Music and Me (For the Love of House)

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Not everyone understands house music
It’s a spiritual thing
A body thing
A soul thing

A soul thing

Eddie Amador – House Music

At the start of 2007, I started ‘the search for the perfect girlfriend’ – an exercise which was undertaken with military precision.  Step one was to lose some weight as I had porked up during my months of slothfulness (I have the pictures to prove it as well, but I sure as Hell aren’t posting them here).  Although I made some good progress, I became impatient after a month and hit the Internet where I advertised for the perfect partner for a complete freak like me.  I found her. 

One reply basically went along the lines of, “I’m exactly what you are looking for, so you might as well stop looking now.”

And she was.

Despite the fact that she was 17 years younger than me, we had a lot in common.  One was that we were both in the process of moving into the field of real estate after having something of a chequered past; another was that we shared a common wanderlust and had lived and worked abroad in the past (Tokyo and Leeds in her case).  Thirdly we shared a very sarcastic sense of humour.  But, most importantly of all, we both shared a common love of house music.

It took a while for the pair of us to get together.  We met first of all in mid-February but, because she was busy working two jobs and studying, it was April before we started meeting regularly.

Our third date was out to see Sandy Rivera (from Kings of Tomorrow) who was playing at Sapnu Fabrika(Dream Factory).

At the time he was playing this track that he he was involved with:

DADA ft. Sandy Rivera & Trix – Lollypop

Can’t say I really like the track compared with the stuff he did with Kings of Tomorrow, but it brings back memories anyway.

After that night, things moved quite quickly and, at the start of May, we were a couple and starting to live together.

I was so happy.  The song that summed up my feeling at that time were:

Hard-Fi – Hard To Beat (London Elektricity Remix)

Unfortunately, because the real estate market in Latvia was dying on its arse, she had to keep a second job, which meant that she worked most Friday and Saturday nights and so I continued to go out alone with my crazy drum and bass friends.  We’d often meet up at 6.00am after she’d been working all night and I’d been smoking pot and doing poppers in the back room of Depo at some event or other (not necessarily drum and bass – maybe jungle, breakbeat or drumfunk [whatever that is]).

There were a couple of major exceptions though.  At the end of May, she was able to get a night off and we were able to go to the first ever Sensation White that was held in Riga.

Bloody hell!  They even have that on YouTube! 

To be honest, I can’t remember that much about it.  I was wasted, as usual, very proud to be out with my baybee for the first time, and there were also several other of my friends there as well. 

But better than this even was another event on 07.07.07 called Essential Knockout- an open air festival in an island on the Daugava.  Unbelievably to me, even this is on YouTube – not just the event but the actual tent where we spent the majority of our time:

Highlight of the evening was definitely the set from Seamus Haji (who was the last DJ on).  The one track I remember most from the evening was:

Roisin Murphy – Overpowered (Seamus Haji Remix)

I even danced to this.  Which is a rarity as I dance about as well as the average 43 year old (i.e like your Dad).

The other track which came from this evening (which became our song and my ringtone for the next 12 months) was:

Axwell – I Found U (Remode)

The event was only (slightly) marred by the fact that the event finished at 5.00am and we were still in the mood for more house music.  For the first time in years, we went to the Russian superclub in town, La Rocca, only to find that it was pretty much dead already.  Worse still, the gorilla-like bouncers could see from my eyes that I was still high as a kite and extorted all of the cash I had on me (about $200) not to bust me to the cops.  Fuckers.

What goes around, comes around though and so I was delighted to hear, six months later, that someone had firebombed the place, closing it down for several months.  That’s karma.

Sadly these happy days did not last forever though.  My baybee has a theory that there are three major elements to anyone’s life – relationship, money and career – and that it’s impossible to have all three going perfectly at the same time.  It seems she was right.  Although our relationship was going great, business-wise everything was turning to shit again and I was quickly using up the last of my savings.  Nothing seemed to go right.

I had started off a new website called Propertastic! for people interested in investing in overseas property, but it just wasn’t getting enough visitors.  I noticed that there was a lot of interest in property on Egypt’s Red Sea Riviera, however, and so we came over here in October 2007 to have a look around and a holiday at the same time.  I ended up getting a little carried away as I ended up writing a book about the real estate market in Egypt, totally by accident.

