Party Review: Zoology @ Bullets, Tokyo

Party Review: Zoology @ Bullets, Tokyo

24 July, 2008 | 6.10PM

• Written by: elektrax
• Filed under: Videos : ein kleiner schelm, magnet toy

It’s my last weekend in this country, and I’ve been dragged to Nishiazabu in Tokyo, alarmingly close to the gaijin clubbing mecca that is Roppongi.

But then my Japanese friend wordlessly grabs my hand and zigzags away from the main strip, down side streets, until we find ourselves outside a small, innocuous-on-the-outside looking bar/club called Bullet’s. It’s unerringly quiet and desperately cold, and I begin to doubt my friend’s intentions…

Heedlessly, he tugs me downstairs, out of mobile phone range, into a red-drenched boudoir that reminds me of a tech-vision of Marie Antoinette’s inner sanctum, where we have to remove our shoes.

It’s only 10 PM, but the music is already berating our senses, and it takes me a moment to realize that the superb electronica rolling around us isn’t put together by some DJ, but is being produced live, off-the-cuff, by people fiddling with Mac laptops and Korg and Roland gear.

This, my secretive Japanese friend tells me, is the real Tokyo, away from the glitz of superclubs in Shibuya and Roppongi.

At places like Bullets, local underground producers and their foreign friends play to small, up-for-it crowds, as they experiment, push musical perimeters, and create something truly special—much of it live and improvised, sometimes with guest vocalists and musicians.

One moment there’s pounding Detroit-style techno with moments that sound like Ken Ishii drifting through Chicago; the next second it’s eclectic hip-hop that skips along into drum & bass.

The crowd are into each and every diversion, cheering the producers’ twists and turns, and dance wildly when the grooves settle.

Then, at around midnight, it’s the turn of two gaijin, calling themselves Ein Kleiner Schelm vs. Little Nobody—one of them from Germany; the other from Australia, but both of them Bullets’ regulars, according to my friend, who also got Little Nobody to play his birthday party at the same venue.

The next 90 minutes is breath-taking, cataclysmic madness that threatens occasionally to do my head in.

One moment it’s all ethereal, drifting, abstract beats, but straight after, somehow seamlessly, the boys are upping the bpms and hitting a tech-house groove Robert Hood or Jeff Mills would die for, I’m sure—only to debunk that notion by doing a cut-up drift into disco, kitsch film samples, and on into electro breakbeats.

I swear there’s every contemporary club genre hidden somewhere in the live mix, much of it bent just a fraction, and the crowd—much bigger now, and fighting for space on the small dancefloor—are going insane, in tandem with the insanity of the sounds themselves.

Straight after is Tokyo native Magnet Toy, who previously released music on Thomas Heckmann’s TROPE label, playing a live tech/electro set that’s driving, punchy and appropriately up-for-it, perfect after the exhausting freestyle moments of the earlier live duo—who both are now jumping up and down in excitement at their colleague’s set.

After three months in Japan, an array of internationally famous super-clubs like Yellow, Womb and Ageha notched up in my belt, I only wish that I’d discovered Bullets—and crews like IF? and TTAK—a lot earlier. Think earnest, fresh, and invigorating. What a wonderful way to end the experience.

Story © Angela Fox

Live in Tokyo EP is out on the Hypnotic Room label. Get in now through Beatport and re-experience this event!

• (0) Comments
• (1259) Views
• Get Live in Tokyo EP' on Beatport