THE STORY OF ULTIMA 2 AND THE CHAMBER OF JAILZ ****** DISCLAIMER!!!!! THIS WAS WRITTEN IN 2003 BY 4 DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES...SEEING AS HOW IT IS ON FACEBOOK THOUGHT THAT SHOULD BE STATED IT WAS ONLY COMPILED BY ME****

Since I have posted this I have received numerous emails from Fusion members and attendees with little add on stories and also some corrections which I have not put in place. You can email me at with any more of these emails. Urge to turn this into an indie flick is rising... (Written on Jan 2003)

THE STORY OF ULTIMA 2 AND THE CHAMBER OF JAILZ
The year was 2001 and Fusion Elite Electronic Music was at the peak of its wave.

First though let’s establish the characters in this play.

wahili - dnb dj and technorati extraordinaire and one of founding members of fusion along with mister trunks Mel and Mighty.

mister trunks - dnb dj from NYC and a good friend. he was my roommate for 3 years back in college and we plotted many an intergalactic takeover scheme. sometimes he goes nuts and eats cheese with his feet. hes a fellow programmer and vid enthusiast and also longtime lover of music of many types.

Mighty- this bostonian panamanian plays great house music is a master of sound acoustics and did lots for the fusion crew ( in between fist fights and explosive arguments between him and mister trunks) which always brought much amusement to the 8-10 people who lived in various places of our house. their epic battle when we all lived in a house a few years prior truly made times interesting. he loves cats.

D1- D1 is the senior member of the crew and is a hip hopper from the days when hip to the hop was hippy to the hoppy and has many connections in the promotion circuit. He procured Qbert via Gray Multimedia. i have heard him call himself the black missile which always freaked me out a bit along with the fact that sometimes he would do shots while we drove around in his vehicle.

J5- dnb dj and the young one of the group .. J5 hails from Singapore and was also my room mate at the time and business partner in our web development firm back when the DOW stood at 5,000+ and websites like this could be planned for $250,000.

Mel - the chick of the group and promoter. we all first met mel and mr E at a large rave in Toronto on a very crazy weekend. Mel and mister trunks used to bad bad things with me in the room…ohh boy

Jet - this gothic, now legendary vampire freak, from www.vampirefreaks.com was the hardcore dj of the group. he started what was known as the 4:20 circle where each year at our university everyone would get together on the academic quad during our yearly festival and make the sky green. i always thought this hailed from the late 60's and was an age old tradition but i found out later Jet had started this tradition only a year before i came to our school. crack!

Stigma - this self-professed Mecha junkie, born in Niagara Falls and raised in DC. His distinct surfer accent is a riddle, wrapped inside an enigma, wrapped inside a twinkie. Stigma was another dnb dj in the crew and had also been crashing on my couch for the last few months for reasons pertaining to jobaphobia.

Ben - ol skool friend of mine from my guitar playing days. We kicked ass in a band back in the day. now he kicks ass for a living as tae kwon do instructure with a 2nd degree tae kwon do black belt. i grew up with this guy and at the time, he too was crashing on our couch for a few months and was between homes.

EvilJungleJeff- This Jeff is neither evil or jungle however he is and most certainly will always be Jeff. Jeffrey is da man. In our group he has always been the token white guy and none of us would have it any other way. The party is always better with EvilJungleJeff. EvilJungleJeff has a degree in psychology works at a company that makes lots and lots of tissue. if you live in new york state, at some point, some place, you have wiped some thing with tissue from his place of business.

DP - this guy is a cool ol skool tech head who knows vast amounts of all types of technology. most people ask how much heroin he does after they first meet him but in actuality he smokes lots of cigarettes after breaking off the filter and only sleeps an hour a night. if you think you saw the unabomber at your local bar last night, chances are it was DP knocking back a few. He lived in this building where J5 and i had our web dev firm and also lived in, for a year up till 2 weeks before this party when we had moved about 2 blocks away. thats definitely a run on but oh well. this comes into play later in the story in odd and as of yet, incomprehensible ways.

