Dahlia was first on the bill last night, which sometimes means death because people rarely arrive at shows in time to see the first of three artists. However, Ms. Dahlia was on fire. I'm not just saying this as a fan or a friend. The guys behind me kept asking each other "Who is this? She's awesome!" Outside, after her performance, I heard a group discussing how "awesome" the set was and "do you think she has CDs for sale?" When Dahlia eventually relocates to Los Angeles, she is going to build up quite a fan base. Here are some pictures taken with my brand new phone that I haven't quite mastered at this point. I took video too, but my video option only allows recording 15 seconds at a time.









Punk Bunny followed with one of the strangest shows I have seen in some time. There were times when I thought I might have to step outside because it was like one of those surreal moments when I'm half-asleep at 4 a.m. and the infomercial for the real estate scheme run by twin midgets comes on only to be followed by the one for the device that removes "fecal matter" from your system and I can't really figure out if I took too many sinus pills and am dreaming this or if it is real.

By the time we left, roughly midnight, The Hacker had not arrived. I don't know if he ever made it. Frankie was behind the decks and he did an excellent job. I particularly enjoyed the remix of Depeche Mode's "John the Revelator" that he played.

(I just found out from Dave that The Hacker did arrive after we left. Ah, the hell of airports.)

I ended up talking to one of my friends last night about the incredibly small amount of European techno/electro DJs that make it out to L.A. It's a conversation that comes up time and again, so I thought I would share what I learned from doing Transmission for two years.

L.A. is not a dance town in the same sense that Berlin or Montreal or Detroit are dance towns. When L.A. does dance, it's mostly to progressive house and/or trance. That said, DJs like Oakenfold, Sasha, Digweed, Tiesto, et. al. have no problem bringing in the crowds. Certainly electro and/or techno events happen in Los Angeles, but even the most successful are small in comparison to Friday nights at Avalon. Now, when I did Transmission, booking agents did approach me about some big-time European DJs. Even though I loved these artists and continually played their productions and remixes, I had to say no simply because there was no way we could budget for such things. Transmission was a little different because it was intended to be a free club and The Parlour was a fairly small venue (at the very most, capacity was 300 and that's probably a stretch). However, my best guess is that even clubs that do charge a cover would have a problem bringing out such DJs. Because the European DJs generally don't do full-scale tours, the promoter would have to fly out the artist, get the hotel room, feed the artist and then pay the performance rate. This can be extremely expensive, particularly in consideration of the fact that L.A. clubs generally don't charge more than $20 at the door and, usually, cover is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10. Then you have to think about how many people you can get through the door. If it's a club with an already established, large crowd, you can probably estimate that you would get roughly the same amount of people as you would any other night. If it's a monthly or a one-off, the crowd is almost solely reliant on the DJs' draw, which is a gamble considering that even if the person has a song or remix that is incredibly popular on the L.A. dancefloor, most of the crowd won't know the artist by name, unless it's Miss Kittin or Felix da Housecat. (Aside: That's why I always post playlists.) Plus, L.A.-based press tends to completely ignore dance music unless it's either so hipster that everyone else is already talking about it, involves DJ AM or, you guessed it, is progressive house, which really limits your capabilities to hype the event. (Also, I firmly believe that My Space is completely useless in club promotion, but that's a different rant all together.) That said, I think most of us are going to have to head out on European road trips if we want to see Tiefschwarz spin anytime soon.