Massive elephant noises to everyone who came down and filled the Adam & Eve with appreciative sounds to the great array of talent on show from our 3 special guests this month.

Flame of Fervour were dark, gritty, acoustic with a very cool sound and great musicianship, the flamenco & latin fusion of the Hidden Half ignited a huge response from the audience, and The Heels, once again, set the whole place on fire, with one hour of inspired musicianship, and plenty of crowd pleasing ska….literally a band so large the brass section wouldn’t fit on the stage!

Also very special shouts must also go out to Jack for coming to video, Tony the sound sound man for rockin the last two hours, and   Tony from TheLab who came down all the way from Leicester to Vj all night long.

Not only did he perform with an unprepared selection of material (not that we knew til he said!), but he also used footage from the 2nd Birthday made in the kids animation workshop in his vj set!

…plus he also gave 2 workshops to our resident dj Marc Reck, and our guest Paulo Riddle, both of whom got to perform live as a vj on the night! Nice work Tea!

In what is deemed to be Birmingham Music Month, it was refreshing to see so many multi instrumentalists in one room, and experience so much diversity of music, all of which generated a  real warm crowd response.

Our resident videographer Jack Brabant, will be posting his video of the evening and we also have more photos taken by Marc on his flickr page here. Marc also recorded some of the audio which will be featured on Mr Elephant radio in our new monday night residency next week on rhubarb radio – 6pm – 8pm, and check out his own set from the night, which was as wonderfully diverse and crowd pleasing as the live music.

For now we’ll leave you with a little footage of the Hidden Half. Our next Live & Free event is on Sat 25th July 2009, and as always it will feature great live music , a range of dancing music, and is free all night long til 4am.

One love

Mr Elephant x

Tony from The Lab who hosted vj workshops, vjed all night, and is to be producing Mr Elephant T.v has wrote his review of the Mr Elephant 2nd Birthday, so until he has a log in on this site (big elephant things afoot with The Lab) i’ll post it. The link one of his many excellent sites is http://www.vurt.org.uk

After three hours sleep, I’m awake!  and running through the final kit checks for the train journey to Brum.  Not only the Mr Elephant birthday party, but also my first VJ workshop.  This will be seen as an introduction to hardware VJing using the Edirol kit I have now assembled.  With an early start to these preceeding scheduled for 3pm, it’s all hands on decks wilst myself and Liam setup the two rooms for the evenings mayhem and merriement. Anyway, the hardware tutorials went (I think) well, and the star pupil without a shadow of doubt was Charly.  Talk about getting it quickly or duck to water (or do feel free to enter your own analogy for that matter) anyhow, I digress ….

Even when I cheekily stepped away from the mixer for a bit and watched, I was bloody impressed!  Hopefully though, the participants of the said workshop enjoyed themselves and have a smidge of a better understanding of what a hardware VJ actually does (apart from getting asked to put on some abba or R n bloody bee).  Throughout the workshop, Mr Elephants two superb guest camera ops (Jack Braybant and Julie Hyland) were running around the event capturing loads of footage from the setup, the workshops and into the night.  I can’t wait to see the footage and begin the editing for Mr E TV!

The night kicked off with a superb loop set from Laura Louise in which I had the oppertunity to play with the mixer and get in some nice feedback effects for her entire set with additional content coming from Liam (Blendstate).   Caught up with Mike Freear of Alphadrive before his gig too, absolute top bloke !!!  I loved the music! (I danced the whole set!), the energy (did I mention I danced the whole set?), and the reaction of all those sweaty, jumping about bods that were at the front of the stage!  and then the finalae from Marc Reck himself was a joy to VJ to.   This gentle reader then led to an early morning unwind back at the hostess of the night’s abode.  Thanks must go to Laura for the music, hospitality and tea.

As per usual though, there were so many people that came together to macke this an absolute blinder of an event, and I’d like to thank Marc and Pyn for encouraging me to actually begin with the workshops that have been on a drawing board for so long, Liam for lights, visuals and his siter workshop on software vjing, Rich batsford for an amazing set, the osmosis boys for a storming night of techno and heavy breaks (class work!), Charley for participating and playing!, Laura for a storming opening set and hospitality, and Mr Mike Freear and Alphadrive!  Hope to catch ya when you visit these lands further south.

Sleep however, never came … and around half nine I was off on my train travels again back to Leicester for the finale of my weekend!

It’s something else to actually see some of the energy and preparation that goes into creating such a mammal and Marc and Pyn have it down to a tee.  The revellers were taken on an ecletic evening of sound and light that puts all of the Leicester events to shame.  I look forwards to working closer with Marc and Pyn over the coming months and can wholeheartedly recommend that everyone has to experiance a Mr Elephant party at least three times in their life.