The Lying Russian- the x munching, ambiguously russian, tall tale teller who was chased out of philly for pissing off the russian mafia... ?

So as I was saying… The year... 2001. The event... ULTIMA 2 : CHAMBER OF SKILLZ... the headliner, DJ QBERT.

Qbert for those that aren't in the know, is a turntablist elite. For example, he stepped down from the DMC World Chamionship Tournmants cuz he just kept winning them all. He invented the crab and countless other techniques and has stated that when he composed his pieces he tries to picture what beings on another planet would create as their music. More info on Qbert can be found at:

DJ QBERT - A LEGEND IN HIS OWN TIME
http://www.djqbert.com

That being said, Fusion in all our ol skool glory and knowing the way of the rave well, decided to throw an ol skool UNSANCTIONED underground rave just like the golden days of yore or some would call it.. the early 90's.

Now keep in mind Qbert doesn’t come cheap and we had sunk a lot of money into this event but as time drew near and our 20,000 flyers were passed and tickets were distributed state wide, we for some reason had 5 venues fall through and well the little detail of place to have this event was still open to suggestion.

One night D1 and Mighty call the crew together saying they have found the perfect venue and to meet them on the corner of something and something. The crew congregates at said rendezvous to see no other than D1, Mighty and The Lying Russian in a small uhaul.

I am confused as we are in the industrial district downtown.

We are then led into a building that will be famously imprinted into all our minds forever. As we walk into this warehouse, we all get the feeling that we really shouldn't be there because, well for one thing it was filled with industrial supplies and machines. It is dark and slightly dank and as our eyes adjust we all realize that it is The Lying Russian who vouches for this place. The Lying Russian has assured Mighty and D1 that his boss's son ownshas granted full permission to use this place to throw a rave. I figure that you can't lie all the time. we are all phasing between skepticism and relief at finding a venue but we decide then and there that its official.

The next day we decide its time to prepare our illustrious venue and gather supplies. Procuring of all the typical items began such as procuring 8 palettes of water from a confused Sam's Club sales person who had to help with a forklift H20 into our uhaul. I always do enjoy asking people for 1500 bottles of water.

The next 10 hours can only be described as manual labor of the worst kind. After surveying our place of party, it was discovered that the 3rd floor was the only floor that didn’t have crap filling it up.

THIRD FLOOR DOUBLE FLIGHTS OF STAIRS. Now you may think i was being lazy but recall for a moment the 8 palettes of water mentioned a moment ago and add to it, the coup de grace, about 60 cinder blocks for a sweet ass turntable setup. I would have preferred Qbert play on styrofoam blocks at that moment but I digress. Working deep into the night like a chain gang set us all up for some major pain the next day.

Oh snap, the BIG DAY. And that snap you hear is the snap of our very sanity as the day will progress. Let us begin........................... (deep breath)

As we all woke up in pain at our respective places of residence, I remembered that I had to meet our sound guy at our venue and help unload and haul again... what this means is to take the reverberating pain of hundreds of bottles of water and cinder blocks and add to it about 50,000 watts of speakers, subwoofers, turntables, cables, snakes, lighting and a plethora or other sound equipment up 6 flights of stairs.

We were a brash (read.. stupid) group of individuals that day, because there we were in broad daylight in a building we may or may not have had permission to use. Also disturbing were the men in overall uniforms that came in with the warehouse's logo on who seemed more than a bit confused as to why a whole bunch of kids were moving about $120,000 of sound equipment into their storage warehouse.

Mighty dealt with them slick and being paid minimum wage, they really didn’t give a shit. its not their ass. As the day wore on, the venue started coming together and decorations were in full effect via a massive group effort.

I was pretty tired by this time and I knew i had to refresh because these things last till the first light. that’s right. so J5 and i took off for an hour to prepare ourselves as we both had our own sets to play that night.

Qbert was already in town and was being schmoozed by D1 and Ramen. These guys got the the stuck with the job of chilling with the man himself in his climate controlled stretch navigator with PS2 in tow. Poor bastards...

