AK Step '03: Bloodbox, Shadow of a Twisted Hand, Sin, Anti-Kati, DForm, Audioslut, males kort, Marq Bizarre, DJ Suicide @ Galatos, Auckland; 20 June

Another event promoted by a-klass rekidz, and I've got that cynicism before I even get to the venue - what's going to go wrong this time?

I get off the bus on K'Road, and there's a bar offering that you can have a scorpion in a shot of vodka, which boggles my mind. The bouncers however inform me that it's gonna be a $10 cover charge, and then an additional $6 for the drink. That and the fact you appearantly might need to rush to hospital afterwards really disuades me from having a Fear Factor moment.

Anyway, I find my way to Galatos, and head down to the basement, and am met at the door by MC Slypussy and his girlfriend Lina, who are here from Australia. I go and stash my gear and then walk around for a minute to get a feel for the venue. It's giving me a really bad buzz, especially because the house lights are turned up so far that you can easily see from one end of the venue to the other.

Anyways, DJ Suicide is on his decks, playing exactly what you'd usually expect from him, and people trickle in the door, but they're almost all people who are playing tonight. I sit in a corner with Edward Denton, who's kindly bought me a drink, and tell him how I'm getting paranoid things aren't gonna run on time, and that my hair looks stupid, and that no one will show.

I talk to k5k about getting DJ Suicide off the decks and getting on with the evening, and then go and sit at the door with Lina, and we spend ages gossiping about all sorts of stuff, and then finally the music changes to Marq Bizarre, who plays kinda dark ambient industrial stuff, for at least an hour. More people are showing up, and I get given drinks by first Dizrythmia and then MC slypussy,,, I haven't touched alcohol in months, and I'm starting to feel it, and I could, or should be up next on the equipment.

k5k comes and informs me that now DJ DForm is gonna be playing before me, and that I'll probably be in between live acts, which suits me just fine. So when the music finally changes to hip-hop, I get up and dance with MC slypussy and his brother Leroy, and DForm plays a lot of real pop stuff like Missy Elliot and more than one song by Xzibit. He also plays for at least an hour, but although I know things are starting to get tense for time, it was always expected he'd get a long set because he's the most well-known DJ there.

Finally we were into the live acts, and k5k tells me that now I'll be playing between two Anti-Kati sets, and I can see that that's gonna be pretty much at the end of the night. So, out to the front come Splash and Hakaider, together being the vocalists of Bloodbox, and I suddenly realise that Splash always plays barefoot.

Just like the last time I saw them, there's foot stomping and jumping around, and of course lots of screaming, over their backing tracks. Splash has a bit of paper in his hand, and I get the impression he's reading the lyrics off it. They do an encore of «S U 10 says» with one of their friends on vocals, because it's his birthday.

And then it's Shadow of a Twisted Hand, who I recognise as Koil and Trevor, who were playing under the name Gho:la a few weeks ago. This time they have different equipment. Koil has a box covered in knobs, and since I'd just found out he's been in Japan for the last ages, I realise that it's a home-made noise-maker. The noise is fantastic, absolutely shredding, and I'm really glad I'm wearing ear-plugs, as I see the bar staff with their fingers in their ears.

Koil is really going for it, jumping around more than Bloodbox, and I jump around a bit too. And suddenly one of the bar staff comes out and turns the master volume down, and Koil looks quite pissed and they stop playing. But everyone begs them to continue. Afterwards Koil is talking into the camera of his friend who was filming it, saying how fucked off he is that the bar staff turned him down when he only had five minutes more to play.

After that the sound stays down, and Sin is on. Sin is Rigel Walshe who also plays in Black Metal band Dawn of Azazel, and tonight he's playing hardbreaks off his laptop, and he's bought his own video along to go in the projector, which for lack of a screen has spent the whole night skewed across the brown wall behind the DJs. But it's immediately obvious that his video is porn. And since I know what his day-job is, I think "fucking typical",,,, yeah, that's right, he's a cop.

I head out of the venue, and go buy myself an energy drink and a cookie, and when I come back it's finally time for some Anti-Kati, and they're playing a really great cut-up set, because they've finally got some bitching hardware. They only play for about 15 minutes before k5k lets Audioslut on the decks.

Audioslut had been itching to play all night, I could see it in his body language. He played for maybe half an hour, his typical breakcore style this time including lots of dub reggae type samples, which was really cool. The bar staff have closed the bar, and now they turn up the house lights too. I can't fucking believe it, because it's not even four yet.

But this is my opportunity to jump on the cd-mixer, and I blast out the «macarena» as this large dude who seems to be the boss tells me that I've got ten minutes to pack up and get out. I tell him to go tell someone who cares, because I'm just the DJ, not the promoter. But that's about the end of that.

