Brick Lane Window Party

Brick Lane Window Party

http://www.partyvibe.org/free-parties/fpreportl.html

3/4/99

The party was near Aldgate East in a huge blue and white office block. Loads of people are arriving as we turn up around midnight and boom-boom-boom is coming from inside, so in we go.
Oh shit, this place is huge. Over something like 10 floors, there were rooms and rooms of sound systems. I lost count of how many there were, but it was much more than the 6 promised. There was everything from Gabba to that lovely "Housey London" sound, I still don't know this is really called.

The night was spent either dancing myself silly or wandering around this huge building, constantly finding more and more new areas. Fair to say I was getting as trashed as the building was.

One thing was clear though, the event was popular, massively popular. Despite there being no advertising and the phone lines not opening 'till 10.00pm, I would say at a guess at least 5000 people turned up, maybe a lot more. The reason for the popularity is simple, no hassles. This was free land, go mad in an empty office block, have fun.

I continued my wanderings down a second staircase, through the heating plant and into a huge underground car park and a room with the most beautiful sounds.

Back up the stairs to the first floor and a small area with a PA and a guy with a CD, MD and DAT arrangement playing "home made" music of various types. This guy looked like a real thug, huge he was with deep set eyes. He seemed to know his music though and was treating the CDs with utmost care. Now I began to see the strength of the underground in London, the brilliance of the music and the two little figures held stiff against the blandness of commercialism.

More rooms later I find Doug, a friend over from the US and experiencing his first squat rave, who seems to have had an interesting time. I was worried as to how he would feel about all of this, certainly it was quite unlike anything he had experienced in the US. He seemed happy enough and we went upstairs together to yet another room I hadn't found yet on the top floor.

This room was huge. It was daylight by now (had been for some time) and the large "glass wall" windows let the light flood in to show a somewhat trashed open plan office room full of trashed people. After dancing for some time I took a break and sat down for a chill.

As we were talking some geezer, totally off his head, runs over to me, slaps me (gently) on the head and runs away. I didn't think too much of it, but a bit later he does it again to someone else. I'm watching him as he is clearly going over the top, rolling around on the floor and then running around the room. Suddenly, he runs toward me again, but slightly to my left, and smashes into one of the large glass windows which shatters. He seems OK though and goes back to his insane running around. A group of people are concerned about him however, and we talk about what to do. Some of them want to call the police and stop the party before he hurts himself. I thought we should take him downstairs to somewhere nearer ground level and where its quieter.

Before we can come to a conclusion though, he comes running from the crowd again. I see him and I can tell from his eyes, this is it. I try and grab him but fail, then run with all my speed behind him shouting "stop him, stop him", but he reaches the window and dives head first at it.

Fuck

Glass smashes as he goes out the window with a sound I will never forget, but someone catches his feet at the last minute and pulls him back in, we're 6 floors up remember. He gets up and runs again, but this time there is a lot of blood. I catch him and wrestle him to the ground and with the help of about six other people, we apply first aid.

This was serious, and I had wondered what would happen in a place like this if there was an emergency, now I was going to find out. Someone with a mobile phoned 999. The police were there in minutes, followed by the medics.

The guy was out of there very quickly and off to hospital, I doubt he would

have had faster attention in a legal place. Police re-enforcements turned up but stayed outside. I was left there, covered in blood and very shaken but with a strange feeling of having just saved someones' life. I've never done that before.

It's also worth mentioning the way others reacted. A girl knew more about applying the pressure pad than I did, someone else checked carefully for glass fragments, someone else phoned the police and directed them to the scene, others helped restrain him. No-one got in the way, everyone helped. The police, it has to be said, were also wonderful, they were calm and polite and accepted help until they were able to take full control.

The bloke was tripping on acid, rather too much acid.

Afterwards me and Doug went up to the roof and I became a lump of jelly. We left the party (it was around midday) and went to have a cup of tea.

There is a happy ending to the story, the person concerned made a full recovery and is still very much with us, if a little shaken by the experience, but it was an unfortunate end to what had been a really good party.

Derek

Waterden Road

First party Waterden Road

17.4.99

http://www.partyvibe.org/free-parties/fpreportk.html

Back again to Hackney Wick, a mother of an industrial estate in East London. Down past an array of trucks and after the usual hassle at the door (parties in London are never free or just donation) we're in. Now, I'm quite excited about this party because in the main room is Bedlam, with live sets promised from 69db, Crystal Distortion and les Boucles Etranges, who are all making amazing records at the moment but never seem to venture across from France.

Unfortunatel,y I was to be disappointed. There was no stuff up saying who was playing when and no-one I asked seemed to have much idea. I was hoping to hear some teknival sounds but what seemed to be going on was a sort of extended jamming session over the DJ which meant the overall music was cluttered and only good when the DJ played a good track, which wasn't often because he/she was trying to play looping repetitive stuff so stuff could be added over the top. A case of too many cooks perhaps.

Another downer was the rig which was set up in Spiral style to be as loud as possible, which in a long, thin, low-ceilinged room with a speaker stack only at the front led to quite a bad amount of distortion (although also some interesting sub bass sensations). The toilets in the corner of the room were filled to overflowing which is pretty normal, but here they were feeding a big puddle which you had to walk through to get downstairs, so the piss got spread all around the floors and the stairs were dripping.

