💵 House Arrest @ VOLO, Corning, NY

July 05, 2024 | Work: 2024-02

Background

My friends do a regular monthly on the first friday of each month at this cool bar in Corning called VOLO. (I’ve played there before.) Because of unrelated reasons, I don’t always have Fridays free to play these events, but this time I did!

One thing that has been consistently challenging about playing here is that the crowd preference definitely skews more contemporary / familiar music. When I do play, I often go in with the expectation of opening or at least playing early; pragmatically, it makes the most sense. We all want the evening to be successful for the bar, and that means making decisions that serve that end.

That said, I see it as an experiment to try and find stuff that I do have that will land well. I’ve played trance, acid, techno, tech-house, drum & bass, and now this time: house. My house collection is still pretty minimal but I have enough now that I can almost get a decent-sounding full hour out of it. This region tends to be a safe bet with disco / boogie style music (~125 BPM), so I planned out a set that was roughly there.

A friend also mentioned that the crowd last month did well with breaks so I added some breaks records to pad the set and also see how it would land.

There were two additional factors that went into set planning:

  1. It was a holiday weekend, and I was visiting family the day before.
  2. I had THREE BOOKINGS for this weekend, consecutively.

Setlist

(I did record it but had the same issue as with Middlelakes where someone moved the recorder and it scrubbed the recording when the power was disrupted, so no recording for this one)

This set may or may not be completely accurate, but it’s the best I can recall – I played variations on the same set for each event, since I didn’t have enough time to study material for three separate sets. It was some combination of these songs, in a sequence similar to this.

  1. Kool Moe Dee
  2. Wishbone
  3. Kool Moe Dee b-side
  4. Wishbone b-side
  5. CJ Bolland
  6. Bucketheads - Da Bomb
  7. Ben Sims
  8. Joey Beltram
  9. Starecase
  10. Paul van Dyk - For An Angel (Way Out West mix)
  11. BT - Somambulist
  12. Madonna - Music (whitelabel breaks mix)
  13. Nigel Richards
  14. Joey Beltram
  15. Eric Prydz - Call On Me
  16. Green Velvet - Flash (Timo Maas’s Dirty Dub)
  17. Richie Hawtin - Orange Minus

Reflection

The set was OK. Even though I was the second of four to play that evening, the crowd didn’t really appear until the last 15 minutes of my set.

Bucketheads ran too long. This particular mix has an incredibly long intro – 128 bars if I had to guess – and finding the cue points is tricky because the beat is very repetitious until it finally breaks and the melody comes out.

Even though I’ve practiced it many times, the blend of Flash with Orange Minus just didn’t lock in right – I kept drifting and derailing the beatmatch slightly. I don’t know if other people noticed but I did.

I need more disco / funky house so extend the opening portion longer.

Of the three sets this weekend, this was my second best.

This was a paid event.