Jenny Tan’s Minitek Festival hit a bit of a pothole on Friday night at New York’s Penn Plaza, when the fire and police department shut down the all night event at around 2:30 AM, with a line of approximately 1,000 techno enthusiasts stranded outside waiting to get in.

Blog posts on RedBeatle.Wordpress.com, Basstown.Blogspot.com and Jaskim.com describe confusion that ensued. Someone also posted their to the Resident Advisor forums. Of course, RA haven’t posted any updates about the festival on their home page in both their news and blog section, even though they’re the online ticket broker.  No wonder why electronic music can’t get out of it’s own way. Not a good look. It’s like everyone took the weekend off to party, forgetting their esponsiblity to communicate with their audience.

One person overheard that Minimoo only had a 300 person permit for a 3,000 capacity space, however, that’s just hearsay for now. We haven’t learned the real reason, but it doesn’t really matter much today. When the authorities decided to shut down the party at 3:30 AM, Minimoo quickly regrouped and moved the event to the nightclub, Rebel. However, that change was not reflected on their web site, nor was an email sent out the list by their PR company or Minimoo themselves. Granted, it was three on the morning, but if you are going to throw an event of this size and scale, you must have your communications on point.

For a technology festival to not utilize tools such as Ning, on which you can build your own social platform, or Facebook, where they’ve set up a group already is kind of strange, no?. The last time Minitek posted to their Twitter account was on September 3rd. There were no Twitter posts last night to inform anyone who purchased a ticket what was happening at the venue or to notify them where the show would move.

Of course, the Minitek site lacks the one thing they should have had in the first place, a simple blog. Why that is, I don’t know. Everyone has a blog today. If they have podcasts on the site, why no blog?

Fortunately for Jenny and Minimoo, today’s event on Coney Island went off without a hitch. I checked it out for a bit and was impressed. A number of record labels set up booths, including Clink Recordings (we love their branding and design), Ghostly International, Catalog Records, Hidden Records, and Confined Media, a DIY operation who trekked out east all the way from Seattle, Washington. The venerable Halcyon had a booth. Shawn Schwartz and Ricardo were manning the booth. And an interesting company, Fractalspin.com, had a variety of transistor based jewlry, watches and other interesting products for sale. The only problem was that the booth’s had no electicity, which meant that the labels couldn’t set up their listening stations.

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Let’s get to the music. Adultnapper and Alexi Delano were both on point. Clink Recordings label owner and DJ/Producer, Camea, warmed up the crowd nicely with a very, very deep techno set that really took you down into that tantric place. You know that vibe, where the bottom heavy bass lines inject a moodiness into the air. We don’t know what her set list was, but there was one track she played that was just super dirty. As it chugged along, spitting its rawness out of the speakers, you kind of felt like you needed to take a shower afterward! Definitely a dope track. Wish we knew what it was.

I left around 4:30 to head over to Nathan’s for one of their world famous hot dogs. I don’t know if they provided electricity to the booths after that and I’m not sure if tonight’s rain affected the event, but we hope that Jenny has better luck at Webster Hall tonight and the event schedule tomorrow. Keeping our fingers crossed!

Anyway, let me cut this short because I have somewhere to be. Tonight’s event has been moved from Penn Plaza to Webster Hall, just in case you’re wondering. I may head over there to check out it out.

— Tony Zeoli

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