💵 House Arrest @ VOLO (Corning, NY)

Background

VOLO is this awesome bar down in Corning, NY. The decor is chaotic, fun, and just plain weird in places. One point of notoriety that I always share about it is they have the keys to a BMW in a vending machine. The current owner says that the keys were left behind by the previous owner – a guest who forgot them and lived out of town and never returned for them. The keys are priced at $200 and while you can purchase them, so far no one has.

Crowd wise, it varies. It’s a tough crowd. Very bar-typical. I’ve played there with my friends in the past and it’s been pretty hit or miss, mostly miss. They tend to favor House music, modern House tracks in particular, which is a challenge for me as most of my stuff will be at least 10 years old (roughly when most music started shifting to primarily digital releases). This is definitely more “bar crowd” than “club crowd”.

I knew I was either playing first or last, so I decided to prepare a “Liquid Drum & Bass” set: fast breakbeats with atmospheric and melodic elements. It is occasionally used in commercials, video games, movie soundtracks, etc, and is perhaps slightly more accessible for being rhythmically interesting than typical straight beat music. I also knew that a friend was bringing an 18” subwoofer, so I would be able to push some good bass frequencies (the eponymous “bass”). I had 80 mins to work with.

(If you are familiar with D’n’B at all, you may recognize that many of the tracks aren’t technically liquid d’n’b tracks, but I was experimenting with playing a few funkier / more upbeat tunes and then punctuating with some gritty deep bassline tracks)

Some video one of the other DJs recorded from that evening:

Setlist

This is partly from memory so it is almost certainly not completely accurate. The first and last few, and a few clusters, are ordered correctly, but otherwise I lost the full set order.

• Wink - Young Again
• Ani - Tic Toc
• Kosheen - Yes Men (Decoder Remix)
• Future Forces, Inc. - Strongium Jazz (Dilinja Remix)
• John B - Up All Night
• XRS + Marky - Striptease
• Matrix + Danny J - Telepathy
• KG - Lucky 17
• Hive - Ultrasonic Sound (Dilinja Remix)
• Greg Packer - Lost & Confused
• John B - Sight Beyond
• X-Plorer - Doin’ It Right (I think it was this one; def one from this album)
• M.I.S.T. - Warp 1
• Trace - Sniper
• Dom & Roland - Dance All Night
• ShyFX ft. Diane - Shake Your Body
• Kabuki ft. Jenna G - Touch & Go (One of a kind)
• High Contrast - Return of Forever
• DJ Shadow - Six Days (Fresh Remix)
• Teebee - Forever Lost
• High Contrast - Amen Sister

Reflection

Technical execution was great. There were only 2 mixes that I felt could have been done better, and there were some minor technical issues regarind vibration transference that caused brief record skips (I had taken the decks out of their flight-cases for height reasons) but overall very happy with it.

The crowd was so-so on reception. Drum & Bass is always a hard sell, despite people saying they want to hear it. Even back in its heyday, it was a tough one to land with a crowd just because most people don’t know how to dance to it (it is typically around 160-170bpm, but you dance to it in half-time, as if it were 80-85bpm). Since I opened, I think this was probably fine. This can be very frustrating because while people can be entertained in a variety of ways, it’s always far more satisfying to have that validation through dancing.

Next time I play @ VOLO I will probably do some more House-type stuff, perhaps.