Boiler Room bikes and b2bs
Ross Gray gets a taste of the Red Stripe Make Session series
When I first considered writing an article on Boiler Room, I thought it would be redundant. I always thought that it’s just one of those things that everyone who would be interested knows about, but when I started chatting to people about it I realised this is not really the case. Considering how electronic Imperial’s tastes seem to be, as well as our churning out a pretty incredible number of DJs and producers, I felt this needed remedying.
So, the basics: Boiler Room is essentially a promoter who gets incredible line-ups of electronic musicians, shoves them in a tiny room with a number of the city’s biggest hipsters and broadcasts a TV stream live over the internet. That said, they’re not always electronic people; just last Friday they threw an incredible event with BEAK> (live), Anika (DJ set) and Jaakko (live) and on Wednesday had the whole Boy Better Know crew live in the place.
The whole thing is sponsored by the great folks over at Red Stripe – yet another perk, free beer – and for a good few events now they’ve paired up officially with Boiler Room to present Red Stripe Make Sessions. I was first introduced to this concept at the NTS one back in November, where 11 painfully obscure artists were crammed into a 4 hour slot and their sets recorded live onto reel-to-reel tape. The product of the evening was a sweet compilation vinyl; particular highlights include the incredibly bass-heavy Insomniax’s ‘Speakers Blow’ and Graham Dunning’s loop-manipulating experimentalism.
The real spark for this piece was Red Stripe Make Session 007 on Monday, which Red Stripe kindly let us tag along to. The musical line-up was simple but heavy: xxxy b2b Steve Braiden and Midland b2b Paul Woolford. In a slightly surreal centre stage, 14 Bike Co were brought into the building to hand make some damn fine bespoke bikes with the DJs names painted onto the frames.
It must be said that as much as I love it, Boiler Room does have a bit of a reputation (especially in London) for not getting crazy at all – have a look through the Facebook comments on almost any of their photos and you’ll see what I mean. I was hoping that having purely b2b sets would bring the energy up, and I’m not sure whether it was that or the sheer size of the venue relative to normal but it certainly got pretty mental. The end of Midland and Woolford’s set in particular was not only one of the most impressive pieces of track selection I’ve seen but also sent the crowd absolutely wild. Definitely watch it if Boiler Room archive it, and watch out for IC Radio’s head of programming with his hipster glasses at the front.
