Another edition is over - The not so late part 3

Monday, November 1, 2004

After feeling bad because of the lack of sleep and proper accomodation and good because of the first day of party it was time for… the second day of party. Which was also the last day of TMBase for this year. This night I was finally together with my girlfriend, Ioana, who couldn’t make it for the first day because of her job and whom I picked up from the train station on Saturday morning. It looks like it’s time for the grand finale of my biggest ever write-up for this blog.

So we were out for Saturday night! A little earlier again because I had to set up the MiniDisc again, which I did. It was better because at least I could hang out with somebody that’s close to me but unfortuntaly I realized later that I didn’t have all the time I wanted to dance and just hang around with Ioana because I had to supervise that damn recorder and I had to take pics too. And this drew me away for quite some time, mostly because of the MD recorder because I needed to stay close to it and watch when the artists switched and quickly switch the disc accordingly. Baaah! So, although we were with Ioana’s friend at who’s we sleeped at, my girlfriend was left alone for some serious periods of time and this was quite a mood killer for her. :-(

But back to the event. Saturday night started with the chilled beats of DJ Mike from Sofa Music Bucharest at scene 1 and the more aggressive party breakbeats of Sensorship helped by Alex S’ scratches over at scene 2. The tunes George aka Sensorship slammed down were mostly well known and these combined with those really cool scratches by Alex got the people in the mood in no time. I went over to S1 to see Comfort Fit from the Tokyo Dawn netlabel getting on the scene together with his hardware. I really liked the beats he started to play, although they were more on the hip-hop side of things… But I went back to S2 to see the evolution of Mr. Seb. He played a more “relaxed” set than he usually does and I was waiting for it to explode anytime and it finally did over at the end. I remember that taking pics of Seb was almost impossible because of the huge amount of artificial fog that was floating in the air. Seb was about the last one who I saw at S2 Saturday night because after his performance I went back to S1 and got stuck there for good. I know that at a certain moment I went back to S2 to try to photograph Electric Brother but they were just finished with their performance so I gave up and lost Aria Urbana completely but then heard some of the performance of Gojira and Kosak who were greatly appreciated by the public later on the forums. Then lost Millimetric, Mr. Pit and Haute Culture completely again. Whops.

But this means I saw everything that happened in the following hours over at S1. And here are the events chronologically. First of all it was The Hacker who at the press conference earlier that day was really afraid that he’ll have no crowd for his electro set. That didn’t happen. The set was a great success, and people who are sworn to the broken beats said later that it was some great music that French dude played. And it was electro 100% percent. I remember some sample saying: “Tanze!” and then some chipping melody coming in… Wow, that was awesome! I even danced a little, but then The Hacker finished and the big crowd favorite Jay Cunning went up. I like the guy because he’s one great showman, we had him in Romania 3 + 1 times already thanks to TMBase but this time he really overplayed those Prodigy tunes, as some say that he put on 6 of them… There at the spot I didn’t really care, and his set was the only one to which I danced for more than a half an hour during the whole festival. The crowd was extatic anyway. And I remember another very funny moment: Cosmin aka Trigga doing some pogo on one of the Prodigy songs. Jay brought a different team with him this year and they were: MC Xander who is this incredible vocal talent (ever saw someone perfectly immitating scratches with his mouth?) and J-Me, the former scratcher for Hybrid who really knew his stuff. All things considered they made one big crowd teasing show.

After Jay and the gang’s set it was time for the other massive headliners: D-Bridge and MC Stamina to keep up the show. Unfortunately D-Bridge didn’t really live up to my expectations. Stamina would’ve done a great show, but I guess he would’ve needed a funkier DJ. D-Bridge played some rough & tough drum’n’bass but it was on the dull side. The tunes weren’t what I call explosive these days… I especially liked Stamina when he started singing as he had one great voice and pure MC-ing didn’t really do justice for his vocal talent.

At the end it was time for our homie, Cosmin aka Trigga to bang as D-Bridge should’ve been. And he delivered. I think he lived up to his growing fanbase’s expectations and blew the crowd for the last time, and there was dancing all over the place as everybody was just going insane. I had to go and sleep but I think I delayed it for about an hour. Just stood and watched all that craziness that was happening.

And then we went to sleep. And it was over. I’m not too good at conclusions and I’m pretty tired of all this writing but I can say I felt more than great being there. It was one truely massive event that’s finally putting Romania on the map of international electronic music festivals.