Wade Wilby

Last week we posted Luke Sacks’ preview of the second leg of Phish’s Summer Tour. Today, Wade “Wyllys” Wilby offers his own inimitable view on what lies ahead over what’s sure to be an interesting 14 days…

The stage is set. The time is now. After an amazing first leg full of as much surprise as there was predictability, The Phish have left the door wide open for a classic second leg which is the same amount of shows as Summer Tour ’96. The venues alone tell a story worth listening to and they haven’t played a note yet.

The Venues

Tonight, Phish plays The Greek in Berkeley, CA for the first time since 1993, a show where many Dead Heads realized that the torch had been passed – musically at least. There are a lot of heady implications for any shows in Northern California, from LSD origins to aforementioned Grateful Dead comparisons to all the music legends who reside in the area. Simply put, people are looking for a tour opening barn burner, but should just enjoy the surroundings and have a blast.

Last Time Through…

Saturday, 08/28/1993 Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA

Set 1: Llama, Bouncing Around the Room, Foam, Ginseng Sullivan, Maze, Fluffhead, Stash, The Squirming Coil, Crimes of the Mind

Set 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > Rift, Run Like an Antelope, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Sparkle, It’s Ice > Big Ball Jam, Purple Rain > Hold Your Head Up, You Enjoy Myself -> Oye Como Va Jam -> You Enjoy Myself -> Contact, Chalk Dust Torture
Encore: Daniel Saw the Stone, Amazing Grace

[all setlists via Phish.net]

READ ON for more of Wade’s thoughts on Leg Two…

Hello W+TWP peeps. Got a special July 4th edition for you beat-loving freaks. Burlington may be known for ice cream and jambands but it also has its fair share of beat purveyors that can go toe to toe with any national act.

The long running Sunday Night Mass is a weekly party held at Club Metronome – right above the infamous Nectar’s nightclub – that brings in the freshest DJ/Producer talent from around the globe as well as the locals who hold it down proper. Sunday Night Mass is promoted by Nexus Artist Management founder Justin R.E.M. and this weekend’s installment is going to be a SCORCHER. Sunday Night Mass presents La Riots. Don’t let anyone tell you B Town can’t throw down cause that bill is ridiculous.

I recently spoke with Justin about the origins of Sunday Night Mass and what the future holds for Electronic Music in Burlington…

Wyllys: How long ago did you start Sunday Night Mass?

Justin REM:We started SNM in 1999 as a weekly event that ran from 1999-2007. We relaunched the series [on a] monthly [basis] this year and it’s better than ever. We’ve brought in some big names like Don Diablo, Doc Martin, Angel Alanis and AC Slater. This Sunday’s edition of La Riots is going to be a banger.

Wyllys: You also founded Nexus Artist Management. How long ago was that and what are some of the names on your roster?

Justin REM: I founded the company in 2002 with Chris Pattison and we are going on our 9th year. We’ve managed some great acts like Bassnectar, Simply Jeff and Mephisto Odyssey. We just started booking Angel Alanis so we’re excited about that.

READ ON for more of Wyllys + the World Party…

Wade Ellis Wilby presents Hidden Track Storytellers. This is a creative writing workshop for fiction and nonfiction stories & poetry inspired by music. This second piece was inspired by Dwight

Wade “Wyllys” Wilby shares a mix from his set opening for the Disco Biscuits at the Wellmont Theatre in Montclair, NJ back on May 8… I always jump at the

Hello Interweb, So sorry for the long Wyllys and the World Party drought. I have been extremely busy planning my own DJ tour that I have neglected my column here

Wade Ellis Wilby presents Hidden Track Storytellers. This is a creative writing workshop for fiction and nonfiction stories inspired by music. This first piece was inspired by Brock Butler’s song The Weather and the Wait.

I didn’t care to look at the broken LCD display on our now defunct stage clock. She’d been to one too many bars one too many times. She was just a souvenir now; A reminder that time was irrelevant. The last notes of tour were ringing out into the depths of my brain (thanks to the tinnitus) and Sarah was a scant 8 hours away from me. Nothing else seemed to matter now and I had no yearning for anything to matter the way it use to. It’s not that my reasons for getting into this whole mess have escaped me. In fact, they’re more real to me than they ever were in the beginning. I just never thought I would look back on my life and realize that the music was the easiest part of the journey.

