Forecastle 2008–Del, GZA

This past weekend in Louisville was filled with music, beach balls, near riots, and kazoos.

First up was Friday & the Forecastle Festival downtown. I love the mission behind Forecastle—music, art, activism. I’ll admit that I’ve never attended all 3 days of the event. I can usually only pick one day and this time I picked Friday. Because it was the first day (and I think because the focus was primarily hip-hop) a number of the vendors hadn’t yet arrived so there were several empty booths. But there was some interesting painting/photos/sculptures from local artists. I also spoke with Lori Beck from Ohio Valley Creative Energy, which is a really interesting project–much more than you would gather from the name alone.

Anyway–I really only paid attention to 3 performers–DJ 2nd Nature who had a cool visual element to coincide with his mix of mainly major label rappers (i.e. Biggie, Nas, Jay Z). The cool bit was that the videos seemed to scratch along with his turntables. I guess I don’t get out much–turntablism has moved to the next level since I last checked in…Next up! Del tha Funky Homosapien. Del was the highlight of the evening for me. His hype-man, Beaucoup came out first & did his thing alongside DJ Kevin Smith or whatever dude’s name was…A few tracks later, out came Del the pocket MC–for real. He’s tiny. He played a few older tracks (I think only 1 off Deltron 3030 & of course Misatadobalina) and a few Hieroglyphics songs and some really awesome tracks off his new full-length 11th Hour on Def Jux –one of my fav independents.  Unfortunately his mic was too low which made it more difficult to absorb his vibe. But there was a ton of energy on stage. I nearly started a riot a few songs in after catching one of the many vinyl beach balls bouncing around. Seriously. An entire row of people behind me (I didn’t bother turning around to acknowledge them) were no doubt plotting my demise. They were really pissed off–hilarious. START A TEENAGE RIOT WHATEVER! That shits super annoying. You can play beach volleyball all you want before or after the show, during the intro–I get it. You’re there to have fun. But come on…at a certain point it gets old. I’m there to watch a show, see an artist I’ve been waiting months/years to see and I don’t want to focus all my attention on balls flying at my nose. Yeah, so anyway I caught one and poked a hole in it. Go find a new playground.

GZA was up next. Along with DJ City (another bad name for a DJ which caused much confusion among the crowd who assumed GZA was giving a generic ‘city’ shout-out ’cause he didn’t know where he was). I gotta say–I think GZA just kind of phoned it in. The energy was lacking & there were long pauses in between tracks. And anyway–hip-hop live shouldn’t be tracked. It should be one long flow of beats and that just didn’t happen with GZA. It wasn’t horrible, but he didn’t really seem to be interested in our little festival.

That about wraps it up & that’s all I got. Photos courtesy of backseatsandbar cause I was too busy crushing balls.

~ by steadyb on July 29, 2008.