The Magician presents Magic Tape 50

Ace Hotel, London (23rd February 2015)

We’ve done quite well not to write solely about The Magician since we started the blog. We did say that he would become a familiar name to you when we got started but sadly we have not seen much of him in London recently so we haven’t been able to rave about him as much as we would like.

That all changed last night when we were given the very special opportunity to be at the recording of Magic Tape 50 for MixmagTV. What you may ask is Magic Tape 50? Well, the Magic Tape series has been a selection of mixtapes that The Magician has recorded and made available for download through SoundCloud (until SoundCloud changed the rules, but it’s still possible to download via Mega).

Last night was quite the milestone as we reached Magic Tape 50!

We first stumbled across The Magician, real name Stephen Fasano, back in 2011 at Lovebox where he was gracing the decks with former DJ partner Aeroplane (they parted ways in 2010 when Fasano chose to embark on his solo project). After entering Space Ibiza for We Love… to hear him playing Erol Alkan’s extended rework of Metronomy’s The Bay on the Sunset Terrace mere weeks later, our fate was sealed – we’ve been huge fans ever since!

We’ve traveled to some glamorous places to see him play since then: Ibiza, Berlin, Peterborough… Any excuse to get our fix. Thankfully, with him being a firm favourite of XOYO, we don’t usually have to travel far although, as we say, he hasn’t played in London much over the last year.

Fasano hails from Belgium and specialises in house and nu disco. Having firmly established his Magician persona when he plays, he can always be relied upon to be decked out in magician’s suit with accompanying wand (and no, that’s not a euphemism!) 🙂

Although we have followed him almost from the start, it has been exciting to see his popularity soar this year with the release of Sunlight, which reached number 7 in the UK singles chart and brought him to the attention of a much wider audience (I guess we’re OK with sharing him…) One of his older hits, likely to be recognised by any of his die-hard fans, is his remix of Lykke Li’s I Follow Rivers:

We said that last night was special and it really was. We were part of an intimate crowd of less than 100 people who were invited to watch Magic Tape 50 being recorded. Hosted in the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch, we could not have asked for a more stunning backdrop for the evening. As Fasano spun out the first track, London continued with its business in the background, unaware of the memories that were being created up above it.

But alas, all good things must come to an end and, in just short of an hour, the recording was complete and Fasano passed on the baton to Arches, a DJ duo new to the scene. Until next time. *Sigh*

We’ll next be seeing The Magician and Arches at Electric Brixton on 14th March as part of his Potion tour. We cannot wait and we think you all should join us!! If you can’t make London, check out some of the other dates.

You can watch last night’s recording here which also includes the follow on set by Arches:

Visit our Flickr page to see photo highlights from the night, and our YouTube channel where you can watch extracts from the show.
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You can also check out our Past Events page to see our music archives.

 

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