celebrity science

the trip to vancouver started with leaving the cfuv studios at 4:05 pm and arriving at the swartz bay ferry terminal with justin, emmy and nick at about 4:45 pm. enough time to walk on the 5 pm ferry, but only barely. i looked in my assortment of bags that i had packed; my backpack full of vinyl for spinning on resonance earlier, clothes for the over night stay, and everything that goes along with an overnight stay; my other little backpack contained recording equipment for my interview with hybrid, and of course my camera. neither of them contained my wallet. just as quickly as i had arrived at the ferries, it was now time for me to turn back to victoria, and for justin, emmy and nick to carry on without me. if it sounds like a bad start to a trip, it was. but it was a bad start to a good trip. i was driven back to my house where i was dropped off. i grabbed my wallet and was driven back to swartz bay and made the 6 pm sailing to vancouver.

i had a chance, since i was by myself on the ferry, to come up with some extra questions for my interview with hybrid. in fact, i scrapped the ideas i had for the interview and started with a clean slate. the questions started flowing naturally and plentifully. i caught a pcl bus into the vancouver bus depot (downtownish) and met up with julian who was kind enough to pick me up there and go downtown to meet up with nick, justin, emmy, denis, thor, lefty and spyguy. we had some time to kill so a few of us went to the bar above denny’s on Davie to watch the canucks beat the wild to go up in the series 3 games to 1. nice. it was about time to go to the hotel. i was scheduled to meet up with the boys from hybrid at 10 pm for the interview; they were due on stage at 11:30 pm. soon enough, they met us in the lobby — mike and chris both remembered me from a night almost 3 years ago when i last interviewed them. is that mad or what?

picture by emmy

the interview started up for the second time. this time around, i was a bit less nervous than the first time, and a whole lot more experienced with interviewing. with this group, there’s no question, i have done my homework. i had done my homework way before the first interview, in fact so much so that they referenced in their log for the first visit to vancouver that they had met someone who knew more about hybrid than hybrid did. it’s probably no secret, if you’re someone who has listened to me talk on the radio any time in the last 4 years, that hybrid is my favourite electronic music artists. they are. i’m not the only one who is nuts about them, there are tonnes — from punters to dj’s to fellow producers. it’s a big deal to get an interview with them.

from left to right: mike, myself, and chris. picture by emmy

to have a decent interview with them was inevitable. from what i had remembered of these guys, they were pretty good in the mics. the questions were posed, the answers flowed like a river. not only were these guys good at answering questions, they were good story tellers. they threw me a curve ball a couple of times, especially when they posed a question to me. being who they are, and me being who i am, it was quite the question. i’ll leave it at that for now.

picture by emmy

eventually we wrapped up after about 25 minutes, giving us all a decent amount of time to get to the venue. i was conscious of their starting time, so i cut a few questions out. i still managed to ask a couple questions that people had suggested. thank you to all that gave suggestions! mike and chris have agreed to answer some more questions via email and the interview transcript will be posted on the resonance site with the email questions as well. the minidisc mics that i used responded just great to the environment. you can hear everyone really well, and you can also hear the ambience from outside the hotel. there was plenty of people yelling and honking horns in the background.. almost all because of the canucks win earlier that night. it sounds very cool.

picture by emmy

we arrived at the waldorf which is a bit of an odd venue. it had 3 rooms – 2 downstairs and one upstairs. it was not a club, more like a lounge and probably one of the coolest places i have been. unfortunately after a little bit my camera was out of power and i couldn’t really capture all of it.

at the waldorf..

hybrid played a thumping set of weird house and massive breaks. i heard a track by jason dunne and andy page which is just huuuuuuuge. jason dunne did a mix for my radio show about a year and a half ago and it was just marvelous. andy page is another one of my favourite producers so it was pretty cool to hear that they had hooked up to make choons. there was also new music from hybrid themselves, and i also heard a new remix they have done of satoshi tomiie. big stuff.

mike looks for the right record

at the end everyone yelled for one more, so they played brad copeland’s remix of tommy’s diner. just marvellous — i had heard it before when i had played with brad copeland a couple months before up in nanaimo, but i didn’t get to catch the whole thing because the club wouldn’t let brad play the whole thing. well, hybrid got to play the whole thing at the end and it was very well received. nobody left so they put on one last hungarian breaks record, which was rather large indeed.

chris in the mix

the next day was rather stretched out. we met up with hybrid for lunch, and then i attempted to make it back to victoria. i could have made it back right away if i had just jumped on a bus, but steve had saved a seat for me in his car and i decided being driven back would be lovely.