Sat, 11pm, Club Cixi
Not many DJs can claim to have gone from hardcore skate punk to electronic dance music, but this is the unusual journey Mark Pember has travelled.
The producer/DJ, who goes by the name of Meat Katie (above), is now best known as the face of tech-funk - not really a musical genre but an amalgamation of breakbeat, techno and electro. He made his mark with a series of well-received compilation albums released by Bedrock, the label run by progressive house don John Digweed and Fabric, the London superclub where Pember is also a regular behind the decks.
However, his musical career started as the bass player for British skate punks Sandladder, an abrasive outfit who were signed to Iggy Pop's Kill City imprint. In the early 1990s the burgeoning acid house scene started exerting its influence on Pember and he was roped into the big-beat outfit Ceasefire, releasing a slew of singles on the Wall of Sound label.
It's been a wild ride for Pember in the intervening years, with his efforts under his Meat Katie alias winning him respect among the harder-edged dance crowd and his Lot 49 label cornering the market in quality tech-funk through its artists including Elite Force, D. Ramirez and Metric.
Pember acknowledges that tech-funk isn't a sub-genre on the notoriously fractious electronic music scene. 'It's always been more a case of like-minded producer/DJs who make music that sits on the techno/electro/breakbeat fence,' he told Beatportal recently.