Kutski's Blog

The random thoughts of a DJ, music enthusiast and general nerd!

[kutski]

Kutski's Game of the Year 2015

After 2014′s dark start to the next gen, giving us little more than HD remasters and broken attempts at open world games, 2015 more than compensated with more hits than I had time to play! In no particular order, here are my top 5 ‘must plays’ from the past 12 months

Bloodborne

Having never even touched a ‘Souls’ game before, not being particularly good at gaming in general, and having an extremely short fuse for difficult games, I really should have stayed away from Bloodborne at all costs, and to start with I did. However, having listened to conversations about the game, my intrigue got the better of me and I took a punt on it, and this has to be my personal game of the year. Yeah it’s difficult, but it’s never unfair. The world building, environmental story telling, and general mystique of this game left me infatuated with it for months until I finally completed it, and having revisited it recently for the Old Hunters DLC, it reaffirmed my love for this cult hit! It’s not going to be for everyone, but if you do get into it the pay-off is so rewarding I would recommend everyone to at least give it a shot.

Dying Light

Another surprise hit from early in the year I think this one took a lot of people by surprise. A first person, parkour zombie survival game does sound awesome, but after the previous years disappointments to new franchises, you can excuse people for being a little sceptical at first. But it certainly didn’t disappoint. With really unique game play mechanics (to me), it took a few sessions on the game before it fully clicked, but when it did I was addicted. The support for up to 4 player co-op was awesome too, as there is little more amusing than scaling a wall to leave your so called friend behind to be mauled by a horde of the undead, only to turn the corner and see another friend hitting a zombie in the head with an electrified, barbed wire baseball bat!

Super Mario Maker

Obviously this had to be on my list, but to be honest I can’t help but feel it came 20 years too late for me personally! It was everyones childhood fantasy to be able to build their own Mario levels, and this package delivers everything I could have dreamed of and more! However, whether it’s just my place in life at the moment, I didn’t feel I had the time and motivation to really delve into the level creations tools as much as I thought I would, and fell off that pretty sharpish to be honest. I still dip in regularly to play some of the top rated user created levels, so despite not having the urge to hit the creation side of the game particularly hard, the fact this game is effectively unlimited 2D Mario is more than enough to make my top 5 list.

Rocket League

I’ve never really been a fan of footy games, partly because I’m shit at them, and partly because it reminds me I support Leeds Utd. But if you’re going to have a kick about it rocket powered cars, count me in! This game is super simple and addictive with less emphasis on excess content and more focus on core gameplay. This makes for a game that is perfect to jump into a quick 5 minute match, or to lose an entire evening by continually playing “just one more game” with friends into the early hours. I have the platinum to prove the latter happened more often than not!

Until Dawn

Another surprise hit of the year, and still shockingly over-looked by many gamers, this narrative driven horror hooked me instantly! I guess the best way to describe this game is having the branching paths and compelling story telling of something like Heavy Rain with the somewhat campy teen horror story of the Scream era. Despite it’s camp nature, this doesn’t stop there being moments of genuine terror playing this game and jump scares that genuinely had me jumping out of my seat!! The game took me about 7-10 hours to complete and left me satisfied and never bored. All killer, no filler as they say! Depending on the decisions you make throughout the game, it is possible to finish the with all or non of the characters surviving. I made it out with 3 alive, and absolute plan to revisit this again in the future to see what other outcome the game has!

[kutski]

Finish Him!!!

There are very few game franchises that give me the warm fuzzies like the Mortal Kombat series. I can still feel the excitement of being 10 years old and seeing the MK 1 cabinet in an arcade for the first time after hearing so many playground stories about this mythical game. Despite remembering very little from school at that age, I can comfortably recite all the fatality sequences for all the fighters in the original game... but this is no real surprise as I’m a mind full of random and mostly useless knowledge, and as you’ve read this far I’m guessing you’re up for me spilling a bit on you regarding this epicly brutal game!

So I recently got the new Mortal Kombat X, and whilst checking out the fighters I saw Ermac which reminded me of his really cool backstory! For any super die hard MK fans, apologies in advance if not every technical detail is perfectly accurate, but it’s more the general story I find fascinating.

