Thursday, November 19, 2009

fOd4 - EPIC


Field of Dreams 4.  Quite possibly the peak of my raving career.  Having missed the legendary FoD3 a year-and-a-bit beforehand, my posse and I were determined not to miss this one.  And we were determined to make it a HUGE one.  Extra shifts were taken at work, nights out for months beforehand cancelled to save as much money as possible.  For a good eight weeks, the entire focus of life was preparing for this party.  (Sadly, not for my HSC just a few weeks later.)

This Paul Holden tape, released a few weeks before the party, played a massive part in the pre-fOd gee-up, along with a staggering number of trinkets: stickers, keyrings, massive and elaborate flyers and posters...  The ticket itself came in its own crisp white envelope filled with all sorts details about the fun you were going to have on the night, thick with the hippy-ish buzzwords of the day. ("Energy", "Experience", blah-di-blah.  They all started with the same letter.  Clever, huh?)

Paul Holden's mix indicates the direction of his (count'em) two mainroom sets that evening.  UK-style bouncy happy-hard is the order of the day here, peppered with a little breakbeat. (Breakbeat?  Just keep moving, junglists, this ain't your thing.)  This tape also holds the dubious honour of introducing me to Dune's "Can't Stop Raving"....although, facing facts, I really quite enjoyed it at the time.

Download Paul Holden's fOd4 gee-up Side A
Download Paul Holden's fOd4 gee-up Side B


The night itself was a total blur.  It was undoubtedly epic, but it just went by so fast, especially given the months of excitement leading up to it.  My memories just don't seem to do it justice.  The video above shows what was meant to be the peak of the night but the energy and scale of the evening is well and truly lost.  The full video is online here and goes a little further towards revisiting the vibe.

To say I clearly remember Dynamix's set would be something akin to an outright lie.  He played around 4 or 5am and my night was well and truly in the midst of 'blur' territory.  Nevertheless, I eagerly picked up the tape to "relive" the experience the moment it was released.  And it's a pretty darn fine example of hard-house-slash-hard-trance as it was at the time.  There's a whole bunch of killer tracks here like "Rock tha House", "Higher State of Consciousness" and X-Cabs' "Neuro".  It seems to sum up the kind of music that was playing around that point of the night and for the most part still has me happily bopping along today.

Download Dynamix's fOd4 set here

Got any more memories of the night you can use to help me fill in the blanks?  Are there any more Field of Dreams 4 sets in existence?  Leave a comment below....


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8 comments:

  1. Awesome, I had been looking for this for a while. Was at the party as well but, like you, I don't remember Mark Dynamix's set. I think he says in another thread on ITM that he pressed like 200 copies or something and made a copy on CD which is floating around somewhere. I have a copy of it, so going to check if it is the same as the version you put up.

    Just out of interest, how many more tapes do you have lying around?

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  2. Checked out the dynamix tape you put up here and it is half of his set @ 30mins. There's a CD copy floating around which contains the whole hour if you are interested?

    Were there 2 sides to the tape you have? Or just one?

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  3. Definitely interested in the CD. If you can get a rip of it to me (upload to Zshare or Mediafire would be ideal) I'll update the blog with the better quality soundfile...

    I've doublechecked the Dynamix file posted above. It's the full hour, so perhaps your downloader conked out before it finished!

    Regarding my tape collection - I have a whole box at home. Lots of stuff has made it onto the net before, so I'm trying to put up the tapes that I haven't yet seen elsewhere. I've probably got 20-30 or so proper tapes to go, plus a few Dynamix radio shows etc.

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  4. sick been looking for this tape for a while now! lost it about 5 years ago rad

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  5. Keen for tracklistings of both of these gems xx

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  6. Dynamic mix link is broken.... please fix.. thanks for your efforts.

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  7. Paul Holden links are broke. Great site btw. Much needed.

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  8. I'm looking for Paul Holden's mix of Field of Dreams 3...unless the text above implied it was HE who missed that one??

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