5 Questions with Rags #30 - DJ Jimi Needles (w/ Exclusive Remix!)

As I’ve ventured further into the world of electronic music, more pointedly – BASS MUSIC – I’ve noticed an incredible gap between the accessible and the challenging. It seems the entry-level stuff gets discarded quickly in favour of darker, harder-on-the-ear music. The artists that newbies and vets can agree on get further and further away from one another. Sometimes though there are artists, DJs, who dwell in that vast chasm, building tiny bridges so friends on either side of the divide can find each other once again. Jimi Needles is one of these DJs. His mixes and mixtapes are places where people who aren’t familiar with the increasingly large world of bass music can sit comfortably with the ones who need the harder stuff after years of the easy shit. His soundcloud has become an invaluable tool in my life for finding a quick solution as to what to put on when the downtime in a group comes, or even better, when trying to listen to something new with people who have less clue than I and still want their electronic music rooted in the comfortable rhythms and grooves of real life. This is all a long way of saying Jimi Needles makes bass music that everyone can love. If you’re having a party and need to get asses shaking, I promise, you can’t go wrong.

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1. Do you remember the first album you bought with your own money?

Fatboy Slim, You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby. That album was fucking sick and it’s still the sickest thing ever.

What’s your favourite track on there?

One is “Praise You.” I don’t know about you, but you know when you get older and you just want to investigate where the DNA of these songs comes from? For instance, you go onto Who Samples and type in any song and it’ll tell you who and what was sampled. As a 10 year old I had never had anything like that and now it really appeals to me. I was kind of aware of hip-hop at the time because I had a CD I was given around 1996, it had Public Enemy and stuff on it and I was just like, “Whoa, what the fuck is this?” It was a compilation disc and I thought it was completely sick. I could make the correlation that I really liked the funky beats and aggressive lyrics then I heard Fatboy Slim and thought, “Okay, I still like this but it’s not hip-hop.” I didn’t even know what it was called. I mean, it’s breaks, but when I was a kid I didn’t know what the fuck it was. But that album, when you take samples and arrange them, you still can’t make it the same as it is on the album. It’s absolutely mental how someone does that. It takes the most extensive musical mind to pull that off. And Norman Cook, Fatboy Slim, paved the way. There was also scratching on there and scratching was something I was aware of but not being cool or a DJ, I had no fucking idea what it was really was. So, there’s “Praise You” and there’s also a track on there called “Fucking in Heaven,” that I used play really loud. My parents would come upstairs and say, “What the fuck is this?”

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5 Questions with Rags #29 - Featurecast (!!!)

Featurecast is best. He’s held a stop spot on my listening list since my good friend and Guide to the Cosmos introduced me to the groovy sounds of the mighty Featurecast a couple of years ago. I’ve seen him live is a goddamned clinic. Featurecast embodies everything I love about an artist, DJ or otherwise – a willingness to try new things, to bring in new elements, a lack of regard for predefined definitions of their art and most of all, the ability to keep up a consistently high quality with everything they do. Dude is a breaks champion, rocks Ghetto Funk like no one’s business, even helped me start my journey in trying to enjoy drum ‘n’ bass. I always dig his drum ‘n’ bass. And even though he’s on the other side of the Atlantic, he’s a fixture over here on the Canadian West Coast. This past summer I missed him in my homebase of Victoria (I was in Vancouver knocking other legends off my list) and just the other day was opining of how long it’s been since the last time I shook my ass to the mighty Featurecast. Luckily for me, and all other Victoria funk-lovers, he’s going to be back here on Dec.3 with other awesome acts, and other 5 Questions answerers, Timothy Wisdom and The Funkee Wadd! I managed to get a few of Mr. Cast’s minutes in between his various DJ and dad duties, to get another round of delicious answers to the 5 Questions! Big respect to Featurecast.

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1. Do you remember the first album you bought with your own money? What format was it? Favourite track? Do you still have it? Anything else you may remember about it.

The first album I got was actually a Christmas gift and it was Run DMC's Greatest Hits on double vinyl and I have still shrink wrapped till this day. I must have listened to it like a 1000 times! I’m still a huge fan of Run DMC and find it funny that the Run DMC t-shirt has become a fashion accessory these days in the UK. As for the first record I ever bought myself....it was the Ghostbusters theme song that I got in a toy shop when I was a kid. I'm not sure I even knew what a record even was back then but I bought it with my pocket money just because of the amazing cover. 

2. When is the last time you did something for the first time?

Few days ago…going down a slide head first at a kids soft play centre with my daughter. So DJ, rock and roll, I know! Lol

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5 Questions with Rags #28 - Def 3

I’ve seen Def3 rock a few crowds over the last year and his album Wildlif3 has been in regular rotation on the headphones since its release. This past summer I saw him rock out with the mighty SkiiTour at Shambhala and, more notably, he opened the first night of hip-hops at Phillip’s Brewery on the first night of the Rifflandia festival, here in Victoria. That was more notable for a couple of reasons, 1) It was just Def3 and his band doing their thing rather than working in support of a DJ, and 2) In a night full of yelling and barking and needlessly profane trap-rap, Def3 embodied everything I love about hip-hop and specifically, Canadian hip-hop. When Def3’s joints are pumping from the stage the love and respect for the art form is palpable and wholly addictive. I’ve been wanting to get ahold of the homey for a few minutes now and was happy to get him fresh off rock Portland with fellow Canadian hip-hop masters, Sweatshop Union. We talked about Hallowe’en, Thomas Edison and the current, amazing state of hip-hop. Respect to Def3 and Saskatchewan, because really, how often to I get to shout Saskatchewan?

