More Pleasuredome goodness...

I was a huge fan of Pleasuredome '94 and have been eager for quite some time to track down as many sets from the night as possible.  Thanks to Rob RadioDog for posting a link to DJ Angus' set from the night in the comments on my previous Pleasuredome post, which I've not heard before.  It's a great set which contains many of the great anthems of the day and skits effortlessly between happy hardcore, more Italian stuff and even a little house.  Pretty darn good!  Also below is the DJ Vic set from the night which, while a little harder, is just as good.

I have the full Pleasuredome video floating about my house somewhere.  I'll have to work out a way of posting it to the archive as well.  It would be great to get a full archive of available sets from the night.

Do you have any of the other Pleasuredome tapes?  Hit us up in the comments or on Facebook!

On the Archive's Facebook page, there's a bit of chatter on the wall from others who have tapes squirreled away, just waiting to be ripped and uploaded.  From my standpoint I'm particularly interested in "official" tapes that were put up for sale (you know, with covers 'n' shit) and live sets from legendary parties.  Hit us up in the comments or on Facebook and let us know what you've got!

At the moment I'm trying to upload tapes I haven't caught online elsewhere, so if you're looking for something in particular that isn't on here, there are hundreds of tapes in the forums on Inthemix or the Oldskool page on Facebook.

Click here to download DJ Angus live at Pleasuredome '94 Side A

Click here to download DJ Angus live at Pleasuredome '94 Side B

Click here to download DJ Vic live at Pleasuredome '94 Side A

Click here to download DJ Vic live at Pleasuredome '94 Side B

(These tapes were not ripped by the Sydney DJ Tape Archive)

Or click here to read our post featuring Slipmatt's set from the party

Definition of a hardcore tape

This is the last proper hardcore tape I bought before moving on from the world of insane gabber kicks.  And as far as a hardcore tape goes, it's pretty darn good.  Side A is my pick.  To me it's the classic Geoff Da Chef sound - hard ass beats at around 180-190 bpms that make you wanna move.  Classic samples abound, referencing oldskool hip-hop, acid house, Dutch gabber, English jungle, movies, reggae, rare groove and more.  Side A is yet another chapter in the sound Geoff brought in "The Second Serve" and "Just Desserts".  It may be hard, but ultimately it's party music.

Things take a harder twist on Side B, where the beats slip over the 200 bpm mark and well into nosebleed territory, including some, erm, classics like "Shaftman", "Necronomicon" and the one that goes "Sex, sex, sex is the law, law, law when a guy gets a girl on the floor, floor, floor".  Without the benefit of nostalgia it's all too easy to pass the whole side off as aggressive noise.  It's a challenging listen without question, but the reward comes in realising 200 bpm hardcore is less about "aggression" and more about "release".  It's the style that takes the antiestablishmentarianism of rave to its logical (and final) conclusion.  The ultimate "fuck you" to society.

Download Geoff Da Chef "666 - Definition of a Hardcore Tape" Side A
Download Geoff Da Chef "666 - Definition of a Hardcore Tape" Side B

Happy Hi NRG at it's BEST!

"Happy Hi NRG at it's BEST!"  Yup, that's what the tape cover says.  Nothing like a rave-related tape cover, flyer or 3D World article for a bevy of wayward apostrophes, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.  To be fair it never was about the spelling...

I never made it to Free Love '95.  It was somewhere like Blackmarket off memory.  Being (and very much looking) underage at the time, I was just a little too paranoid I wouldn't be let in to a 'real' nightclub.  Given 15-year old Anna Wood disastrously made it into Apache at The Phoenician a few months later I probably would have been fine, but how was I to know?

The Free Love parties just grew from there.  I missed Free Love '96 as well, due to being struck by a nasty flu post-FOD4, which had occurred a week earlier.   I did make it to Free Love '97 but by then I'd lost most of my raving mojo and don't remember being particularly impressed.  That party was one of those massive Minto raves and, being free, was packed to the rafters and seemed to attract all sorts of bogans, bombers and general weirdos.  I imagine Free Love '95 would have been the goods though - smallish, inner city and a little more underground than the juggernaut sequels that followed.

Download Free Love '95 Side A (Budds'n'Stoo)
Download Free Love '95 Side B (Dynamix)