Stuff gets packed up and loaded into a car, and everyone bitches at the unprofessional attitude of the bar staff. Out on the street we bump into Koil, who is so pissed off he's going to a bar up on K'Rd to drink,, but first he tells us lots of stories about Japan, where he claims he was good friends with one of the Boredoms, which impresses k5k and MC slypussy.

I walk with those two back to k5k's apartment, and Herr Denton, Lina and DJ Suicide are in the car, and we end up sitting in k5k's studio smoking and drinking duty-free Kahlua and Smirnoff, and it's getting late and boring, so Herr Denton drops me home.

It was once again disasterous, so it ended up being kinda funny.

kid 606, phelps and munro, parallel universe DJs, raw fx @ FU, Auckland; Sunday 8 June

This gig was like Cobra Killer a year or two back: some random promoter no one's ever heard of puts on a gig at FU with some support acts that no one's ever heard of. k5k spends the weeks leading up to said gig trying to get himself on the bill, and eventually it just comes down to him, Herr Denton and myself going to the gig and bitching.

I managed to arrive quite late, and am assured that I haven't missed anything. Someone, I assume a parallel universe DJ, is playing IDM off a CD-mixer.

Then some guy gets up, and I assume it's raw fx, and he does this beat-box routine. The crowd goes wild, but others such as myself assume that electronic trickery is involved, and k5k tells me that the whole routine is stolen and he's heard it done better.

It's over in about five minutes, and then just like that kid 606 is on, and everyone moves towards the DJ box, craning around the stupid pillars that hold up the roof to get a better view.

I watch for about five minutes, and no one seems to be dancing, and I think "that's fucking typical" and find a gap and I'm down the front and up for it. And then these really young looking, really drunk looking guys come up the front, and do some munter dancing, and keep waving their cigerettes around and hitting each other with them, and I shrink away and keep a wary eye out. Fuck I can't stand people like that on the dance floor.

Kid 606 keeps the action going, using two laptops and a few other little gadgets to do a little live manipulation. A rousing cover of Missy Elliot's «Get Your Freq On» was a good touch, the ambient track that seemed to go on forever wasn't, especially because I was the only one dancing to it, and had to keep on moving so as to look suitably freaked out on acid (I wasn't).

After about an hour, certainly no more than 90 minutes, I needed a break and went outside to buy a drink. I came back five minutes later to find that that was it. His set was over and he was packing up. I was more than a little disappointed. I was only just getting started, and here was the international DJ done for the night.

Phelps and Munro were playing though, and the dancefloor had cleared out, so everyone who was up for it was going nuts. They were using CD-mixer, a laptop, and some other equipement, playing some drum'n'bass and a cool Kylie remix, where I assume they were just using the sample function on their CD-mixer to make parts of it all skippy and broken.

k5k handed out flyers to people, and then we left, and I for one was rather disappointed. k5k somehow had the inside information: that he'd only arrived at about 16:30 and was leaving again that night after the gig (he stopped playing at about 00:15). And that he usually charged US$1500 for a gig, so he must have cut his rates ridiculously to come here. 100 tickets at NZ$20 each would hardly cover air fares, promotion and venue hire, let alone his fucking profit.

I dunno about some of those punters, but the lasting impression I got was that kid 606 is lame.

battery: Bloodbox, Gho:la, k5k, DJ Suicide @ Necropolis, Auckland; Satuday 7 June

This is the second installment of battery, and as I'd missed the first, I wasn't about to miss out again. Besides, I was really curious to see electronic music at Necropolis, Auckland's legendary underground punk rock dive venue.

Things took ages to get started, with DJ Suicide playing his industrial records for ages. He's getting better at mixing; he'll go far, especially now he's picked a name for himself.

Finally Gho:la set up. They had a laptop and a synth, and some other cool devices, and continued the industrial theme. They were very good, but I was starting to get bored of all the music being in time.

So, I was happy to see k5k was DJing next. I was hoping for an all out assault of breakcore and stuff, but no. It seems like every time I see this guy DJ it's more disappointing than the last time, although I'll give him a break this time because he was only using vinyl, and I'm sure most of his good tunes must be on CDR. Eventually he played a couple of songs decent enough to dance to, but I got so bored I went outside and down the road to buy a drink.

Bloodbox eventually got their shit together, and played for all of about 10 minutes. Since they were just screaming along to their backing tape, it sounded quite like their album «structure against self», only with the vocals lower in the mix, which I thought was an improvement.

Things really wound down after that, especially when someone came up the stairs yelling paranoid stuff about the police being outside, just like every other gig I've been to here. Appearantly if I'd stayed past 01:30 I would have witnessed k5k in a DJ-battle with Suicide; instead I was home making sushi. I win the battle!