The dorm room acoustic sessions that evolve to open mic nights that stumble into auditions that ramble into first gigs end up rolling down some hill in the universe somewhere and one day you wake up a musician. The kind of musician and the trail of destroyed relationships tend to differ from minstrel to minstrel, but make no mistake about it, at the bottom of the hill you will have a career and a laundry list of “what could have beens”. It goes with the territory. You spend so much time perfecting your craft you lose track of the world around you and usually, about a decade later, if the universe has taken you under its wing, you come to, and realize you have actual proof of all your hard work. It may be in the form of a discography. It may be in the form of rehab. One way or another your career is born.

Somewhere in that timeline came someone who believed in you and pushed you further down the hill. When that first person makes that first shove it creates a chain reaction of shoves, a domino effect of nudges that come with their own sets of ideas, responsibilities, and consequences. It is this shoving match that moves your mind further and further away from the music, no matter how hard you practice every day. Managers, accountants, publicists…all necessary evils to an end goal, but evils nonetheless. When I picked up my first Ovation in 5th grade (what a piece of shit that guitar was) I never thought I’d spend more time on the phone discussing the importance of playing Boston on a Thursday as opposed to NYC. I wish I never found out what a “major market” was. I wish I never learned a lot of things.

READ ON for more of this installment of Storytellers…

My DJ Partner Lax Class just sent me this stone groove of a mix from AliOOft. It’s a Nu Disco and Re Edit saunter through some great old dance classics

Chicago, IL is the birthplace of House Music, and subsequently, the birthplace of Electronic Music. Sure, Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno were making synth based music before this, but nothing resembling the beats and rhythm patterns that make up current day Electronic Music as a genre.

House was a product of technological advancements in studio production gear. This process is what drives Electronic Music to this day. New synths, drum machines, and software are constantly evolving and the genre follows suit. The Roland SH 101 and the Roland TB 303 were the first synths that were used to create House. They were keyboards with built in sequencers used for looping, enabling the artist to lay a foundation for their tracks as well as a bevy of oscillators and filters. These synths were expensive and most of the youth in Chicago who spun records could not afford them.

So, in reality, House Music was born in the suburbs surrounding Chicago where to this day there is still a HUGE scene of kids producing and spinning House. This is part of where House got its name as well, being produced in houses all over Illinois. Others believe House got its name from the famous nightclub that hosted underground parties known as The Warehouse.

House combined elements of R and B, Blues, Disco, and Funk with a four-on-the-floor rhythm pattern. Producers sampled records from all of these genres whether it be the vocal take, a 4 bar sample of the beat, percussion, etc. After sampling, the producers would create their unique beats and breaks to make it House. Then all the elements were brought together and mixed in a sequencer. The tracks were influenced by mixing, producing and editing styles of DJs at the time. Larry Levan, Tom Mouton, and Frankie Knuckles are great examples of the House template and set the bar for all up and coming producers.

• Essential Mix: House – Frankie Knuckles Live at Pacha

READ ON for the rest of this edition of Wyllys and the World Party…

I usually have some form of download for you guys; some up and coming mix by the crate digging souls of this great planet. However, I felt that a State of the Union address was important to this column moving forward. We’ve all heard the age old saying that in order to conquer the future, we must first understand our past. In this installment of Wyllys and The World Party, we will give a quick history lesson to educate a generation of people who missed the rave culture at its peak, then move into the present day dance culture to try and understand where the future of dance music is going. School is in session. Grab your Roor. Put on some Aphex Twin…

The story starts in The Bronx on a set of belt driven turntables next to a pile of old funk records. In 1972 Jamaican born DJ Kool Herc had the vision to take these records and isolate the “break” or drum section and mix two records together with an archaic stereo mixer that had a cross fader which was significantly different from the Disco style of mixing at the time, which would just cross fade between two tracks once the original track reached its end. He then took these breaks from the same two records and mixed the two together creating what we all know today to be Hip Hop and laid the base for Turntablism as an art form. Spoken word, or “rapping” quickly caught on fire over these breaks and the MC was born. Grandmaster Flash and Africa Bambatta were two of the first to cop Herc’s style and push the genre forward with great success. Not only were these DJs making history, they were giving the youth of the ghetto a ray of hope that maybe one day, they could MC or DJ and find a way out of the projects for good.

READ ON for more of Wyllys and the World Party…