OTAD#80 - Point Blank 2

This article is the third in the series commemorating Point Blank, the party Edouard and I organized for close to 5 years which came to an end abruptly recently due to losing the location, which we called le Skuat. In my last article I touched upon the first edition of Point Blank, held only a couple weeks prior to the second edition, our focus of today. We envisioned this one as a mini festival to celebrate the end of summer, starting on Friday night and kicking until Sunday morning, 28-30 August 2015…

Plus vite, plus fort (faster, stronger), we quickly made this our motto and fully embraced it. While the duration doubled, the attendance tripled at least, with 60 to 70 guests over the entire week-end. And it shows, just from the facebook event itself I was able to gather more than 160 photos and 13 videos. It was clear that le bouche à oreille had worked its magic: a huge chunk of the Laval crew came, Flo managed to convince Guitch and friends to come from Rennes, the Parisian crew came alive and kicking (with Bardon coming with his live equipment), a great many gadz came from Angers and finally a lot more people from Saint-Lô joined, including long lost faces like Matthias and Romuald.

You know what it means to have the Laval crew coming? It means dressing up and a lot of dancing! On Friday night we already had almost a full house. After doing many back and forth between the train station in Lison and the Skuat, about 15m drive; we were able to start the night. Each new guest would be bamboozled by the woodwork from Edouard and would go congratulate him, already actively preparing a huge BBQ close to the bonfire. Everybody was ecstatic, it was the end of summer, the weather was pretty warm (for Normandy standards), Edouard and I had been sending constant streams of tracks and photos to hype up the crowd, you could feel the electricity in the air… we were here and ready for it.

On the lineup that night, many new faces: Romain (a.k.a. Tartine), Guitch, a live from Nomaz (a.k.a Bardon), and last but not least our amazing duo Merlet and Paulo to finish the nights with some hardcore. I was relieved that we managed to rack up so many new names at the DJ booth, as I could not see myself and Edouard playing for the entire night like for the previous one. For this one, I was even dethroned as the warmup guy, as Guitch played some really nice house sets on both days to heat up our souls.

The first photo of someone playing on Friday night is from Romain a.k.a Tartine, who if I remember correctly played right after Guitch and just before me, around 11pm-12pm. Romain and I were in sync music-wise at that time, it was all about deep, slow and evocational techno. He had already perfected for a long time on his dodo techno, douce frappe and mind immersion playlists, which were all different shades of ambient-oriented techno. As per usual, and as polar opposite to Edouard’s way of conceiving a mix, Romain picked from these playlists on the spot, adapting the tracklist to his mood and the dancefloor. It was his second set in this booth, as he was part of the NYE crew, and one can see he shortly felt at home there.

No photos from my first set, next in line is Bardon. He initially came with his live equipment, but he got so drunk he ended up packing the live equipment on the first night to avoid any mishap ahah. I can still see him climbing up the stairs to the booth, starting packing without saying a single word… fun times. He still played a set though! And ended up recording the live on the next day. Bardon is the first of the crew to go towards production. I remember spending time with him one day on thinking of a B2B together in my small 7m2 bedroom in Paris, and he explained to me he felt too constrained by a DJ’ing setup and was dreaming of buying elektron machines and unleash his full potential. Bardon is a melodic techno head, he since founded the label W8RD and collaborated on many occasions with renowned YouTube channels like FingR86. He even helped releasing Edouard’s output under the Silence Science monicker in 2019, which I am happy to say reached 5K views on YT, congrats on that! That night both him and I played Lost in Pyongyang, track he would be releasing in October of the same year.

Talking about Edouard, this time, 3 videos of him by Estelle will show you the DJ we know and love, with his uncompromising acid techno. Acid stabs, fat kicks, filter shots; you’re in for a treat when he’s playing. Edouard has a sense of crowd control, his tiny tricks add to the tracks he’s playing and keep things moving. Pretty loop-based he is not afraid of mixing 3 tracks together, slapping vocals here and there, basically playing in the gaming sense of it. Something that adds to the character is his presence in the booth, stoic, solid like a rock, sipping from time to time on a bottle of water, eyes lazer focused on either the mixer or the next track. Like a true captain, his crew could count on him not to sink this bouncing ship, although tides were at a all time high. Eager to serve many more times at your side, captain oh my captain!

As usual by now, our timetable ended after Edouard’s set, near 4am, the rest of the night was free-for-all. Romain and I prepared hastily a B2B, in his car parked just outside as Edouard was wrapping up his set. I can remember this moment like it was yesterday, Alison was with us in the car as well, and we would keep playing track after track on the bluetooth saying “nah… next, nah… next” until Junk Project - Brain Tool came up. It was a relevation to the three of us. We quickly got out of the car, and started playing. Tracks were coming along nicely, we unrolled the red carpet to bring this track which would be the peak, and boi o boi did it peak. This track is just the perfect tension builder, with a break close to 2 minutes leaving the acid line looping, filtered higher and higher as drums and horns intesifies in the background, edging the crowd to a point of no return until all pressure finally releases and everybody starts jumping, mosh pit like! I can see Jordan bouncing around, half naked, kicking air with a 1m long grin on his face. A true slice in the cake of life ahah, god damn I have goosebumps just thinking about it.

I think I did not go much further that night, saving myself for the next day (which was so haaaard oh my god was it hard to get into it the next day ahah). There are only a few signs from the photos themselves that the party kept going strong. I like the shot above from Camille, rare photo near the fireplace, just outside the barn, where people would go to take a break from the rukus inside, and sometimes fall asleep in the warmth of the ember, nestled in an old resting chair.

The next day started very slowly, people nonchalantly fading in rather than waking up would be a good way to describe it. There was a slight drizzle outside so people gathered inside, bringing sofas from the bonfire to the dancefloor. I remember everybody being slightly worried they would not have the energy to keep going for another night.

Yet as another batch of fresh party people came in, those who could not join on Friday evening, folks started to warm up again. Once the rain passed, mölkky and palet games started, with fierce competition. Things were slowly starting to pick up again. All DJs gathered and devised a quick timetable, following roughly the same order as the day before.

The rest of the night I only have confused memories of, I played most certainly, but what? what did the other play? can’t really know for sure. Not many videos of that second night either, except a few from our dear Alexis, which transcribe pretty well the “fighting through the smoke” part I was describing in my article on Saturday.

This concludes my retranscription of the second edition of point blank, in retrospect it is probably one of the most attended edition. Incredibly it is not the last one from 2015, as we will discover in tomorrow’s article. I will leave you on that one last photo of me, seemingly very happy, and a track I know I played because it was a “secret weapon” from Nina Kraviz I loved playing at the time.