Ace Ventura is Yoni Oshrat, a 31-year old Israeli with a rich musical background. Born in a musical family (his father is a famous Israeli composer and song writer, for instance behind the Eurovision song "Halelujah") and previously working in the TV and movie-industry as a sound producer before he discovered trance in the beginning of the nineties. After that things moved quick for Yoni - after DJ'ing for years...
Lady Strangelove combines the minds of Brendan Shaw, (vocals, harmonica, tambourine, percussion) Azz Shaw (Bass, Keyboard, Sampler), Josh Van Looy (Guitar), and Damo Satanek (Drums) to crete an experimental style of psychedelic dance-rock, fusing influences so vast that they span everything from Pink Floyd, Santa and Jimi Hendrix to The Chemical Brotheres, The Mars Volta, The Music, and Comets on Fire.
Rene Hell is the alter-ego synthesizer project for Jeff Witscher, who was born in California in 1983. He operates "Club Lucifer" (a weekly night club) & is currently residing in Vienna, Austria. Witscher has kept busy in the past few years, recording dozens of releases as Rene Hell and a gaggle of other pseudonyms (Impregnable, Secret Abuse, Marble Sky), as well as playing in bands like Roman Torment and the curiously titled Deep Jew.
Grimes is the alias of Claire Boucher, a Montreal-based artist. Grimes fuses contemporary instrumentation with classical vocal practices from around the world. She recently released a cassette titled Geidi Primes on Arbutus. MySpace
Anton Zap was born in Moscow in 1979. He studied Chinese for 7 years and then embarked on a 2 year sound engineering course. He started collecting wax from a very young age and in the mid 90’s he joined Moscow’s underground lounge group, Tetris, led by Vlad Lozinsky. He was resident DJ at one of Moscow’s leading clubs, Propaganda from 1997-2005. He later started his own band, Papaztrio alongside Pavel Hotin and Yuriy Shulgin.
Still waters run deep but wild waters run deeper. Both when fronting San Fran free-punk body-music trio Mi Ami or performing angst-dance psycho-dramas under his solo alias, Sex Worker, Daniel Martin-McCormick always succeeds in generating total motion (and emotion) and breaking the fourth wall. His vision of tranced/anguished rhythm questing hits an apex on The Labor Of Love, his LP debut under the Sex Worker guise, and we’ve been soaking in its dark arts for months. Pulsing, lo-fi kraut electronics bubble and sputter under hazy arcs of weirdo vocal smear.
Procs is Mikael Stegman from Stockholm, Sweden. He was born in 1979 and in his early years in school his first music teacher let him play the piano on the breaks. This soon led him into taking piano lessons and he started playing classical music. In the beginning of the 90s he got his first keybord and also a new soundcard which was delivered together with an old DOS based sequencer. He started trying to make all kinds of music with this sequencer, altough, no trance or techno. The only electronic music he heard so far was Jean Michel Jarre, which he was very inspired by in the beginning.
At least 3 artists are producing under the name JP: 1. Rappare från Eslöv 2. JP is the Brazilian producer Joao Paulo who delivers Freak Out as the next Digital EP on PsyCore Records. With the constant support of Max Lanfranconi and Raja Ram, within a few years JP has become a highly demanded artist. With a slight teasing progressive start, Freak Out really jumps out at you by track two with fresh grooves
that will do nothing but get you on any trance floor experiance.
Suuns have no doubt ingested a lot of art rock, the Montreal group's minimalist rhythms are equally informed by Joy Division, Suicide and Can, often wrapped in a noisy squall of droning guitars and pulsing synths. Add to this Ben Shemie's breathy, paranoid sing/speak, and there are times that it seems like Suuns are about to drive over a sonic cliff. But there's actually a great sense of restraint at play.
The Fugs were a band formed in New York City in 1965 by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. Later that year they were joined by Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders. The band was named by Kupferberg who borrowed it from the euphemistic substitute for the word "fuck" famously used in Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead. Incidentally, the band is featured in a chapter of Mailer's book, Armies of the Night as they play at the 1967 march on the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War (with Scott Rashap on upright bass).