So in the original Mortal Kombat there where two playable ninjas that despite having different move sets, where effectively pallet swaps of each other in blue and yellow, Sub Zero and Scorpion. There was also a third non playable ninja added in a later revision of the arcade, Reptile, with a green pallet swap that could accessed by hitting a button sequence when the “toast” guy pops up. 

In the audit menu of the arcade system there was a stats screen that showed statistics such as how many people had completed the game, how many times Reptile has appeared, and had been accessed. Below the Reptile stat was another mysterious counter labeled “ERMACS”. This lead people to believe there was a fourth ninja hidden in the game named Ermac that could be accessed somehow. Fuel was only added to this fire when reports of a red ninja having been spotted on rare occasions too!!

The reality was that ERMACS was short hand for ‘error macros’, a sequence of code that would run when an error in the pallet swap code would happen causing Scorpion to appear black and red instead of black and yellow!

The developers of the game did non kill these rumours, but rather sat back and watched the myth unfold, despite later making reference to the non existent character with messages like “Ermac Who” and anagrams of “Ermac does not exist” sporadically appearing in the games sequel.

Finally in Mortal Kombat 3, the developers embraced the legend of Ermac and made him a fully playable character with his own unique move set, and he has gone on to be a firm fan favourite in the series ever since!!

Like I said at the start, I’m a mind full of useless information my brain seems to absorb in late night internet ratholes, but this one I find particularly interesting for whatever reason and thought I’d share it with the relevance of the new MKX just being released...

..which is absolutely awesome by the way!!!

[kutski]

Top 3 Dance Music Albums

I’ve always been a fan of the format of the music album. The highs and lows of the tempo and vibe can really take you on a journey with a great album, but sadly this art is lost in the majority of dance music albums. Dance music, as the name suggests, are tracks written for the dance floor, and this often leads to a dance music album becoming a collection of ’12 inch’ mixes, no greater than the sum of its parts, losing the nuances that make the album format so interesting to me.

There are however some amazing exceptions to this, so below I have reviewed my top 3 dance music albums of all time!

Number 3 Audiofreq - Audioception (2013)

Audiofreq is well known for his diverse taste in music and lack of fear to experiment with different genres along side his predominantly hardstyle productions, and for this reason his debut album was always going to be interest in terms of direction. The album is split into four sections, each with a defining characteristic for the tracks within it. The album starts strong for any hardstyle fan with some of his biggest hits of the time, but at the midway point, hits reset and drops the tempo, opening a whole world of experimentation. This format reminds me of a classic ‘LP’ where all the big chart releases of the time would be on the ‘A’ side of the vinyl, and the deeper more experimental cut’s would be on the ‘B’ side. All in all, a great album that offers so much more than the already awesome dance floor hits Audiofreq was writing at the time.

Number 2 The Prodigy - Experience (1992)

I may be succumbing to a little nostalgia with this one, but Experience was my first real love for an album. Picture a 10 year old Kutski when this dropped, playing football at the park and spending all his spare money on batteries so we could crank this album out on a ghetto blaster! This album was the peak of the explosion of the rave scene in the UK and captured all the chaos and energy in the scene at the time. It featured remixes and album edits of all the hits they had released on their rise to fame which added a fresh twist, along with the first glimpse of their forthcoming releases, and album only cuts such as Weather Experience showing a deeper down-tempo side to The Prodigy you would never hear on 12 inch releases or live shows. If someone had no idea what rave music was, this is still the first place I would send them.

Number 1 CLSM - Transmission To Mars (2004)

For me this is the ultimate template for how to write a dance music album. CLSM are an eccentric UK based rave act with a totally unique blend of euphoric, freeform, and breakbeat hardcore. Their debut album has it all, a uniquely sequenced blend of high energy music. Pounding breakbeats and baselines are followed by haunting euphoric pianos, super ravey synths, deep trippy freeform, broken up by down-tempo ambient chillout tracks, comical skits and musically political statements. The album slowly develops in theme as it builds to a crescendo with a live band rendition of the title track from the album. While the other albums we discussed are in many way products of their time, this album did not follow any trends of the UK hardcore scene, and therefor stands on its own as a timeless masterpiece as fresh today as it was in 2004.

