The Hacker @ Get Together
Posted by ariadna on Tuesday, November 30, 1999

Vancouver is on most big name DJs´ tour itinerary and there are a few that come to town more than once a year but the gamut is incomplete and the usuals are clustered in the ´house´ section. DJs that are revered in Europe and even on the eastern side of North America are completely unknown to us western folk. When John Selway played in Vancouver last year on a Thursday the turn-out was paltry. Sadly, if DJ Hell, Vitalic, Alter Ego, Ellen Allien (who´s November show was sadly canceled) and maybe even Sven Vath were to play in Vancouver they would be met with the same pathetic number.

This would have been the case if The Hacker had come midweek or even if he had played on the weekend by himself. Blueprint, though, brought him to town and put him as the headliner of September´s simply amazing Get Together party. The Waldorf would have been packed regardless and for the few that knew that The Hacker was THE HACKER it was event demanding that one not show up fashionably late.

The fans went off. And everyone else did too. Bar stars, mods, goths and probably some b-boys from the breaks room were all ripping the carpet to shreds while the The Hacker played his brand of techno and electro. It was insane how well it all went together. The music was unreal; it was a mixture of sultry techno and rancid electro each track playing off the other. He wasn´t a slave to inertia but neither did he forget that a pumping techno track was going to have us all in a frenzy and he better not play something sweet – he was able to play with the momentum by sliding a spaz of a song into something sparse, leaving us in limbo and then revving it back up. Kind of like something that Zabiela would do but way better because you never catch yourself twiddling your thumbs.

He played some tracks from his latest album Reves Mecaniques and some old Miss Kittin and The Hacker era songs (1982, the under-played Life on MTV and Stock Exchange Woman). He also played Aphex Twin, Bloq Party and Kraftwerk. RC had a track by Boys Noize scribbled on his hand. Maybe I shouldn´t have written that.

Anyways, back to The Hacker. He fucking rocks. That set was the best set I´ve ever partied to hands down (the music was getting me so excited I found myself dancing out of beat – that´s happened to me before but not because the music was too much). And he´s ridiculously cute, so endearing with the hair and the cigarette and how he puts on his teeny tiny headphones for only a moment, like a professor putting on his spectacles to look up some Latin verb in his unabridged dictionary, and then back down on his shoulders again.

When I got to speak to him after the set (I wanted to know if he wanted to spin at an afterhours) I kept on repeating, “We´re so lucky,” and that´s the truth! The French rock!

http://www.goodlife-ozone.com/
http://www.goodlife-ozone.com/artists/hackerempty.htm
http://www.escorteaze.com
http://blueprintevents.ca/