1. Do you remember the first album you went out and bought with your own money?

Yeah, actually. It was Wreckx-N-Effect,  Hard or Smooth, on cassette.

Do you still have it?

No. I have some of my tapes, but that one I don’t have anymore. I still have quite a few but a lot of them are pretty damaged.

It’s not a particularly hardy medium, eh?

No. <laugh>

2. Can you think of a movie that had an affect on the way you saw the world?

If we’re talking about fiction, I’d say Magnolia. That was really cool. Documentary-wise – I watched a movie called Forks Over Knives that kind of twisted my head up a bit and turned me into a vegetarian for awhile.

For awhile…You’re not a vegetarian anymore?

No. I’m not anymore. I was for almost a year, not super long. I went to Europe and tried for awhile. Interesting story: I met a person will full-blown cancer who was a vegan and that also twisted me up a bit. I thought, “How is that possible?”

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5 Questions with Rags #27 - Kevan McGovern (Filmmaker)

Vancouver filmmaker Kevan McGovern is in the midst of a huge undertaking, attempting to document the importance and impact of electronic music and festival culture with his feature-length documentary I/O (Input/Output). What started as a love-affair with the legendary Shambhala Music Festival in Salmo, BC, has become an all-encompassing passion. Last year saw the release of the Shambhala Experience, a smaller documentary that dives into Shambhala specifically. I had the pleasure of catching it last summer right before the festival and highly recommend it for those who have gone to the festival and those that are even the least bit curious about the festival. Luckily it’s been made easily available as part of a new Kickstarter to help with the completion of the feature-length I/O. The documentary goes beyond Shambhala to capture the spirit that makes the EDM festival culture so vibrant, unique and ultimate important. (I know EDM is a shitty term, but it’s all-encompassing and easy to type, so lay off.)

It’s not every day you get a chance to nerd out hard about something you love with a genuine expert (And a bigger nerd about it than you) so I couldn’t just leave it with the 5 Questions this time. Take a moment to check out what I/O is all about, and then enjoy our nerdy Shambhala chat and another rousing round of the 5 Questions!

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1. Do you remember the first album you bought with your own money?

The first album I went out and picked was the the Crystal Method’s first album. That was probably my first exposure to electronic music.

I think that was a lot of people’s first exposure, right? Certainly the beginning of mine.

They were some of the first electronic music pioneers that made it into the mainstream before a lot of others.

Have you seen Crystal Method live?

I’ve seen one of the members play at Burning Man, but haven’t seen both of them?

2. Can you think of a movie that you saw that had an effect on the way you saw the world?

The first thing that comes to mind is the Matrix. I was very deep into that. My favourite movie is Almost Famous and that made me see things very differently. I saw myself in the protagonist. I just love that movie so much. I could watch it forever.

I could watch Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Lester Bangs for all times and be happy.

I know right. “Do not make friends with the rock stars.” There are so many amazing cameos in that movie. It’s mind-boggling how many people pop up.

It’s got my boy Marc Maron!

A lot of people don’t remember Jimmy Fallon is in there too.

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The Big Work - I try to explain why you should listen to Dan Bern by listening to all of the Dan Bern. Pt.1

“When I tell you that I love you don’t test my love, accept my love, don’t test my love, ‘cause maybe I don’t love you all that much.” – from “Jerusalem” (Dog Boy Van EP, Dan Bern)

That’s a bold way to introduce oneself to the world and with both his first EP and full-length debut, Dan Bern did it twice. If you look at the words long enough or hear them sung enough times you can see it all right there, the lifeline that runs through one of the most consistently strong songwriting careers this side of <BLANK> (You can fill this in with any songwriter you like that was going before 1996). It’s a short simple string of words that is at once audacious, painfully self-aware, slightly nihilistic, dripping with feeling and most importantly (?) very Funny.

I discovered the music of Dan Bern sometime around my last couple of years in high school, when I was just starting to fumble around in the dark, attempting to carve an identity for myself. By this time, Bern had released three full-length records (Dan Bern, Fifty Eggs & Smartie Mine), so there was a lot to devour. A music nerd from my youngest days I was pretty well versed in guys with guitars, but I’d never heard anything like this. Listening to these first few Bern records broke something important in my head, set it free and permanently changed my core temperature. It’s difficult to overstate the importance this man’s music has held in my life and as such, don’t read on looking for scathing criticism (Spoiler: I'm a fan of his work across the board), but rather to remember or learn some stuff about one of the great songwriters of our time and the important connections made between people and art.

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