Disclaimer: As many of you will know, I have collaborated regularly with Sam Audiofreq, and have also worked very closely with Jon Doe from CLSM over the years too! This has not biased my list. I’ve worked with many artists in the scene so if I was exclude friends and colleagues this would be a dull list.

[kutski]

Promo Etiquette

In a world of digital creation and distribution the barrier of entry for music production has never been lower, but the flip side of this shiny coin is that it has never been harder to get your work noticed. If you have written the next big hit, how do you bring attention to it above the 500 other clips that have been uploaded by people who download some cracked software last week? It’s hard, and can be highly frustrating when you are dealing with your passion and something you poured your soul into to create!

I understand this as I receive hundreds of promos every week from A-list labels to aspiring young producers, and I do my best to not only grab the hits, but to also listen to as much new music from new artists as I can to find that secret gem for my club sets, and help promote artist who are on the right track on my radio shows. Most of the messages I receive regarding promos are polite and friendly… however there are still a surprising amount of people who commit career suicide with their online demeanour before anyone gets a chance to even listen to their work!

So here are a few pointers to help you understand how to efficiently promote your music to DJ’s!

1) Politeness. Most people can skip this point, but for the few who don’t get it, when you are sending music to DJ asking for feedback and support, you are asking for a favour from someone who doesn’t know you. You’d be surprised how many DJ’s are willing to help, but if you are being rude or bolshy about it, don’t expect to have you music listened to! “It’s your job” i’ve heard before haha. It’s only my “job” if someone is paying me to do it, otherwise you are asking me to use my free time to help you, which I will be much more likely to do if you are polite!

2) Patience. Most DJ’s and producer are busy people, they travel a lot, and internet access while travelling can be spotty at best. They need to spend time in the studio like you and also run their business as it is their profession. All this mounted together means it can be hard to find time you listen to promos or reply to emails and it can take time to listen or get back to you about things. Give time! I’ve replied to people months after something has been sent when I randomly had wifi in an airport and some time to kill. Sending an initial message followed by an increasingly irate daily reminder won’t make people listen quicker, it will have the opposite effect. Maybe a gentle reminder a few weeks later but be patient.

3) Keep it simple. The more hurdles you lay between the DJs and your music, the less likely they are to meet. If I’m on slow hotel wifi and your track is on a file sharing services that requires me to fill in a screen cap, then wait 30 seconds, then time out so i have to start again, I’m probably just going to move on to the next message. Also, in relation to point 2, make sure the link won’t expire any time soon. If you think the DJ may not be familiar with your name or work, provide a preview link like soundcloud so people can skip through it briefly before committing to download. This for me makes life a lot easier, and you are much more likely to get a listen.

4) Introductions. I link to a file alone isn’t very appealing. Neither is a 16 page biography to read! A few lines about who you are, where you are from and what you do is always a nice precursor to the music without being overwhelming.

5) Unfinished clips. I always recommend people not to send unfinished clips. There is always the temptation to send it out and get feedback on how best to finish the project, and by all means do this amongst friends but if you send an unfinished track, a DJ listens to it and thinks it sounds unfinished (of course), when you finally send the finished masterpiece they may recognise the name, remember they didn’t like it by the name in the subject line, and simply delete the message and move on.

6) Radio play. A more recent pet peeve of mine is when people send tracks out, I play them in a recorded club set or radio show, and then getting highly charged emails from the artist telling me to take down the show because it hadn’t been cleared by the label yet etc… I have close friends that send me tracks very early and they always tell me clearly if they’re aren’t safe for radio play which is fine, but for general mails out of music, don’t send it out until you actually want people to support it!

