Heineken Green Room : Trip the Light Fantastic !
Heineken Green Room is indeed a pushing music boundaries event – I didn’t quite expect myself to enjoy the event this much ! As mentioned in my earlier post, I really find it hard to enjoy the “diu diu diu music” but surprisingly, I had a great time and Moderat was just mindblowing !
Joshua and I made our way to Tanjong Pagar Distripark and first look of the event venue was pretty cool, a very unique/underground industrial feel. 
Thank goodness we were quite early so there wasn’t much of a queue. We were then ushered into this huge cargo lift with glowing green light (duh, it’s the color of Heineken and it’s not called Heineken Green Room for nothing!), I like the feeling of “godknowswhat it’s going to happen next!” while waiting for the lift to reach the party location. Being a cargo lift, the door really opens up slowly but that added on to the effect in a good way – you see lights and smoke from the tiny little gap and viola, it opens up to the dance floor with DJ Cherry already playing on the main stage ! She’s pretty cool – I always have a thing for female DJs, girl power ! (lol)
Since it was still early, Joshua and I had the chance to walk around the area freely. There was this interactive area where guests get to be their own DJs and do their own mixes via the iPods and Korg kaossilators which were pretty cool. It took us awhile to figure out (we must be really dumb) and I was wondering where’s the instructions – but who the hell reads 
instructions at a clubbing event right !? -slaps forehead- Pardon me, it is obvious that I’m no party animal ! (Haha) We then moved on to grab ourselves a Heineken each at the long bar which was so much better than event bars I’ve been to, no long queues and quick services. One downside to it was that, by the end of the night, the floor was wet from the ice and people were littering their bottles everywhere. Poor cleaners but I guess it happens at all these clubbing events.
I love the lights and visuals we were surrounded by, Joshua was telling me which patterns and how he has done the light effects for one of our school events. You can’t blame the geek/nerd in him, can you ? It was a good thing that the smoking area was out of the party area so I didn’t inhale any 2nd hand smoke at all ! The crowd was pretty much a disciplined mature group (there’s a reason why it’s exclusively by invites only!) and I didn’t see much drunkards around, especially with the amount of security lurking around. Afterall, people are really here for the music ! (Well, some are here for the girls…Joshua and I were observing how some guys were trying to hook up with the Heineken girls who were walking around to take polaroids for the guests) I had fun with Joshua nonetheless ! 
Speaking of music, Moderat was really awesome ! I’m totally sold by their live performance and the stunning visuals. Still quite head-bobbing but it was quite adrenaline rushing ! I managed to snap a few (bad) shots and the starting sequence on video – the sound quality was quite disappointing though. (Will some kind souls please sponsor me a proper video recording+picture taking gadget or something ? hur)
Moderat_02 from Ingrid on Vimeo.
I enjoyed myself alot, especially when I got to meet a couple of my friends there ! Had a great date with Joshua and it was a brand new experience for me. Although I have to admit that I went home with a bad throat after all that yelling over the music and blocked ears, thank god I didn’t drink enough to get any hangovers. It was a fabulous “trip the light fantastic” indeed !
AOTW [8] : Moderat
I’m never a fan of anything that sounds too much like House/Techno/Trance, basically I call them as “Diu Diu Diu music” (like the background beats ? Haha) Honestly, it still gives me a headache each time I listen to these genres. No offense to fans out there but I personally would prefer music with lyrics or pure instrumental like piano etc.
I came across Moderat during my internship and they will be coming for the Heineken Green Room Event later on ! Am really excited over the event itself and getting to watch them live should be a new and interesting experience. Basically Moderat is made up of Modeselektor and Apparat who both have equally great separate career but decided to do another collaboration after the first one in 2002.
If you were to ask me, I’ll probably not listen to their tracks since I’m not a big fan but the cool visuals changed my mind, supported by eclectic visual arts collective Pfadfinderei! Along with the visuals, I see them as more of a multimedia performance rather than just electro icons. I guess their music is club-ready to the party animals, whereas I really don’t understand how people dance to it except bobbing their heads with a drink in their hand. I will find out later !
Speaking of which, Nick Catchdubs, also in Singapore for the very first time will be at the Heineken Green Room as well ! See you there if you have the cool invites =)
Here’s a track that I thought was pretty cool with the awesome video (the video looks crappy but I thought the editing was great),
