an artist and promoter in Taichung who has stepped in and saved the day for international breakbeat hero Freq Nasty, who is visiting the country.

Nasty -- who is signed to Skint records with producers Fatboy Slim and Dave Clarke -- was scheduled to play at Room18 tonight, but his gig was canceled at the last minute because the club's New Year makeover requires more finishing touches.

O'Dowd got together with DJ Blueman from BK William Studio and fellow Swank co-founder Liza Cioccio, to make sure that Nasty and his bouncy basslines were exposed to local audiences. As a result he will play at Club Rush in Taichung tonight instead.

The New Zealand expatriate, who has lived in England since the early 1990s, plays a blend of "urban-futuristic music" and "tinkers with the back end of rave culture ... carving radical aural geometry out of uncut bassline material and diamond-tipped breakbeats," according to his Web site (http://www.freqnasty.com).

"Freq Nasty is a crowd rocker and now one of the biggest artists in the wider world of breakbeat," O'Dowd says. "This event was not planned whatsoever, yet to have passed up an opportunity to hear this guy's beats would be a shame, as well as [making up for] Taichung's lack of visiting big DJ's due to its small population and the constant closing down of its clubs."

It's just over two hours and NT$500 to get down to Taichung from Taipei. Catch the bus from the Chengde Road bus terminal near Taipei Main Station. Buses to and from Taichung are available all night long and in the early morning.

Remaining in Taipei, the weekend's dancefloor filler will be Tyler Stadius, formerly known as T-bone, one of Canada's top DJs who started as a punk and migrated toward electronica when he realized rock `n' roll died with Sid and Nancy.

He started spinning at warehouse parties in Toronto before moving to Vancouver, where he got into the scene there before starting his first residency at the Romper Room. He opened the record shop Bassix in 1994 and is currently on a world tour of Asia, America, Europe and Anzac. At the Vancouver club Sonar, which he part owns, Stadius plays a funked-up, deep house mix mixed in with robot grooves. He also plays at Fabric in the UK.

The party weather forecast for the rest of the month is light showers of DJs, with an improving outlook after then, followed by intense sunshine. The Ministry of Sound still hasn't got its act together and should be opening in March now, rather than February, because its license hasn't come through, though the building is complete. The owners have promised us "the top 20 DJs in the world plus well-know dance bands like Hybrid."

LUXY will be depending on K Fancy and his boyz, plus DJ Spectro, for the rest of the month, after which there will be an Underwater tour to Kaohsiung and a Loop tour to Taichung, Taipei, Kaohsiung and Tainan.

The latter will bring us nicely into the low pressure front that always gathers at the beginning of April with Spring Scream. Mid-way through the same month, Heineken will be putting on the current holder of the world dub plate crown DJ Tiesto, at World Trade Center III, but details need to be confirmed.