7) Expect no reply. This is more of a personal note from me. As I said at the start I get a lot of promos and don’t always have the most free time to keep on top of them. So when i do, I opt to spend my time listening to as much music as possible rather than replying to every message. If I have a opinion I may ping a short reply, but generally I listen to music and support the stuff I like, which you can see in my radio show playlists and DJ Mag reviews. I think there is still something nice about the surprise for an artist to be featured without knowing beforehand. Just because I don’t reply doesn’t mean I’m not reading and listening :)

So to wrap this up, the screen cap at the top clearly inspired this post! This chaps promo obviously hasn’t been listened to and I get that is frustrating. Maybe I haven’t got round to it yet, I missed it, maybe it went in my junk folder, maybe a friendly private reminder would have encouraged me to look!? I’ve blurred out his name as I don’t wish to burn him and I’ve taken the time to write this to explain my side of things as a DJ who receives promos, but I’m sure gauging his online persona from this he will probably try and take the opportunity to make a twitter war or slag me off to anyone who will listen. Whatever. Bait not taken.

To any other aspiring producers, I hope this helps you understand a little bit more about how this all works, and helps you distribute your music as efficiently as possible going forward…

..and of cause the final questing answer: [email protected] ;)

[kutski]

Practical Pro DJ Tips!!!

Lots of people ask for tips about DJ'ing, and lots of DJ's write blogs giving technical tips, but what about some practical advice? The little things outside the DJ booth that will help you on your way? Allow me to drop some knowledge that I have in many cases learned the hard way over the years.

1) Late check outs. When you have been out in the club until 6am, and probably drank a few shandies during your set. You're not going to appreciate the hotel maid banging the shit out of your door at 11am to check out, so always ask for a late check out when you check in. More than likely they will say no or try to charge you. And here lies my tip! Smile and walk away, then take the pen and paper provided in every hotel room and write "Late checkout arranged 3pm, thank you" and place this in the keycard slot on the outside of your door! The maid won't know this is bullshit and the desk staff in the morning will be different that the night shift so they won't know either. So simple but this honestly works 99% of the time!

2) Imodium. This isn't something anyone wants to address but the simple fact is there is no DJ, male or female who has had a successful career travelling the world, eating exotic foods who hasn't succumb to the humanity of travellers diarrhoea. Speaking to many of my DJ friends, everyone has their own hilarious yet terrifying story to tell from eating some dodgy festival food before the biggest gig or their career, to missing flights after being unable to leave the departure lounge toilet. Seriously, just keep a pack of anti diarrhoea tablets in your headphone case. There will be a point in your career you thank me!

3) Spare t-shirt. DJ's get all the chicks right? This is far from the truth with most DJ's being reclusive, obsessive compulsive nerds (myself included). Becoming a DJ's is gods way of throwing you a bone, but when you finished your set and head over to chat with the girl / boy you thoughout was giving you the eye thought your set, you're probably going to be dripping with enough sweat to scare off even the most die hard groupie. Throw a spare t-shirt and some deodorant in you bag along with your headphones and Imodium... and maybe even a pack of nodders if you're feeling confident!

4) Free fast-track! If you travel enough you will learn to hate airport with a passion. They are designed to take advantage of the fact you are in a closed environment and rape you for every last penny they can get! Security fast-tracks are the best example of this. In my local airport, Liverpool, there where NEVER any significant lines or queues for security until they decided to add a paid fast track lane, halving the capacity of the regular queue, therefor artificially manufacturing a demand for the new paid lane. Time to get you're own back. When booking my parking last year I knew I would be pressed for time so begrudgingly paid the £5.00 extra to add fast-track to my booking. The confirmation of this is on the second page with no date or booking reference. So next time I just showed them that same second page... and have continued to keep doing so for the past 6 months without question!

5) Ear plugs. Ending on a slightly more serious note, ear plugs are something you really need to invest in! When I was 21 I had a midweek residency at a club in Leeds that had the craziest loud sound system. Then of cause as the DJ you need to drown out the club sound system with the monitor speaks in order to hear what you are doing! It used to be funny how my ears would ring for days after. Funny, until the ringing also started to be accompanied by dizzy spells! After going to the doctor and having hearing tests it was discovered that I already had permanent damage in my left ear. The options I had where to stop DJ'ing or pay for expensive professional ear protection, so I was £180 lighter in the wallet, but lucky enough to continue with my career! I've used plugs (ER-15's) for over a decade since, and regular checkups and tests show (despite some tinnitus), my hearing hasn't got any worse since! If you want to be involved in the industry, your hearing is your biggest asset. Yeah it feels a bit weird wearing ear plugs in a club at first, but you get used to the point where now it is uncomfortable for me to be in a club without them, and with non-custom moulded solutions starting at £15 now there is absolutely no excuse for not to be protecting your hearing!!

