Traxx launches Faith

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    Wed, Jul 29, 2009, 18:04
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  • The Chicago DJ/producer will DJ and play live at the launch party for his new album this Friday.
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  • Chicago jakologist Traxx will be hosting a special showcase celebrating the vinyl release of his new album, Nation, this weekend. The event, as you might expect, will be going off in The Windy City, with Traxx headlining the festivities at Smart Bar. Josh Werner will also be on hand for a DJ set along the way, but the major bit of interest should be the five live performances. They'll come from Traxx himself, James T. Cotton, Saturn V, Nancy Fortune and D'Marc Cantu. The performance from Saturn V—a collaboration between Traxx and James T. Cotton—will be the first time the pair have ever played in public together. With Traxx and JTC also lined up for DJ spots, expect the power of jak to be on display all night long. We caught up with Traxx to ask him a couple of questions about the night.
    Why is this show so special to you? I've thrown many party events in the past several years with my promotion project called Kode with my partner Andrew Wood from Minneapolis between Chicago, Detroit, New York, Minneapolis, Berlin and Dresden to produce an atmosphere. The showcase in Chicago will be another installation/extension of powerful performance, music exploration and spiritual enlightenment. While club promoters keep utilizing the same formula to maintain numbers with the more primary or in-demand DJs/artists in the clubs in-and-out every other month, there's no chance for the lesser-known artists/DJs to even make an impact or to express what they feel which I believe are equal yet in some cases inferior to the popular group.. This presentation of musicians/artists & disc jocks will display my explanation. Some are known, others are unknown. To create something special there needs to be a new approach to refine the basic blueprint of clubbing by partaking in pushing for a future beyond genre and classification styles in a dance event. What do you feel like Chicago, as a city, has meant to your music? Chicago is the center for my sound basically but I don't base my entire sound to just one particular sound. In the last seven years Chicago has somewhat abandoned me because I feel they didn't take the time to know who I am musically. They only wanted a version of what people heard of me from the late '90s and are basically stuck there. It's really a shame actually. To be honest, I don't really play in Chicago. I want to do more in the future if it's possible or someone who would like to listen to my ideas. The thing is, when I play it's for myself. Not to please the crowd. I create and program ideas from the songs I select from my collection to give like-minded and non-believers to listen, witness or experience music which has been heard or unheard to the ear.

RA