2 reviews of Marcus Intalex
Monday - Jan 25th, 2010 by Fiver
Tags: Marcus Intalex, Montreal
So yeah, a few of us went to Montreal Saturday night to check out Marcus Intalex. I’d been looking forward to the show for a long time, given that he’s one of my favorite tastemakers and all that sort of jazz; you can see my enthusiasm for this show in my previous post.
As I often do when I hit a show in another town and I don’t have to drive, I had a few drinks that night. Usually this works out quite well, adding to the feeling of “yes!” that I get whenever I go to see an excellent deejay in a foreign city. Unfortunately, Intalex’ performance didn’t turn out to be what I’d call “excellent”, so instead of being in a great mood I ended up pretty pissed off with just about everything. In fact, I got so annoyed that at one point I sat down in a corner of the club and wrote a drunken review.
I read it the next day, and was amused by the angst in it. I figured it’d be an excellent bit of writing to post on here… so here it is, complete with random meanderings and typos.
Review #1: Drunk
What a nugget of joy! Can you tell I was vexed? The second review’s a bit more… balanced.
Review #2: Sober
I think I set myself up for a fall for this show.
The Intalex is one of the few bigtime drum & bass deejays / producers I still follow religiously. I tend to snap up his new releases when they come out, and I download his excellent but infrequent Soul:ution podcast whenever it’s available on mp3. His taste in music has always been A-1 and as far as I can remember the quality of his tunes has never lagged for periods of any period of time. In summary, he’s one of the most consistent jungle guys out there.
I’m just not sure how strong a “live” deejay his is.
There’s a big difference between putting together an internet radio show and playing a live set to 300 people in a club. On the internet you can pretty much play what you want in whatever order you want; that seems to be the format for Soul:ution Radio, and it works out great. If you’re playing a headlining slot in a live setting, you have to cater more to the audience, and make sure they’re dancing.
My major problem with Intalex’ set was that I think he catered too much. He got them dancing, and once they were dancing, he played the same kind of tune that got them dancing for the rest of the night.
As a deejay and as somebody who likes going out on the floor and dancing, I look for two things in a live deejay set above all else: clean mixing and variety. If you don’t have both of those locked down I’m not interested. Intalex’ mixing was just fine (as I’d hope it would be, given that he’s been playing out for years), but he was brutal when it came to variety. All I heard was rollers, all night long. I have nothing against rollers, they have their time and place in every deejay set and Intalex played some excellent ones (”Entropy” among them). However, as soon as I’d heard 20 minutes of the same kind of beat I started getting annoyed… and when they went on for over an hour and a half I was livid and anxious to get out of there.
Marcus Intalex & ST Files – Entropy
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I suppose a lot of my disappointment is my own fault; if I hadn’t hyped the show to myself as much as I did I probably wouldn’t have been as upset at how it turned out. Still, I can’t help but think that he could have stepped outside of the box a bit more and challenged his audience a bit.
The night wasn’t a complete loss, though. Our host and friend Generic tagged a fun set with Corey K, the event’s promoter. G even played a tune that he and Threesixty had thrown together over the weekend. It sounded great and the crowd responded to it well, which put a smile on my face.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if I’d been cheated by the headliner. Did he play safe because he was in Montreal, a city that Generic described as “not ready” for hearing music that’s a bit more challenging? Or is he just not that good of a live deejay? It’s funny to say it, but I’ll have to see him play in another city to know for sure.
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Slick says:
had the exact same experience in Hollywood this past week. A combination of 2 of the last shows you wrote about.
11:00pm, 1500 people inside Avalon, and this awful resident dj playing before a crowd a dummies, eating up track after track of uninspired music. How does that get someone the biggest residency in L.A. ? And what does it say about the people paying to listen to that? An equally awful set by the headliner follows, and ultimately I can guarantee that most people went home drunk and happy. But only because they don’t really know how much better it could have been. And maybe it’s a curse knowing sometimes. Because the expectations of a good night become so hard to meet.
February 19, 2010 at 2:12 pm