[kutski]

It's All A Work Anyway!

It’s the Royal Rumble this weekend!! I’ve been an on and off pro wrestling fan since the Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage feuds of my childhood. It’s surprising how many ‘grown ups’ you’ll find that are still big fans of WWE. There is a real art to telling a good story in the ring and the crowd psychology of a good match that will make you want to suspend disbelieve. But whenever I mention anything about WWE online you will always get at least one “I can’t believe you watch that, men dancing in tights, fake soap opera bullshit”… and usually a few homophobic insults thrown in too to help gauge the IQ level of the author!

We all know pro wrestling is a work (fake), but it didn’t start that way, and I think if you follow the trend of how it became what it is, you would have a greater respect for why it is what it is, and also how other shoot (real) fight organisations like UFC aren’t really that different in principal!

The first and most important thing to understand is the difference between amateur and professional. The definition of any “pro” is that this is their livelihood. They earn their living from the discipline they are in. Pro wrestling has a long tradition at carnivals and touring small towns, and did start out as legit competitive wrestling matches, but as these matches where to entertain carnival goes, it wouldn’t be very entertaining for a match to be over in seconds. So it was in both fighters interest to keep the fight going for a minimum time if they wanted to get booked again… which they did as it is their source of income! If you get paid the same win or lose, but bonuses due to the crowd you pull, it wouldn’t take a huge genius in this position to figure out it is more beneficial to both fighters to put on an entertaining match rather than compete, and here we have the fundamentals of the industry as we know it today!

Everyone loves a good guy, bad guy story, and if wrestlers wanted to continue to be rebooked in territories, they built up feuds between each other, talking smack on local TV networks to promote the weekend event. Building a story that people could get invested into, hating the the heel (bad guy) and coming back each week to see the baby face (good guy) finally get his revenge. Again all in the interest of filling the arena for the biggest payout, which is near as damn it as we are in pro wrestling today!

Now take a shoot (real) fight organisation like UFC (I probably like UFC more than WWE but…), aren’t UFC fighters paid bonuses? After last weekends fight Uriah Hall jokingly said “I wished the fight went a bit longer so I got my bonus”. Fighters are mostly hugging and complimenting each other after a fight, but before they are cutting promos about how they are going to eat each others babies! Why? Clearly to build hype for events and sell tickets. To be successful, not only do you have to win, but you have to sell tickets if you want to be top of the card. After all this is a business and they are professionals! I can guarantee ex pro wrestler CM Punk will win his first bunch of fights in UFC because they will feed him opponents they think he will defeat as after the money they paid to sign him, they want to get some hype behind him to recoup on their investment!

You see what I’m getting at? In no way am I saying UFC is a work, but all fight organisations, boxing included, all play by the same business model, pro wrestling just took things a step further. If you don’t like wrestling, this isn’t going to change your mind, but as with everything in life, hopefully a little more understanding will result in a little more respect for other peoples views :)

Enjoy the Rumble!!!

[kutski]

DLC and the Wii U-turn

I was one of the blind Nintendo fanboys who bought the Wii U at launch for £330 and then watched it gather dust for around two years while I played my then PS3 and now PS4 due to the lack of games on the new Nintendo platform. I was pretty bitter about this and have not had a lot of love for the console… until recently that is!

