Deadmau5 – Spinning Platters

Show Review: deadmau5 w/Feed Me at the Fox Oakland, 4/25/2017

In a now-relatively-infamous Tumblr post, Canadian electronic wunderkind deadmau5 (aka Joel Zimmerman) called out the DJ world for the lack of ingenuity and overall simplicity of their live shows. Ever since, he’s worked to keep pushing the envelope of his own performances, adding layer after layer of lights and screens that are all triggered by his own available controls, and his popularity continues to ride high even as the EDM scene itself shifts and changes. As a pretty popular act, it’s rare to see the synth mastermind outside of massive festivals or arena tours, so his Lots Of Shows In A Row tour was a treat to see — particularly at Oakland’s Fox Theater, a venue which has lately proven rather popular with the electronic music scene.

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San Francisco’s 2011 Outside Lands Festival, Day 3

The crowd in unified fist-pumping for Major Lazer

60,000 is an extremely large number, especially when you’re speaking in terms of human beings. The largest amphitheater in the Bay Area, the Shoreline in Mountain View, holds around 30,000 with its lawn fully filled, and most shows that can completely fill it to the brim are multi-platinum megastars, or great music festivals that last all day. It therefore isn’t too surprising that nearly all 3 days of the 2011 Outside Lands Festival were sold out, both with single-day and three-day tickets; still, 60,000 people per day is a pretty staggering number. By the time Sunday rolled around, and the denizens of the festival had been dragged through cold, fog, heat, sun, and likely several hundred thousand watts of amplified music, it was stunning to see that the park was still packed to the gills; while most people didn’t trickle in until the mid-afternoon hours, there was enough sunlight out to see Golden Gate Park filled from end to end with a flood of musicgoers.

But what about the people who made it in the morning?

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Spinning Platters Tackles Your Tough Outside Lands 2011 Decisions

map11 — We will make this a little easier for you to navigate.

For four years running now, the good people at Another Planet and Superfly have put together a massive outdoor music festival in the part of San Francisco so far west that most people don’t even know it exists. The weather is unpredictable, the terrain in this portion of Golden Gate Park is difficult, and with 5 stages, decisions are always tough to make. Well, all I can say about the first two is to bring layers and wear sturdy, comfortable shoes. As for who to see when? Well, I’ve studied the band schedule and the map, and based on my impeccable taste in music I am ready to present to you the most fulfilling plan for your Outside Lands experience.

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Spinning Platters Presents the Official List of the Top 10 Albums of 2010

0250 — No, it's not an album, but what you see here sure helped one album make our list.

by The Spinning Platters Staff

Unlike last year, we spent more than a month at the Spinning Platters offices (our homes) passing albums around to try to determine a staff list of the Top abums of 2010. We were going for “Top 10 and ties,” and that ended up at exactly 10. There was a nomination step, a finalist selection step, a final voting step, and then we had a list. No list is perfect, but ours is not only pretty darned good, it also manages to represent the wide variety of musical tastes among our team here (i.e. some of us hate some of these albums). Now, read and enjoy our Top 10 for 2010. Continue reading “Spinning Platters Presents the Official List of the Top 10 Albums of 2010”

Day 1 of Treasure Island Music Festival 2010 – Instant Band Reviews

Nick Offer of !!! wants you to read this now!

Sure, one could write hundreds of words about each band on the bill at the Treasure Island Music Festival, but then the entire comment section would be filled with a lot of “tl;dr” comments, which aren’t much fun. And I could write a “best-of” post, which basically translates to “I took a nap during Jamaica’s set.” Instead, in the tradition of our fan-favorite Instant Album Reviews columns, I instantly review Saturday Treasure Island Music Festival, with the help of some great photos from David Price. Continue reading “Day 1 of Treasure Island Music Festival 2010 — Instant Band Reviews”

New Release Round Up 9/22/09 – 29 Instant Album Reviews

This band is not made up of girls. Didn't they learn their lesson from Barenaked Ladies?

When Pouria started writing this weekly column, he said there might be weeks where he was too busy to listen to 30-or-so albums. I said, “no problem, we can get a guest columnist on those weeks.” So when he told me this week that he was too busy doing stuff like seeing Bon Iver to write this week’s column, I said “wait, you were serious about that?” Since I hadn’t arranged a guest, I’m doing it myself. Let’s just say that doing this is a lot harder than Pouria makes it look. Now, on to the mini-reviews. Continue reading “New Release Round Up 9/22/09 — 29 Instant Album Reviews”

Glastonbury Diary, Part Three: The Music

Seeing this on the screen was only a hint of the excitement to come.

What follows is a pretty simple list of every single musical act I saw at Glastonbury 2009 for at least one song. There were others that I walked by, and sometimes it takes a whole song to walk by them, but when I don’t know who’s playing until I’m finished walking by them and have gone back to my tent to look at a list of who was just on stage, I don’t think that counts because I wasn’t paying any attention at all. I’m looking at you, The Script (or was it The View?) I’ll make very brief remarks about some acts, and pretty lengthy ones about others. I probably won’t say too much about the music for some bands, but will assume you know them already instead. Find out which acts had me dancing, which had me skankin’, which ones had me screaming, and which one left me in tears. Buckle up, because this is going to take me a while. Continue reading “Glastonbury Diary, Part Three: The Music”