Adam F vs. DJ Craze

Billed as Vancouver's biggest drum & bass event of the year, this gig was brought low by that scourge of all multi-turntable performances: technical difficulties. After solid sets from local spinners Link, Matty and Jay-Auto — the latter of whom dropped High Contrast's brilliant remix of the Streets' "Has It Come to This?" — Britain's tag-teaming mixologists kept the vibe hype, rolling neuro-funk joints back and forth between two sets of Technics. Later, London's Adam F and Miami's Craze took the stage for a combined set, promising a blow for blow battle between the former's jungle selections and the latter's scratch skills. Adam's known as one of drum & bass's most refined beat makers, but on this night a malfunctioning set of decks kept him from trading beats with three-time DMC turntable champ Craze. The sound cut out three times in the first ten minutes of their combined set, causing MC Skibadee to admit that he was "lost for words," surely a first for one of jungle's premier toasters. Instead of a dynamic four-turntable performance, the heads on hand had to settle to for a straight-up two-deck set, with Adam and Craze taking turns on the ones and twos. While the bass was all but absent from the mix, MC Skibadee wowed the crowd with his hyper-literate flows, making this a victory of traditional showmanship over malfunctioning technology.