Off The Record

Last week Victoria’s Strawberry Fields festival dropped a huge list of international acts that they’ll be hosting this year, giving us an insight into some tours we’ll be seeing hitting Sydney later this year. Highlights include Pachanga Boys, Superpitcher, Nightmares on Wax, Trus’me, Stimming and much more. The festival usually shares a few names with Sydney’s own Subsonic festival, too.

Another Victorian festival, Rainbow Serpent, also dropped their first lineup on Wednesday. Highlights include Marcel Dettmann, Lee Burridge and Petar Dundov, who I’m told will all be coming to Sydney in late January.

Speaking of Marcel Dettmann, the techno heavyweight has just been revealed as next selector in the illustrious fabric mix series. fabric 77 will see Dettmann mixing mostly unreleased material from his own imprint, Marcel Dettmann Recordings, with tracks from the likes of The Persuader, Norman Nodge, Francois X and Joey Anderson alongside a few from the man himself. It drops on Friday August 22 through fabric/Balance Music.

Best releases from the past week: Anthony Naples continues his killer run with Zipacón (on The Trilogy Tapes), Wolfgang Voigt’s Rückverzauberung 9: Musik Für Kulturinstitutionen (on Profan) sees him return to career-best form, while Lee Gamble’s Kuang (on PAN) is a tasty primer ahead of the release of his double LP KOCH that will be released next month (also on PAN).

Tour rumours: a little birdie tells me that we’ll be seeing visits from quite a few techno luminaries in the next few months. Samuel Kerridge is set to visit in September, Peter Van Hoesen will be stopping by in October and Powell will hit our shores in November. Stay tuned for the official announcements.

Get yourself straight over to the Dazed Digital website right now. To celebrate the release of his latest album Wildest Dreams, the disco don DJ Harvey has dropped an hour-long mix full of his signature curveball disco and it is top notch. The album is killer, too.

For the disc jockeys reading, Pioneer DJ have just announced the launch of the DDJ-SX2 – the first controller with dedicated buttons for the new Serato Flip. Other new features include performance pads with multi-coloured cue point LEDs, enhanced jog wheels with digital cue point markers and countdown, Serato DJ DVS upgrade-ready and a variety of inputs and outputs. Visit pioneer.eu for full details.

In some sadder news, an autopsy has confirmed that DJ Rashad’s death was due to a drug overdose. A deadly cocktail and heroin, cocaine and Xanax was found in his system, NBC Chicago has confirmed. Rashad Harden passed away earlier in April this year at the age of 34.

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