>> A l e X a n g a

all i see are changes..

Posted on December 16th, 2008 by Al'x.
Categories: AleXanga.

me @ warehouse702 a couple weeks ago~
(i was wondering why they asked me for a picture o_O..)

so a lotta stuff has been goin on recently and its been way too long since ive written any of it down.. im not workin at all this week so its time i stopped ignoring my blog, haha

maxed out
so as soon as i got back from my san diego trip (that was only august but man, it feels like a lifetime ago, haha) i switched from weekend resident dj (thurs-sat) to full-time resident dj (tues-sat). that was cool. i was spinning at minimum 8 hours a day, 5 days a week so i leveled up like crazy and got my shit real tight. on top of that, i became a lot more involved with promotions and marketing. somehow i became a graphic designer and totally stepped up my flyer game. money was goooood.

but combined with my teaching job, which i reduced to 1 day/week, i had absolutely NO free time. check this out: there were 30 days in september and guess how many days i worked? 29. 30/31 days in october and 28/30 in november. so dont get me wrong.. i love what i do and to get paid so much for doing exactly what i wanna be doing is awesome. but one massively random event happened that really made me re-think my direction.

recession
so in early september, lehman brothers went bankrupt. do u know where the lehman office is in tokyo? yea.. right around the corner from odeon. but we didnt notice the impact right away. summer was great attendance-wise. we became the undisputed best after-hours club. itd be 11am and we’d hafta kick people out so we could go home! anyway, as autumn started progressing, the attendance fell sharply. there used to be decent crowds throughout the week (even on tuesdays at 5am o_O) but it got to the point where the club was basically empty until friday.

so i began to realize that recession hits hard in all industries- especially entertainment. i mean, what’s the first thing people cut out when they’re trying to save money? the 10,000yen ur gonna spend on a night of drinking or the 10,000yen ur gonna spend on groceries? i don’t blame them at all. hell, i dont even go out unless im geting paid to, haha. so on top of that, the rising fuel surcharges and the strength of the yen has basically killed the tourist crowd. so what happens? i end up playing music for the staff all night long for the majority of the week. i held strong and tried to be optimistic about the economy and the crowds but its not lookin good. all that time standing there behind the decks gave me a ton of time to think. conclusion? i was wasting time.

re-focus
why did i come to japan? to take over the world, right? right. i took over a lil corner of tokyo and now its time to expand. plus, residency might not be my thing anyways. i can’t stand routine and somehow i turned a traditionally non-routine job into one. playing one-off events is way more financially efficient and fun. i think the biggest sign for me was that i realized that i didnt get nervous anymore. whats performance without butterflies? a weak one.

so starting december 1st, i quit the weekdays and bought a keyboard. i figure my mixing is tight and my performance is on point so i can chill with that for a minute and switch gears towards production. im getting tired of waiting for other people to release good songs. its time for me to get other people to play MY music. oh yea, i finally went clubbing a lil while ago. got to see mr.world’s #1 DJ himself- armin van buuren @ ageha. so he rocked hard as expected.. but i noticed that technique-wise, he didn’t do anything i couldnt. performance-wise? id destroy him. so whats the difference? hes got like 20 albums released. hmph. just u wait.

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