Italy's Alex Kenji blew up Footwork
I first heard about Alex Kenji about a year or two ago when he released the banger “Samurai”. However I didn’t really start following him until around January 09' with the release of his tracks “Vertigo” and “Adelante”. His style is Tech-house with touches of minimal, tribal, and even bits of electro.
His tracks have featured on the BBC Radio1 Essential Mix and in the DMC US House Chart and playlisted by: Pete Tong, JUSTICE, Roger Sanchez, Kaskade, Sharam (Deep Dish), Robbie Rivera, Tocadisco, David Piccioni, Jason Nevins, Chris Lake, Hernan Cattaneo, Tom Novy, Alex Gaudino, Joe T Vannelli, BSOD, John Dahlback, and many others.
When I heard he was going to play Footwork on May 16th, I knew it was a show I wanted to check out. Footwork is always a great experience because it’s very intimate. As much as I love big productions and massive crowds that venues like Guvernment have, there’s something unique and special about experiencing a DJ in an intimate setting.
I arrived around 11:45pm and Toronto’s own Kotov & Wilde were playing. Around 1am Kotov & Wilde dropped one of the best remixes I’ve heard, of Green Velvet’s banger “La La Land” (still wondering what that mix was??). This is the track that they handed off the decks to Alex Kenji on.
From the get go Alex was playing deep hard rolling bass lines, not for the faint of heart. There were even points where I found his techno a bit to hard for me. Nonetheless his set was filled with energy and banger after banger of tech-house.
One department I felt Alex lacked a little in was direct crowd interaction. One of my pet peeves when going to see a DJ is when they are so focused on spinning that they forget to look up, bounce around, flap there hands in the air, etc. When a DJ interacts with the crowd a lot it elevates the energy to a new level. Although he did do a little bit of this, I felt overall he could have interacted more. Either way he dropped a sick set and the crowd seemed to love it. Unfortunately I had work Saturday morning and had to leave before hearing Jon Jon close off the night.
So in retrospect, if I could go back in time, would I go again? Most definitely. As I said in my Footwork 4 year Anniversary review, Footwork is always a good time. The crowd and music is always top notch. Alex Kenji is a great producer that I recommend checking out. All-in-all I like his productions a bit more than his hard hitting set, but I still think he’s both a great DJ and producer.
Aaron
“Getting down to business, so you can get to the business of getting down”
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