Now that the first party games we buy Nintendo consoles for are here, it’s not so bad. Infact Mario Kart was probably the best game that came out in what was an admitted dry 2014. But it was when the DLC was announced that I started looking at my Wii U rather favourably. This was at the same time I was playing Destiny on PS4. Destiny offered its season pass of two DLC’s for an extortionate £35!!! Now I love Destiny but I think everyone can agree that the standard game had rather an underwhelming amount of content and the DLC added little more for almost the full price of the game again!! Mario Kart however, offered its season pass of two DLC for a mere £11, in total almost doubling the amount of tracks and vehicles in an already well fleshed out game!!!

This got me thinking even further about the amount of broken games released on XBONE and PS4 last year, and even the working ones requiring day one patches to fix game breaking bugs, and yet the big ‘N’ are now releasing a steady stream of high quality, polished games out of the box!!

Back in the 80’s Nintendo saved the video game industry after many people where turned off by the shear amount of crap being released on the Atari, but Nintendo had their ‘seal of quality’ allowing only titles of certain standard to be released restoring consumers faith! No one has batted an eye lid at that logo that still appears on all Nintendo boxes but maybe it is more relevant than ever again!!

Do I think this will be enough to stop the Wii U being considered as an ‘also ran’ in a two console race? Probably not, but I do think they should be commended for this more than they are, and I’m sure if they stay the course, for all their flaws, their attitude towards quality control and consumer protection will mean they will always have a place in the market :)

[kutski]

Keeping The Vinyl Alive

One of the things I hear a lot at the moment is people passively mentioning that vinyl is making a come back. This always makes me chuckle being heavily involved in the music industry as I do not see this trend in any significant way at all!!

Now before you attack me as a vinyl hater, please bare in mind I was the last professional DJ in the hard dance scene to be playing vinyl exclusively (probably around 2007!?), I'm an avid turntablist, and have over 2000 records taking up space that I couldn't stand to part with! I love vinyl, but I am a realist and the party is over.

When people say they are seeing an upturn in vinyl sales within the dance music industry, they are talking about sales jumping from 100 to 300. This is not huge considering in the 90's you could press a turd and sell 2000 copies, and most of the sales now are as collectors items to be kept sealed or god forbid, a picture disc to be turned into a clock!

In the 90's, CD's had already taken over vinyl in the mainstream, but DJ's opted to stick with wax... why? Because there was no way to manipulate digital media back then in the way DJ's required to beat match / mix records together. As soon as the technology became available in more user friendly ways and affordable prices, the mass migration to digital media happened, and I can't see any way this will revert.

Digital DJ'ing is cheaper to buy the equipment (at entry level), cheaper to buy (or unfortunately pirate) digital music, you can take infinitely more music with you, and it's quicker and easier for producers to test, promo and release their music. Most 'vinyl DJ's' now use Serato or Traktor which is purely digital DJ'ing, only controlled with a turntable.

Will vinyl ever die? I don't think so either. Record collectors have been collecting vinyl without pause since the first half of the last century so there will always be the underground enthusiasts to buy, and if there are people to buy, there is always someone ready to produce and sell. There will always be oldskool revival trends from time to time enabling vinyls legacy to continue like the current hipster trend that think its cool to go retro. But do not mistake oldskool revivals for the way forward, our future is firmly set in binary!

Real DJ's play vinyl? Real old DJ's play vinyl :P

[kutski]

15 years too late... Welcome!

Welcome to my Tumblr!! Indeed I'm a little late to the party, but that make me cool right? So I finally got around to setting up a blog as there are generally things I feel like ranting about that require more that 140 characters or a Facebook post, and certain things that are a little too off-topic for my 'Kutski' social media. So this is more of a 'John' blog than a 'Kutski the DJ' one, and as such this will be my random ramblings about all topics that interesting me.

Obviously my first love is hard dance / rave music, and the art of DJ'ing so you can expect a lot of that, but also posts about video games, movies, WWE / UFC, football... basically pop culture and life in general!!

Feel free to comment / discuss / argue anything that I post about on here, but lets keep it friendly right? You're here because we share the same interests so be cool :P ...and don't bother correcting my spelling or grammar unless you are prepared to make it a full time job!

I've never even read a Tumblr blog before so I am as new to this as I can be, if you are too, sign up and feel free to join me on this epic adventure of yet another pointless way to waste our lives on the internets :D