Now the following times are estimates but i do know for a fact that it started to unravel at:

6:00PM J5, EvilJungleJeff, Ben and I get into J5's Beemer with our records in tow and head off to start a fun night. It is about to be a fun night.

As we pull up to our venue i notice something bad... And by bad i mean 3 cop cars pulling up to the warehouse. I immediately call Mighty on his cell to tip him off but i keep getting a voicemail. i know to this day that Mighty is sorry he didn’t take my call waiting . i immediately notify mister trunks and the rest of the crew who are not in the venue that we are UCKED with a capital FAY. i only guessed that we were but when Mighty, Stigma, Mel, and others were tossed into the paddy wagon i knew the shit had hit the fan.

(we found later that Blue upon seeing the warehouse workers come in again and not knowing that we already smoothed things out with them, thought in her sweet, bipolar kind of way that flipping them off and telling them to fuck off would be a good way to secure our low profile environment. these guys then proceeded to call the 5-0 the jailarity of which was lost on those in cuffs. )

6:15PM The party starts at 9:30PM ...

The Venue - dusted.

The Sound - dusted.

The water and decorations - dusted. dusted.

I think we are dusted.

Reality starts to seep in... We have just lost a lot of money because our event is dusted. Your average crew would have called it quits, bailed their buddes out and call it a night. but what did we do...? we took action in what i can now call a moment an exacting flurry of pure brilliant genius and idiocy in its most crystallized form. For the next 3 hours my cell phone rang approximately every 5 minutes between calls that i was placing until the battery died later on. First things we called Blue and told her to undo the mess of the jail situation and start figuring all of that out.

6:30PM Mister trunks mysteriously pulls up next to us in the Eclipse at a red light downtown. Im still talking to him him on my phone. Even when the light turns green we all continue shouting plans of action with our windows rolled down.

6:40PM Our master plan for reasons that currently cannot begin to come to mind is to move Ultima 2 to my old loft which was about 5 minutes from our current location downtown. I still had the key since I had moved out only a few weeks ago. Good thinking!

However, thinking back, this was the very opposite of good thinking and can be generally classified as "bad thinking."

7PM We arrived at my old loft with a bit of that weird feeling you get when you walk into a place you used to live but now is vacant. Mister trunks, J5, EvilJungleJeff and Ben start to take action and by this i mean milling about and talking. I go up and knock on the door of no other than DP.

He is at his computer inhaling massive amounts of nicotine and starts cracking up when i tell him what has happened. from his perspective it must be funnier than it was from mine but that’s to be expected. his roommate blinks twice and prompty brings up the Fusion website, copies our flyer and starts photoshopping it from ULTIMA 2 Chamber of Skillz to ULTIMA 2 Chamber of JAILZ.

Forgive me fellow jailed crew members but i couldn't help but laugh my ass off for a minute. I then proceed to engage DP into moving Mighty's personal sound system from his room (he lived 2 floors up) down to my old spot. Mighty is a wiring master when it comes to sound gear so we undo his spider web of cables, amps compressors, speakers, subs and turntables and pray we can put it back together.

Suddenly it hits me like a ton of bricks... or even like 60 cinder blocks.. no one has changed our INFOLINE. Why would this be like a ton of bricks after all that has already happened tonight you say? What the hell is an infoline you say? Lets have a Zach Morris moment... here's the science:

[ Warehouse parties aren’t exactly what you would call "legal". Therefore, promoters for these events create flyers that have an infoline but no address listen on said flyer. These flyers are like flyers you may have seen in normal life but they are cool, have some crazy crap on it, a bunch of dj names and always a phone number. This number connects to a voicemail recording of the event info but on the night of, you change the message to the address the even is at. However in our case we went even one step further as some promoters do and had the infoline lead to a "map point" where "people" gave other "people" "directions". The more you know.]

However, we had just a little problem now. The people who knew the pin code to the infoline were all being BOOKED and MUGGED and PRINTED and possibly MOLESTED in the cop shop. Time to worry again...all our efforts and everyone is still going to the warehouse...

