Cosmo and Ayres went with the Smalltown DJs to Shambhala Festival in British Columbia last weekend. There were 10,000 hippies and ravers camping out in the woods, doing drugs and dancing. 6 stages, music 24/7, and amazing sound systems. Best. Rave. Ever.

The Fractal Forest during Ayres and Cosmo’s set

The beach stage at about 10 in the morning.

Everyone wore costumes all weekend.

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Ayres and the Scratch Bastid

Cosmo is always groovy

Music highlights were DJ Numark – one of the best hip-hop and classics sets we’ve seen in our lives – Smalltown DJs, Malente, Drop The Lime, Vinyl Richie, Hugs, Scratch Bastid, Flosstradamus, Neighbor, Wax Romeo, Fort Knox 5 and Ursula 1000.

Veronika and Ayres are proud to announce the birth of Nina Zielinska Haxton!  She came a little early but she’s beautiful and healthy so she’ll be able to come home as soon as she gets her weight up a little.

I’m back from Australia – it was truly incredible, a whirlwind tour that somehow crammed gigs in Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle, two radio spots, an instore, trips to the beach, the Sydney opera house and the Melbourne zoo into four days. Ian took 350 pictures! We’re back out on the road tommorow to Detroit and California but we’ll be back in the city from Saturday on for a bunch of Halloween parties and other fun. Be sure to come out and party with us.

Koala at the National Zoo in Melbourne. It was beautiful weather and they were moving around a lot which is unusual for Koalas, even leaping from branch to branch.

Wombats were cute as hell! The platypus was amazing too, so crazy looking.

At ABC radio studios in Melbourne

On the radio! One of the turntables was messed up and wouldn’t work with Serato so I had to play almost entirely on internal mode on that side, so frustrating to suck on national radio behind technical issues. Oh well.

Ian drinking Rave Juice at the club in Melbourne. Agwa liquor + Redbull + Vodka + Glow Stick!

Doing it big in Melbourne

In the club with Levins (Ro Sham Bo / Heaps Decent) and Craig (CWD)

The Sydney crowd was already in a frenzy when we got there at 11 PM. There was a three way battle between Ro Sham Bo, Hoops and Peace Out crews, madness.

Anna Lunoe (Hoops) – the Hoops girls were tag teaming new hip-hop and dancing up a storm in matching outfits. I felt like they won but Ro Sham Bo were the crowd favorites.

Newcastle was a sort of cheesy outdoor hotel party but people were going off to Baile funk and Baltimore Club and electro house. All that stuff is super popular in Australia, it’s not even underground music there.

Huge huge shout out to Alanna who rescued us from the insanity in Newcastle and took us sightseeing in Sydney!

Circular Quay – we hung out for three hours watching the sun set.

Sydney Opera House

(see the whole set on Ian’s Flickr)

Photos from Kurupt 2 (Sinden, Switch, Ayres & Max Pask)

Sunburned and Cobrasnaked in LA:

Ayres & AM & Stretch & Mike B & ?uestlove at LAX

I was out on tour opening for Ghostface all last week. It was a little bit of a challenge because I didn’t play any dirty south hip-hop, house, club, 80s or whatever else I’m used to playing, but I had fun with real schitt hip-hop and classic soul and reggae. It’s pretty awesome getting a room full of backpackers to sing along to Gloria Jones “Tainted Love.”

Ghost at Highline Ballroom in NY, photo by Ian Meyer – prints for sale at Crewcial.org. (more pictures here).

Cappadonna killed it with those long breathless verses from Winter Wars and Daytona 500.  When he’s 48 bars in and still going the crowd just loses it.

Rhythm Roots Allstars unloading from the bus. These dudes kill it live, staying faithful to the original Ghostface instrumentals and freaking shit like Nautilus, No No No and La La Means I Love You. The old guy is our bus driver; he’s normally the driver for Good Charlotte.

My bunk on the bus is the size of a coffin but has its own DVD / CD / radio player. Scion puts us up in four star hotels but we don’t even sleep there.  To get from St Louis to Minneapolis for example we had to leave at like 3 AM so the hotel was just a really expensive place to shower and change clothes after the show.

Mike the 2600 King showed me around Minneapolis and took me to the Burlesque Design studios.

Wezz and Mike were printing MF Doom posters.

The Rub European tour is going swimmingly, thanks for asking! Just one day left then we’ll be home for a couple of days. I have to say the highlight so far was playing with Sinden, Switch, Kool Keith and South Rakkas crew at Fabric. So nuts!

Sinden, me & Dow Jones of SouthRakkas Crew

Switch

More pictures soon-ish. Eleven and I won’t be back in time for McCarren Pool Party Saturday so Cosmo is holding it down along with Kennan & Mikey Palms so go! I’ll be at Highline Ballroom Monday with Ghostface but I think the RSVPs are already full up. But in the meantime check out the video for Escort’s “All Through The Night.”

Scandinavia was really nuts. The Rumble in Malmo in particular was just an incredible party – I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many people go nuts to Baltimore Club in my life.  To give you an idea, the biggest song of the night was DJ Class “Stop Snitching!”

All the parties were great – shout out to Sampo in Helsinki, Jaywalker crew in Oslo, Jonny and Sanna, Saurabh and my man Stefan in Stockholm and of course Sweet Fred and the Discobelle crew in Malmo.  Tittsworth murdered it everywhere we went, and I just tried to keep up!  We literally didn’t sleep at night the whole time we were there, just a few afternoon naps to battle the 21+ hours of daylight everyday.

Helsinki photos here, more photos coming.  So now I’m home playing catch up for a few days, then heading up to Montreal on Friday.