Disclosure and Klangkarussell for Ö3 / RedBull BeatBoat

disclosure at beatboat party vienna 2013

Well. Yesterday i found myself in the middle of an "event", like a real commercial event, something i did not join for many years, which was the first thought on my mind after seeing the "go-go-girls" on that Radio Ö3 platform ...

The concept: "a boat party" - which was not exactly true, since the only people on the boat were the artists and the team. That boat actually just carried the stage and had two stops this week, some days ago it parked in Linz and yesterday in Vienna.

But let me take you back in time a bit.

2011 . This tune immediately got me.::

Disclosure . I Love That You Know ...

which got then released on Transparent, earlier on the promo CD of the guys with some more tunes ... view on discogs

already before that Disclosure released on Moshi Moshi - in 2010.

Guy and Howard Lawrence are two brothers from Surrey, South of England.

In November 2011 Marlene Engel [moun10], Mateusz Najder and me brought the two to Vienna, to perform live. We had a small off space venue and it was more or less a private party for us and our friends.

Kidnap Kid, Jack [manager of disclosure], Guy and Howard.

It was quite a task - somehow something like 4D tetris - to make the boys and all the equipment fit into the car ..

That was a remarkable night, Disclosure's live performance, to me in that year together with James Blake the best live act i had seen. They were super motivated and exited to play and i also remember them burning CDs so that they could then DJ together with Kidnap Kid. It was marvelous!

Great taste, great skills, great energy - everything one wants to find in true musicians.

That is the reason, why i yesterday ended up going to an event that was sponsored by Austria's biggest mainstream radio station. They also invited "Klangkarussell" to perform - greater dismatch impossible ...

... Klangkarussell were really boring, and it was not only me not getting what they played, it was also the people on the event absolutely not feeling their selection.

So it was not easy to keep my motivation up to see Disclosure, could hardly wait for Klangkarussell to finish ...feeling distracted in general by a super media advertising overload .. kinda impossible to take pictures without any huuuuge logo innit...aaajjjjj ... watching those cheap gogo girls, in terrible outfits (they then even had some wing-style-fly-away-esoteric-festival kind of fabric feature on their arms and some glittery captain caps ....) being in their performance so far away from sexy or cool that it was actually fun to watch ...

But then finally it was time for Guy and Howard to step on stage and play. A Dj set. A bit sad to be honest, considering the size and budget of that event, they absolutely should have been booked for a live performance, but probably just overseen by the person in charge, maybe not having a clue about the difference of "live" and "dj set" ...

However, they played a very nice set, covering many different beat sets, very enjoyable it was!

Since Disclosure made that move to become big players in the game, on the edge of commercial music, there came up posts on the web about how they had sold themselves and all that kind of stuff ... i was checking some of these articles and always wondered why people would be so judging.

To me personally, it is such a joy to see guys - who totally deserve it - being so successful. Honestly it means a lot to me. There could not be a greater pleasure than seeing two individuals, who are out of the underground dance scene, perform in front of an audience, that normally listens to the likes of David Guetta. In my ear, Disclosure never "sold" themselves, what they do is GREAT POP MUSIC! and there is no doubt in my mind about the quality of their material. Producing great pop is one of the most respectable things to archive in music - to me, ok official Michael Jackson fan speaking - but i am sure many people feel the same way.

And why does it make me so happy? Because i think that mainstream media is taking their customers for fools. Mainstream media wants to "fit" their customers' desires, and they just assume that people are stupid - they actually raise them to be like that ... DON'T ASSUME!

If we could speak of a vivid and full of variety media landscape things could be different! And actual artists would get a chance to have a life.

Disclosure makes the simple fact appear, that people who are not involved in the club scene and underground music world are able and very capable of getting down to real dance music. It is not too complicated, too abstract, too unknown or any other of these ridiculous reasons that mainstream media is not giving place to a cultural expression of a very vivid international community, speaking of Austria, with the exception of radio FM4 and orange maybe.

The crowd yesterday was not running off because of hearing something like ...