Things went from bad to worse in Riga and by the start of December, I was completely bankrupt (again) and had to turn to my parents (again) to bale me out.   I was obviously not terribly happy about this and our relationship suffered as a result – to the extent where we nearly split up. 

Due to the success of the book, however, and the fact that my prediction that the real estate market in Egypt was about to boom proved to be spot on, I realized that there was an opportunity in Egypt as more and more people were coming to me to help them find some good property in the area – and I knew that it was possible to make some good money by selling property.

So, although I would have been happy to have remained in Riga, one door had closed and another had opened.  The result was that I packed everything I owned into a suitcase and moved to Hurghada in Egypt on 31 January 2008 (four years to the day that I arrived in Riga).  Six weeks later, my baybee came out to join me.

And this is where I am now – making a living selling property through my company, Egypt Real.   There are definitely some good points to living in Hurghada (the weather is fantastic and you can live like a king for next to nothing here), but socially it is no match for Riga.  It’s supposed to be Egypt’s pulsating nightlife centre but, to be honest, it leaves a lot to be desired.  There are three main clubs here, HedKandi, Ministry of Sound and Calypso, but none of them are a patch on our favourite clubs in Riga.  We go out once a week or so, but it is now more of a chore than a pleasure, because:

1. The music they play here tends to be six or more months old.
2.  The audience is usually 90% Egyptian males who are only there to try and pick up some stupid foreign girl who they think are all sluts, whores and an easy lay (and sadly they are often not disappointed).
3.  Despite several wild goose chases around the town in search of E, I usually just ended with being offered some random tablet (probably Vitamin C or something equally as useless).

It’s a totally different world from Riga when invariably I would end up chatting with someone or other.  Here I have no novelty factor at all – just another tourist as far as anyone knows.

So, to have a good time clubbing, we need to go some place else.  Pacha, across the Red Sea in Sharm el-Sheikh, is definitely better than Hurghada.  We went there on holiday to celebrate my baybee’s birthday.  They gave us a free half bottle of champagne in return for her dancing.  Here she is:

Not bad, huh?

But the real highlight of the year was when we went (both of us for the first time) to the clubber’s Mecca of Ibiza at the start of the 2008 season.

First night we were there was at the ‘I Love Space’ Opening Party:

Then Roger Sanchez at Pacha:

And finally the opening night of Armada with Armin van Buuren at Amnesia:

Of these, the last night at Amnesia was the best, but we had to leave around 4.00am as we had an early morning flight to catch.  From a musical point of view, this has been the highlight of the year, although I did get the feeling that the Golden Years of Ibiza are already on the wane now that it is illegal to party after 6.00am.

Unfortunately, the trip to Ibiza was not very cheap and so it will be a while before we are able to do it again and so we are pretty much stuck in Hurghada.  Things are getting slightly better due to the fact that we are starting to grow a bit of a social circle, and also due to the fact that I have found that it is possible to get a mild buzz off 400mg of Tramadol.  But it’s not Riga.

So, I feel like I am entering another fallow period musically in my life at the moment.  We get more access to new music from the internet than via clubs these days – me from downloading DJ sets off ump3.de, while my baybee listens religiously to the shows of Latvia’s top DJ, the excellent Bogdan Taran via his Dancebox site.

But that’s pretty much it at the moment.  There aren’t a lot of new tracks that I have heard that have got me really excited this year.  One that I discovered via a set downloaded from ump3.de that I like is:

Boogie Pimps – Gang Bang (Anthem Mix)

From clubbing here, the only track that will bring back is, ironically, a Russian one:

DJ Smash – Moscow Never Sleeps

Wherever I have been in the past, I have always been interested in uncovering new local music, but unfortunately Egyptian music is generally shit.  It all sounds the same, which is a real shame as I could see that if some of the elements were mixed with Western formats, it could sound pretty cool.  The one and only good track that I have heard here is:

Amr Diab – Neoul Eah

If they can make one pretty good track, I don’t understand why they can’t make some more.

So, not very impressive at the moment, all in all.  I sincerely hope that this is a temporary period and that soon we will be back in Europe where we will continue our musical journey together.

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