The Prince & Michael Experience
Nicos Gun
Sat, August 18, 2012
9:00 pm
The Blockley$10 - $12
Tickets
This event is 21 and over
http://www.theblockley.com/event/110113/
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The Prince & Michael Experience
Collectively, Prince and Michael Jackson helped define the early '80s era of MTV, revolutionized both R&B and popular music, and influenced thousands of musicians worldwide. The Prince and Michael Experience is meant to celebrate the music of two of the biggest pop cultural icons of our generation – a celebration carried out with love and mutual respect for both artists.
The music is far from the only thing happening at this party. There's theme dancing, a face-off between guests repping The Purple One or The King of Pop, and much, much more. This is the perfect night out to lounge with your friends, make some new friends, get your drink on, dance your ass off, and have the time of your life. Prince and Michael Jackson fans go toe-to-toe on the dance floor as DJ Dave Paul from San Francisco mixes album cuts, remixes, rare tracks, and hits from the two artists.
Dave Paul began his music career in 1984, starting as a mobile DJ and evolving into a prominent college radio and club DJ remixer in San Francisco. During the late '80s and early '90s, his weekly radio show Beat Box Fridays on college radio station KCSF was instrumental in breaking many hip-hop records in the Bay Area market. Utilizing various pseudonyms, Paul has produced records and created the world's first scratch tool for digital DJs, The Ultimate Scratch CD. In 1991 he launched the now-legendary publication The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine, and in 1995 he transformed the magazine into a record label. The label's Return of the DJ series was ranked by Spin Magazine as No. 25 in its 90 Greatest Albums of the '90s list. Paul has been featured in URB Magazine and XLR8R, has appeared on the front cover of Billboard, and was featured in the motion picture Scratch (2001). He has DJed throughout the US, toured Europe and the UK, released over 100 projects on his record label, and currently produces themed DJ parties, including the Prince and Michael Experience, which has been packing houses for a decade.
The music is far from the only thing happening at this party. There's theme dancing, a face-off between guests repping The Purple One or The King of Pop, and much, much more. This is the perfect night out to lounge with your friends, make some new friends, get your drink on, dance your ass off, and have the time of your life. Prince and Michael Jackson fans go toe-to-toe on the dance floor as DJ Dave Paul from San Francisco mixes album cuts, remixes, rare tracks, and hits from the two artists.
Dave Paul began his music career in 1984, starting as a mobile DJ and evolving into a prominent college radio and club DJ remixer in San Francisco. During the late '80s and early '90s, his weekly radio show Beat Box Fridays on college radio station KCSF was instrumental in breaking many hip-hop records in the Bay Area market. Utilizing various pseudonyms, Paul has produced records and created the world's first scratch tool for digital DJs, The Ultimate Scratch CD. In 1991 he launched the now-legendary publication The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine, and in 1995 he transformed the magazine into a record label. The label's Return of the DJ series was ranked by Spin Magazine as No. 25 in its 90 Greatest Albums of the '90s list. Paul has been featured in URB Magazine and XLR8R, has appeared on the front cover of Billboard, and was featured in the motion picture Scratch (2001). He has DJed throughout the US, toured Europe and the UK, released over 100 projects on his record label, and currently produces themed DJ parties, including the Prince and Michael Experience, which has been packing houses for a decade.
Nicos Gun
"If #sxsw is where the world meets the future, then we'd like to introduce the future to Nicos Gun." - Spinner
"With oodles of talent, an incredible live show and a super-sized love for Prince many things rhythmic, Nicos Gun brings together elements of New Wave with electronic dance music. File under: not afraid to entertain." - Paste Magazine
"If you could distill the feverish intensity of an all-night rager and alchemize it into a musical form, then you'd get a sense of what to expect from Philly-based foursome Nicos Gun...Fusing punk rock energy with a genre-jumping eclectic mix of psych-pop, funk and glam rock, Nicos Gun wants their fans to have fun enjoying their sound." - Relix
"Nicos Gun mine the musical territory of electronic dance rock. Though the sound of the band recalls elements of the past, they are a band of the moment. The full-force funk of songs like "Dirty Girl," and "Soldier" bring to mind the R&B music of Prince, with its funky rhythmic bottom and slinky, chicken-scratch guitar riffs. On songs like "Control," the sinewy synthesizer lines drive the beat bring to mind the lock-step electronic grooves of LCD Soundsystem." - WXPN
"Nicos Gun got the crowd energized with their own bounce and raucousness. More streamlined then their tour mates, the Philadelphia based band seesawed between electro-tinged dance floor anthems and Velvet-Underground inspired hazy rockers.... The polish of the dance numbers were dirtied up with a surprisingly non plagiarized rock attitude and the guitar freak outs of lead singer/guitarist Barney Cortez........" - Brooklyn Vegan
"Nicos Gun didn't start out as a band at all. Producer Harry Zelnick, Barney Cortez (singer/guitar player), and Nick Bockrath (guitarist/keyboardist) initially met to produce "a track that Lil Wayne would want to use". Having won a Grammy for work that he did with Ludacris when he was just 17 ("War With God"), Zelnick has worked with everyone from Kelly Clarkson to 50 Cent. "Harry is trained to just crank beats out. We started to write fast and combine every type of music we like from the Velvet Underground to Lil B. Next thing we know we had over 40 songs."
