Last year I celebrated one of my favorite holidays, Halloween, by attending the Annual Scarefest. I was directed by a friend to see the performance of a new DJ in town, G.H. Hat. He definitely impressed me with his high-energy POP/EDM (electronic dance music) performance and had the whole crowd on its feet and dancing. It was an incredible night.
This year I went back to see G.H. Hat perform again at the Annual Scarefest. It was no surprise that they invited him back and I wanted to see what he had in store for all of us this year.
He started out with several remixes on a classic song and his latest Billboard charting hit–Sukiyaki (Ue O Muite Aruk?) translated into “I Look Up As I Walk”. This song is about a Japanese student who looks up as he is walking so his tears will not fall, and the lyrics describe his memories and feelings. This song was performed originally by Kyu Sakamoto in 1961 and is a classic which has been covered and remixed by numerous artists.
G.H. Hat’s version featured a beautiful female vocal, which I later found out was that of Japanese Super Star, Eriko Tamura. While standing there at Scarefest and listening to G.H. Hat’s version, which was technically a Swedish House mix, I saw that not only did he do the original song justice, but he had created what I think was the only EDM version of the song while paying the appropriate amount of respect and homage to the original.
He also collaborated with musical artists Ralphi Rosario, Dinaire+Bissen, and Alina Renae to make several other versions of Sukiyaki which he peppered into his high energy dance mix throughout the night. I think he played 6 or more different versions of Sukiyaki throughout the night and they were so diverse that they were each like a different song – from the beautiful pop-dance version of Sukiyaki (Ue O Muite Aruk?), to the cool, precise guitar “Instrumental Version” of the same song.
G.H. Hat mixed up his performance with some of his older hits such as several versions of “I Got a Problem…I Wonder”, “Primal”, “Soft Breeze”and “Joyogistic” and played tons of high energy dance music throughout the night. What I most like about G.H. Hat is he is a dancer’s DJ. He really knows how to change the pace, while keeping all the songs at a high energy level. None of that continual boring “thump, thump, thump….” you get from a lot of the other DJ’s. G.H. Hat played music from all the decades such as great remixes of “Takin’ Care of Business” (Bachman-Turner Overdrive), “Immigrant Song (Lead Zeppelin), “They Don’t Really Care about Us” (Michael Jackson), and “We Will Rock You” (Queen) to “Pumpt It” (The Black Eyed Peas) and “Lose Yourself” (Eminem) to just name a few of the classic songs I remember. G.H. made it an electric high energy performance and made sure that he had something for every member of the audience to enjoy.
I immensely enjoyed myself again and am already wondering what G.H. Hat will bring to next year’s Scarefest. He’s proven himself as a classical genius, an EDM party-starter, and a melodic musician, so there’s no telling what his next performance will give us.
Check out his latest here: