THE BEATS
Music and Urban Culture in Vietnam-



Check out this amazing person, Leon Botha who suffered from a rare disease called “Progeria” which ages him prematurely. Most people suffered from this disease have no more than 20 year of life expectancy.
L.E.O.N is a learning element of nature. From the moment of birth, I’ve been learning lessons through burning testings, of the Head, Heart & Guts. Body, Soul & Spirit. Salt, Sulphur & Mercury, in the stages of alchemy. I have been sent on a long path to take a short journey & share glimpses of my experiences & visions as a artist/channel. Though mostly known for painting, I am a student of many & a master of none, striving to utilize the ways that convey my expressions most successfully. “Gza/The Genius” released a album in 1995 entitled “Liquid Swords”. The concept was, rappers as lyrical swordsmen, as the tongue being symbolic to the sword & also that wisdom comes in many different streams & flows, like water. (The concept had no visual interpretation.) I applied that to me & my art, also in a visual symbolic form that I now show in my work from time to time: The sword is the self, cutting through matter, time & experience to penetrate to insight, knowledge, wisdom & overstanding. Art is like liquid, it comes in infinite forms & flows. As artist I strive to be like water, ever changing & always flowing: If I can’t be defined then I cannot be confined. The pen IS the sword! ->Leon Botha
Check out his website:
Tags: Arts, Leon Botha, Music -


DJ KORRECT (NZ)
Korrect’s style is a mixture of precise and well composed cuts and beat-juggling with a traditional flavour, utilizing both new and golden era hip-hop and 60’s-70’s funk. After moving away from New Zealand, and unable to compete in overseas battles due, Korrect chose to further develop his technical skills, focusing on perfecting an intricate form of trick-mixing and scratch composition which combines battle skills in a club friendly style. With a wide eclectic collection of music ranging from classic and golden era hip hop to rock, his sets always have some suprises. If you’re a fan of quality music, you’ll dig it.Battle Stats:
2002 NZ Regional ITF Finalist
2004 NZ Regional Champion
2005 NZ Regional Champion
2005 NZ DMC 3rd Place
2007 Christ City Battle Vice-Champion
2008 No Tricks Korea Battle 2nd PlaceSupported by DJ JASE (The Beats Saigon)
a night of Turntablism, Hip Hop, Funk, Reggae, Dancehall, Rock to Drum and Bass
FREE ENTRY
— — — — — — — — -
Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 9:00pm – 2:00am
@ Vasco’s
74/7D Hai Ba Trung, D.1
Tags: DJ Korrect, DMC, Events, Hip Hop, Jase -
January 20th, 2010UncategorizedIt seems like in the last few months things have been looking up for underground music in HCMC, especially for bass music. There was the amazing Goldie gig in Cage in December of course, but also the spectacle of so many people dancing to dubstep when the Gaslamp Killer tore the roof off Cage in November. A couple of years ago I never imagined there would be even one person dancing to dubstep in Vietnam, so to see so many people enjoying the 25 minutes or so of solid wobble dubstep that GLK started off his set with was inspiring. Plus more and more local DJs are incorporating dubstep into their sets. Shout out to Jase here, and also to Fugu and Micmac from Jetlag, who’ve all been pushing quality dubstep recently both in online mixes and live sets.
But even though dubstep is just starting to break through in Vietnam, and only became really popular around the world in the last 2 years or so, it’s a scene that’s been developing in England for the last decade. There’s already plenty of places online where you can read the convoluted story of how dubstep evolved out of 2-step garage (just look up “dubstep” on Wikipedia), so this post is going to be more of a personal fanboy type of piece about my first exposure to the sound in 2004 and how I finally got to see one of my favorite DJs from that era 5 years later. If you don’t feel like reading some fanboy ranting then skip this post, but you might still want to scroll down to the bottom and download the awesome old school dubstep mix by Youngsta that I upped.
In 2004 I was living in Bristol. I was excited to be in the city of Massive Attack and Roni Size, but by 2004 the echoes of the 90s drum’n'bass and (ahem) trip-hop explosions were really starting to die out. I was looking around for exciting new music, but there didn’t seem to be much around at the time except for the London grime scene – and you couldn’t get much of that on CD except for the Dizzee Rascal and Wiley albums and a couple of the underground “Lord of the Decks” type compilations that you could only buy in a handful of specialist stores. So there was quite a lot of buzz when respected electronica label Rephlex announced the release of a new compilation just called “Grime”. I rushed out and bought it on the day it came out, and still remember how confused I was when I brought it home and realised that this “grime” CD was ALL INSTRUMENTAL WITH NO MCS.
After scouring a bunch of forums and blogs, I learnt that the music on this Rehplex compilation wasn’t grime at all, but another mutation of UK garage known as “dubstep” which had oozed out of Croydon in South London. I loved the music on the CD and was ready to unconditionally love anything with the word “dub” in it. I wanted more, but there was hardly anything else available. Apart from the two Horsepower Productions albums and the “Dubstep Allstars Vol. 1″ mix by Hatcha (which seemed to be out of print and completely unavailable at that time), all the action was still on limited run 12″s or downloaded mixes/pirate radio sessions. It wasn’t until a few months later, just before I left to go back to Australia in September 2004, that I finally found another dubstep CD to buy at the legendary Rhythm Division record store in Hackney. It seemed to be a promo for a club in East London called FWD>>, which I’d heard of but never made the journey from Bristol to London to attend. The CD was a 50 minute mix by a DJ called Youngsta live at FWD>>.
Back in Australia I played the CD obsessively. This was most exciting music I’d heard in the new decade. It was dark and heavy like the doom metal I’d listend to for the last few years, but still funky. I was kicking myself for never having gone to check out FWD>> when I was in England, and spent a lot of time online reading anything I could find about dubstep and downloading mixes. I read with amazement how in the early days at FWD>>, when this mind-blowing sound was being forged, there were often less than 10 people in the entire club.
For most of 2005 dubstep was still deep underground, and the sound seemed to keep getting darker and heavier. This was the halfstep era when Loefah dominated the scene with ultra-minimal anthems like “Root” and “Horror Show”. Finally in mid-2005 Tempa Records dropped the long awaited “Dubstep Allstars Vol. 2″ mix CD with none other than Youngsta at the helm. “Dubstep Allstars Vol. 2″ was a classic document of 2005 halfstep with plenty of Loefah and Digital Mystikz tunes, but it also included a slightly electro-tinged tune called “Midnight Request Line” by a Croydon teenager known as Skream. Of course if you know some dubstep history, you’ll know that “Midnight Request Line” was probably THE tune which saw dubstep start crossing over into wider clubland and things have kept getting bigger since then. There was the Dubstep Wars radio special in early 2006, the Burial phenomenon, Caspa and Rusko doing the first Fabriclive dubstep mix, massive dubstep nights at Ministry of Sound in London and Skream becoming even more famous for the La Roux “In for the Kill” remix then he was for “Midnight Request Line”. By 2009 dubstep was the hottest “new” music on the planet.
But after all those years, I still hadn’t made it to FWD>>, and I still hadn’t seen Youngsta play. I finally put that right in October 2009 when I flew from Frankfurt to London just to catch a Sunday night FWD line-up that included Youngsta and the great DJ Distance. The next couple of photos are all snaps of Youngsta playing that night.
Even though I’d been listening to Dubstep since 2004, I realise that I never really knew what Dubstep was until I went to FWD>>. First of all, FWD>> is a small, no frills basement room but it has an absolutely wicked sound system. When I walked in DJ Distance was playing and the sub was so powerful that every single note of the bass was like a punch to the solar plexus. On top of that the room was almost completely dark, with the only illumination being from the lights of the DJ booth (the lights didn’t come on until it was almost time to go home). The audience was almost slam-dancing. Hearing dubstep in the dark, in a mass of heaving people and through that gut-churning sound system was a completely different experience to listening to it at home or in a club that wasn’t set up for the true headz.
DJ Distance was great that night but Youngsta was an absolute revelation. Just before he came on the monitors packed in, so Youngsta proceeded to do his entire set with no monitors. Dubstep is notoriously difficult for many people to mix but Youngsta laid down a tehcnically perfect set of neo-halfstep (think Loefah’s new Swamp 81 label). After witnessing Youngsta that night and taking into account both his seminal role in developing the dubstep scene in its early days and his technical skills, I’m ready to call him as one of the greatest DJs of all time.
But what was truly inspiring that night was feeling like I’d been able to drink a little bit at the source of my favourite music. Even though dubstep is now a massive global phenomenon, I was still watching one of the originator DJs at one of the club nights that birthed the sound (even though FWD>> is now at Plastic People, not at its original Velvet Rooms location when dubstep was being born). I thought about how this worldwide scene had been born from a few people at a tiny club, people who persevered and kept DJing and producing tunes even when less than 10 people were coming out to hear them. This is the kind of thing that gives me hope that one day Vietnam will also have an awesome underground electronic music scene.
So without further ado, here’s an upload of the first Youngsta mix I ever heard, Forward Live Vol. 1 from way back in 2004. Listen to how fresh and vital this music still sounds six years later. I hope some Vietnamese kids download this and one day produce crucial dub pressure right out of the Mekong Delta.
-
January 13th, 2010ArtsOn Monday, Saigon just said “hello” to one of the most awesome boutique urban fashion stores in the country, probably the first of its kind.
Located in the Art Arcade on the swanky Dong Khoi street, L’usine is a massive fashion store/Art Gallery/Cafe, set up by the Unavailable crew who does the production for brands such as Rusty, Carlharrt ….
The store stocks Supra, Clae shoes to Cheap Monday Jeans and Nooka watches. Definitely a must visit for any trend seekers out there.
Address: 151 Dong Khoi, 1st floor, district 1
Tags: Arts, Fashion, Lusine -
January 10th, 2010MusicCheck out this hot Dubstep mix by US based producer, Producer Snafu, who i only met through an online forum, the first 3 tracks are actually his productions.
Producer Snafu – worthingtons dubstep Set
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Tags: Dubstep, Mixes, Producer Snafu






