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Club Rouges is a new club night format at the fantastic Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, Crofton Park, South East London. The first night was 25 July 2015 and featured music from the 1970s and 1980s via DJ Kobayashi Doron. Judging by the energy by those who attended (both young and old) it was a huge success. I am already looking forward to their next themed evening 'Hollywood' on 25 September, and this is coming from someone who hasn't 'danced' since his college years. A Grade II listed 1930s art deco building, the Rivoli is the only intact 1950s ballroom to remain in London. It has hosted plenty of epic music nights, including gigs by Florence and the Machine, music videos by Lana del Ray and appearing in blockbusters such as Avengers: Age of Ultron . Rivoli Ballroom 350 Brockley Road Crofton Park SE4 2BY Transport: Crofton Park, Brockley

Radio Ga Ga Last weekend, I've had the opportunity to attend the pre inaugural sailing of Royal Carribean's newest ship, Anthem of the Seas. While I prepare a post about our experience on Anthem, you can read about my experience on Quantum of the Seas , the lead ship of the Quantum-class cruise ships of which Anthem of the Seas is part of (and therefore is almost identical). During our weekend stay on board, we also attended the dress rehearsals to We Will Rock You , the popular musical based on songs by Queen. As someone who has always wanted to watch the West End musical but unable to do so, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. There were two live dress rehearsals held on Sunday, and we enjoyed the first one so much I insisted we went to watch the second one a couple of hours later! We Will Rock You tells the story about a group of Bohemians outcast stuck in a future Orwellian world now dubbed the iPlanet where people listen to computer generated music. Free thoughts a...

Meridian is a Cambridge based audio company known in the audiophile circle as a good trusted brand when it comes to sound quality. Their products are on the upper end of the market and, as all their products are designed and manufactured in the UK, therefore comes at a premium. The Meridian Explorer is a product aimed at cornering the slightly lower end of the market, and to a different segment of audio lovers. The pocket size USB DAC is designed for those who mainly listen to music using computers. It is a growing segment of the audio market. Long gone when you need a PC size amp and book shelf speaker in order to enjoy good audio quality. The Explorer in intended to do two things. It is designed first to bypass a typical PC's soundcard (which are normall inadequate), routing the digital file through the USB onto the Explorer's on board Texas Instrument DAC. This by itself will almost always make a difference for the better. The second thing the Explorer does is up sample the ...

The Meridian Explorer is a new pocket size USB DAC by Cambridge based audio company, Meridian. The portable audio gear is aimed for those who aims to improve the audio quality delivered by their computers. It is designed to bypass your PC's normally inadequate sound card as the source. A CD and MP3 file typically contains audio tracks in 16-bit resolution and 44.1kHz sampling. For some people, this isn't enough. Specialist stores do sell albums encoded in 24/192, but these are rare and expensive. The Meridian Explorer on the other hand is designed to take these 16/44 files and up sample them. This isn't quite the same as buying audio files encoded in native 24/192, and is more akin to buying a Blu-Ray player that is capable of up sampling a 1080p source for playback onto a 4K monitor. I do not profess to be an expert in audio, but a short A-B test with the Meridian Explorer via a pair of Sennheiser HD 700 headphones and my own beloved Sennheiser IE8  in-ear monitors with a ...

Ahoy Londoners, the Lunar/Chinese New Year festival is once again upon us. On Sunday, 10 February, Trafalgar Square will once again be transformed for this year's Chinese New year festival in London. A parade of floats and traditional drum music will begin at 10am from Trafalgar Square and ending in Rupert Street in Chinatown, ending at 11am, presumably when everyone would rush to their favourite Dim Sum restaurant. A host of live performance will greet party goers in Trafalgar Square from noon. This includes one of my favourite London-based indie folk musician, the lovely  Emmy the Great  (see the videos below of her and Tim Wheeler rocking our Christmas of 2011). Other performances include the Chen Brothers Flying Lion Dance (I've got to see this!) and other performers from China. The celebration will be followed by a display of fireworks at 5.55pm, ushering the year of the snake.

Yesterday evening Nokia hosted a Lumia #Switch Party at the Flat Iron Square in Southwark. The event celebrated the launch of the Lumia 920 and 820 Windows Phone 8 smartphones, and is a sequal to last year's mind blowing '4D' projection performance at the Millbank Tower in London. That one So how could Nokia and deadmau5 top last year's crazy display? Well they didn't, but then again, they didn't exactly have to. As this year's performance location was kept secret (the event was exclusive to Nokia staffs, competition winners and a few guests), it was billed as a more intimate event. The rather heavy handed approach by security did annoy us a little bit (the event was oversubscribed) and  it didn't help that no one knew exactly where they should be facing so everyone just pushed forward towards the Shard. Sure, the effects did not blow our mind like last year's, but the music at least did. Using the surrounding buildings around Flat Iron Square as pro...

The Royal Albert Hall hosted the first of this season's Distant Worlds: Final Fantasy orchestra, a worldwide event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the series. The first game was released in Japan on 18 December 1987 by Square on the Famicom (NES) platform, popularising the RPG genre. Since then, 13 main numbered games within the series has also been released, including various none-numbered spin-offs and sequels. The next game in the numbered series would be Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII and is a further sequel to Final Fantasy XIII . It was a great evening, and I have always enjoyed concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. The famous Kensington venue, while traditional in architecture, seems apt for a wide range of performance styles and music genres. In fact, the last time we were there was last year for the BBC Radio 3's Big Red Nose Snow and, before that the Cirque Du Solei's Totem (thanks London Midland!) circus! Anyway the conductor Arnie Roth and the Royal ...