Downstairs we had a dub system, Ooops playing crisp jungle, but I didn't stay there long, and either side of Ooops two fluoro trancey rigs. These were Aardvark and Schpank. The latter redeemed itself in the morning by setting up a huge inflatable floor of a bouncy castle type thing which filled their room. It was quite surreal to witness tanked up ravers cavorting around on this big green air cushion. Upstairs Mainline had a good-looking set up and played some cool distorted gabba, but were at a severe disadvantage in that their space smelt of rancid butter. The reason being that it had once been filled with huge food processing machines, and I've heard since that the building as a whole was used as an abattoir.

This was an alright party but it promised so much more, so it was a shame it didn't deliver. The atmosphere was never that good either, since it felt slightly empty and there seemed to be an air of people standing around waiting for everything to kick in. Or maybe that's just because I was in that sort of mood, it's hard to say. We left at about midday with the music lapsing into super muffled syncopated drum and bass, and get trapped in the world's most horrible car boot sale next door. And then the pub.

Ed

AA Rotterdam

6/3/99

http://www.partyvibe.org/free-parties/fpreportf.html

The location was in the harbours of Rotterdam. It looked like an abandoned factory, with trash all over the floor, and the roof was leaking, but it breathed just the right atmosphere for the parties we want to throw. We didn't squat the building because it just was too fucked up, and we couldn't block all entrances. Glad that cops didn't show up, well they did once, but by surprise they were only interested in the building next to ours. Later it occurred that some moron (a fool from Nijmegen) had broken in... I mean, you have to be a fucking airhead AND asshole when you don't understand that this can cause us trouble. Cybx 010 wanted to throw a party in the same building as well this weekend, but of course, cops prevented this, simply because of this silly burglary.

Back to the party. We had a 3.5 kw soundsystem, with massive bassbins. It sounded like the roof was going up and down. Dj's spinning Chris, Dave, Ratski, Querin, Sed, and Sjors. We also had a 2.5 hour (!!) liveset by Groove Wreckaz. It was original, and hard, up to 200 bpm. The plan was to do a 1 hour set only, but since no DJ showed up, they where forced to go on, and on, and on .. Last but not least we had a videoprojection taken care by Cedi of Cybx 010. All this together, and the fact that the atmosphere was perfect, made this once again, a cool party. We stopped about 19:00 and at that time 40 people where still present nicely sitting around a campfire (inside the building), we kind of felt sad to stop the music, and felt like we could go on for another day. But maybe, our next party will be a 48 hour party. We want to keep a healthy network, so again, no flyers, which hopefully causes to get rid of those morons who started trashing at the infamous Voorburg-party, by AA, K9 and Plexat.

Check your heads, don't let tekno get spoiled... For some pictures and movies, check out http://user.exit.de/tekno

Henry

NYE 1998/1999

Stratford NYE ^^^^^party * report * NYE * 1999 ^^^^

 Pissed up to the gills, the tekno revellers came into Stratford (East London) in a constant stream of minicabs. We got there about two, had the usual "wot ? you're telling me five quid ?" argument and then we were in. The number of systems varied from twelve to fifteen depending on who you spoke to. I saw ten, but then I couldn't see.

There appeared to be four floors, all equally huge, all containing at least two systems each side of protuding corners. The music was uniformly normal in its London free partyness -- ie crap fast techno, reasonably rough jungle, and acid tekno. No Spiral/Network/French stuff was to be heard unfortunately, although that doesn't mean there wasn't any, but then I very rarely hear any quality music in England nowadays.

The warehouse was huge but didn't have any water, which would've been ok except that ALL THE BARS ran out about nine, so we left at ten, which was a shame coz it would've been nice to stay. This was nowhere near as cool a venue as last year, Tottenham, but then Tottenham was something i'll be telling me grandchildren about ("mum - grandad's gurning again"). The people came and the people partied - the take on the door must have been huge and i hope it fell into the right hands. All in all, a pretty good one, especially judging by the size of the headache I had when I finally got home. With another party in a pub and then a party in an old nightclub last Sat, Stratford's certainly basing a firm claim for tekno central 1999.

mujinga





We (Mutant Pollutant) did the United Systems party in London, one of the best free parties I've been to in years! It was in an old office block. The building was huge, with 4 levels and around 15 sound systems playing eveything from trance to reggae, there were 4 on the level we were on. There was no trouble from the coppers either, there were quite a few outside but they never tried to get in. We had our loudest system so far and caned it all night resulting in fucking up an amp. shorting out a mid range speaker and setting fire to a bassbin (there's a huge hole in the cone and it's covered in water now!) but it was worth it. We shut down about 1pm and then came the worst part, lugging all our stuff up and down stairs whilst being completly knackered. This was the first United Systems party we'd done and they seem really well organised, everything thought out in advance like separate entrances for sound systems and party goers so no one got in the way of the equipment being carried in, people on the all the doors that were open so they could shut up quick if the coppers tried to get in, we even got a little bit of money off the door and they'd never heard of us before! All in all it was an excellent party but I doubt if we'll being doing loads in London this year, after all we've got to help keep the vibe alive in this area!
P.Remix
http://www.partyvibe.org/free-parties/fpreport7.html