Cortez has cut guitar tracks for The Roots before, Bockrath has done time with American Babies and Elevator Fight (with Zoe Kravitz), and the two previously performed together as Philly Indie darlings Cortez, Cortez. But when they combined forces with Zelnick, the pieces started falling into place and they realized they didn't have a group -- they had a gang.
With a laptop studio set up in the loft apartment they all share -- and a permanent practice space they frequent daily -- Nicos Gun doesn't take a day off. When they're not recording a new song, they're making a video for the new song they recorded yesterday. "I want people to know that we're experimenting and doing a lot of work," says Cortez. "We're just trying to do something new and cool everyday, whether it fits into this box or that box."
"A big part of it, too, is that we want to bring people into our world," says Nicos Gun. "We want to show people how we live in Philly. Making a video is as fun as making a new song. And especially just to be able to write a song, make a video, put it on the net, and have people respond to it is awesome. Friends will tell friends who will tell friends and you can gain a fan one at a time. We like writing songs, we like getting them to people, and we like playing live. It's a pretty simplistic idea."
-- Benjy Eisen (AOL Music / Spinner); San Francisco
"With oodles of talent, an incredible live show and a super-sized love for Prince many things rhythmic, Nicos Gun brings together elements of New Wave with electronic dance music. File under: not afraid to entertain." - Paste Magazine
"If you could distill the feverish intensity of an all-night rager and alchemize it into a musical form, then you'd get a sense of what to expect from Philly-based foursome Nicos Gun...Fusing punk rock energy with a genre-jumping eclectic mix of psych-pop, funk and glam rock, Nicos Gun wants their fans to have fun enjoying their sound." - Relix
"Nicos Gun mine the musical territory of electronic dance rock. Though the sound of the band recalls elements of the past, they are a band of the moment. The full-force funk of songs like "Dirty Girl," and "Soldier" bring to mind the R&B music of Prince, with its funky rhythmic bottom and slinky, chicken-scratch guitar riffs. On songs like "Control," the sinewy synthesizer lines drive the beat bring to mind the lock-step electronic grooves of LCD Soundsystem." - WXPN
"Nicos Gun got the crowd energized with their own bounce and raucousness. More streamlined then their tour mates, the Philadelphia based band seesawed between electro-tinged dance floor anthems and Velvet-Underground inspired hazy rockers.... The polish of the dance numbers were dirtied up with a surprisingly non plagiarized rock attitude and the guitar freak outs of lead singer/guitarist Barney Cortez........" - Brooklyn Vegan
"Nicos Gun didn't start out as a band at all. Producer Harry Zelnick, Barney Cortez (singer/guitar player), and Nick Bockrath (guitarist/keyboardist) initially met to produce "a track that Lil Wayne would want to use". Having won a Grammy for work that he did with Ludacris when he was just 17 ("War With God"), Zelnick has worked with everyone from Kelly Clarkson to 50 Cent. "Harry is trained to just crank beats out. We started to write fast and combine every type of music we like from the Velvet Underground to Lil B. Next thing we know we had over 40 songs."
Cortez has cut guitar tracks for The Roots before, Bockrath has done time with American Babies and Elevator Fight (with Zoe Kravitz), and the two previously performed together as Philly Indie darlings Cortez, Cortez. But when they combined forces with Zelnick, the pieces started falling into place and they realized they didn't have a group -- they had a gang.
With a laptop studio set up in the loft apartment they all share -- and a permanent practice space they frequent daily -- Nicos Gun doesn't take a day off. When they're not recording a new song, they're making a video for the new song they recorded yesterday. "I want people to know that we're experimenting and doing a lot of work," says Cortez. "We're just trying to do something new and cool everyday, whether it fits into this box or that box."
"A big part of it, too, is that we want to bring people into our world," says Nicos Gun. "We want to show people how we live in Philly. Making a video is as fun as making a new song. And especially just to be able to write a song, make a video, put it on the net, and have people respond to it is awesome. Friends will tell friends who will tell friends and you can gain a fan one at a time. We like writing songs, we like getting them to people, and we like playing live. It's a pretty simplistic idea."
-- Benjy Eisen (AOL Music / Spinner); San Francisco