Christopher Victorio/OC Weekly

The Gromble were going to play, but didn't

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Nothing foretells the end of an event like a dozen cop cars lining up the street.

That's what happened Friday night to the first Culture Carnival, a celebration of local artists with musical selections from bands like The Spell, JUPILAR, The Gromble and Midnight Hour inside a nondescript warehouse in Santa Ana.

More than 300 people were expected to attend when just before the 7 p.m. start date, Santa Ana Police shut down the event. About a dozen officers lined up across the street from the warehouse with batons on hand.

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​So it's starting to look like Orange County can add another illustrious character to its pantheon of dubious stars. According to news reports, Casey Anthony, fresh off an acquittal for the murder of her three six-year-old daughter Caylee, has forsaken one county of citrus for the other--Florida's for California's.

 What's an accused killer to do when the thrill of dodging paparazzi and zipping around the country in a private jets wears off? Luckily for Anthony, Orange County has some top-shelf night spots where a gal can unwind.
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It's a little strange to sense all the buzz surrounding Europe's new dark wave of dance floor sounds, which combine tribal drums with deep, chugging bass and a simmering sense of bacchanalia. The likes of Loco Dice, Sven Vath, Dubfire and Radio Slave have been churning out this latest club-land flavor, which lies somewhere between minimal techno and dubby house music. But it's been done before.

Fabric London

The doctor is in the house.

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Rewind to the mid-1990s and behold one Southern California native Doc Martin, who was rinsing out evil, "druggy" house for the after-after-hours underground. Dry, loopy tracks would declare "New York-London-Amsterdam" ad nauseum; or a song would state, "It's dark in here ... it's wet in here ... it's deep in here ... I like it here." Even before DJ's DJ Danny Tenaglia was declared the king of the "twisted" sound, Mr. Martin was tweaking bodies and minds.

A DJ hero who has been at it since the late 1980s, Doc has never been a flavor of the moment. He's always been his own man, anchoring his strictly underground Sublevel events while jetting off ocassionally to headline the world's greatest superclubs. (London's Fabric is a frequent destination). Check out Doc's timeless, bottom-heavy grooves Tuesday at Focus.

Focus presents Doc Martin Tuesday at Tapas, 4253 Martingale Way, Newport Beach. 18+. Tickets $8 in advance. Doors at 9:30. Info: focus-oc.com.

Some would credit Europe with this thing we call electronic dance music by pointing back to the pioneering work of Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder and Can. They would be half right: Contemporary electronic dance music, like blues, rock and jazz, is a progeny of the interplay between black and white music. (See Juan Atkins, Frankie Knuckles and Moby). And so, for many years New York was the club capital of DJ culture, and Southern California was its backyard playground.

DJ T

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But Europe has, in recent times, exacted a swift revenge on the world's dance floors. Berlin, Barcelona and Ibiza, Spain have surpassed New York, Miami and Chicago as clubbing's premier map points. And early techno and electronic dance artists such as Germany's Sven Vath, Booka Shade and DJ T - some of them beyond their 40s -- have come back with a vengeance, adding that lost ingredient of early European electronic - soul - to their teutonic groove boxes.

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Thursday marks the opening of a new weekly club night at Long Beach's Basement Lounge. Called Big Audio, the kick-off event includes former From First to Last frontman Sonny Moore (aka Srkillex) spinning electro re-mixes, DJ Japson and DJ Jahmontee.

There are drink specials and the first 50 people to RSVP here get in for free.

Before the owners were busted for allegedly running a sex club, the Basement Lounge was the closest thing to Hollywood-style nightclubs that Long Beach had. Velvet ropes, dress codes, men/women way out of your sorry ass league, overpriced drinks...the whole nine. Let's hope Big Audio steers clear of all that mess.

​Hey! I'm OC Weekly's new clubs editor! You may remember me as the guy who hung out with that one birther lady, but forget about that. I'm here for the drinks now.

Thus far, this job has pretty much consisted of me revisiting the places I went during childhood, but getting drunk at them. Yeah, I grew up in south OC. I didn't imbibe until I was 18, and that was at far-away college land. I didn't "club" in OC till... a week ago? Something like that.

So I'll occasionally be blogging about my post-graduate education in OC nightlife. Here we go. First middle-school hang-out boozed-up redux? The Kaleidoscope Center in Mission Viejo.

Last Tuesday, a friend who actually is cool and knows what people in Orange County do for fun (besides staying at home at watching Top Chef) took me out to The Derby Deli and Dueling Piano Bar in Mission Viejo. You are, as I once was, thinking the following things about why that sounds like a terrible idea:

1. "Deli." No one drinks at a deli, and even if they did, the only good OC delis are the Korean ones.
2. "Piano bar." Really? Billy Joel all night?
3. "Mission Viejo." Last time I wrote about Mission Viejo, it was to detail all the ways that middle-aged republicans were getting mad at one another for maybe sorta thinking about putting an old-folks home on a golf course.
4. "The Kaleidoscope." This is a big one. The Kaleidoscope is that awful, huge, turquoise-colored outdoor mall off the 5 Freeway. The one with the flower-shaped roof that lights up. The one that seems to have a near 50% vacancy rate. The one that's been overrun by rowdy preteens there to take advantage of the frozen yogurt, movie theater, laser tag, skate shop, and the rows and rows of Xbox 360s at Howie's Game Shack. A digression about Howie's: A few of my good friends in high school scored their first jobs working at Howie's. This was, at the time, pretty awesome-seeming. We all loved vidja-games, so what could be better than getting paid to hang out at the joint where hundreds of kids could get together for shoot-em-ups till 2 a.m.?  Turns out, Howie's wasn't awesome. Howie's became a vision of hell: tweens and teens dropped off in the dozens by their parents for a night of sitting in huge, cushy black chairs, drinking Monster and shouting profanities at one another while staring straight at the screen in front of them. Quickly, this destroyed our love for Xbox, Nintendo, energy drinks, television, interactivity, technology, anyone under the age of 15 and the basic concept of fun.

So it was a pretty exciting that the Derby ended up being a party.

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