8PM Between frantic trips of moving tons of sound, DP decides that he can hack the phone system. in one of many Seinfeld-esque twists of the night, the company that owned the Fusion infoline (and all other numbers in the city with a 420 prefix) also did the phone system and internet in the building which DP was vaguely familiar with. so next thing we know our infoline is now changed to a map point in the parking lot a block away with DP saying something along the lines of "um yeah if you guys were like confused about where this thingy was before its like, here now, so like you can come and check it out" and the address he gave was to where mister trunks' girl and some of her friends would direct them to our location in what i have already explained as the MAP POINT.

9PM Just as we get the sound system from hell figured out, people start arriving. wow i guess the map point works because there are no cops. not as dumb as some may think it is.

the people filtering in to my old apartment/office were kinda expecting the legendary Qbert and a nice venue for the ticket they dished out their dough for and they find 6 guys in a loft playing drum & bass and chain smoking cigarettes at an alarming pace. they are skeptical and annoyed. i run upstairs for a breather and to gather some extra equipment and run some damage control phone calls. blue is still looking for money and...

the search for Stigma's last name begins because in case you don't know, no full name, no bail out.

9:30PM i come back to my old loft to find the Dance Safe Organization setting up dance safety booths (they pass out fruit flavored condoms and pamphlets that state such pearls as "don't drink the contents of glowsticks" or "don't have sex with more than 5 people in a bathroom without some form of protection" and the ever popular "dont dance for 8 hours on x with no water" and so on. all sound advice.) Also present are about 100 people putting out cigarette butts on the dupont carpeting and starting to get restless like lord of the flies, except instead of a tropical island its a dark smoky room playing darkstep.

they are milling about and every few minutes asking me what the fuck is going on and how this is ever going to shape up to be a real event. Things start getting a bit surreal. It is ear shatteringly loud as i greet familiar club kids and tell them everything will be ok. I get a call from D1 saying he has told Qbert the news and Qbert is amazed we haven't quit already. I walk into the hallway thinking D1 sounds way to unstressed and just then i see the moroccon troglodyte supers of the building from my angle coming out the stair well. I grab J5 by the scruff of his jacket and BOLT because if the supers see us and tell the landlord then we are liable and busted.

We hit the street and i run into mister trunks girlfriend on map point duty. I take her aside and stress: TELL MISTER TRUNKS TO TAKE THE MASTERLOCK THAT LOCKS OUR DOOR AND THE KEY WHEN HE LEAVES. TELL HIM THAT OR I WILL BE FUCKED.

( I can tell you now, he never got the message or wasn't paying attention when he got it. That little mistake cost J5 and myself about $1500 later on to avoid a breaking and entering + vandalism charge even though our moroccan thug of an ex-landlord took our money for said damages AND got insurance from it. hey he’s a business man and i'd have done the same to a punk kid like myself. if it was today, id make him take me to court and he can explain why he rents residential spaces in an industrial area)

As we peel out we see cops arriving from a distance. I start running damage control phone calls again. Stigma's last name is still a mystery.

10:00PM I finally get a hold of mister trunks and find out he has left the lock and key in the venue successfully linking me to the event and also Mighty's equipment has been confiscated by the landlord. Score!

10:30 PM. J5, Mister trunks and I start congregating again. Ben and EvilJungleJeff look as perplexed and worn as we all now feel. The night is just getting started baby!!!! We start getting calls that our friends can't be bailed out because we stil can't find one person that knows Stigmas last name.

11:00 PM We decide to try to plead with a legit venue to allow us to rent their venue sight unseen and hit up one of the most popular venues where bands and clubs throw events and run right into a Cinco De Mayo block party. J5 and Mister trunks park outside and they run into to talk to the owner. After about 20 minutes they come out and miraculously, for another $5,000 he has agreed and he wants all our water. We now have a venue again.

Now what i’m about to tell you next is true and really does sum up the overall karmic feel of the night. Now entropy and wise men say whatever can go wrong will go wrong and when it rains it pours so just then it starts pouring to add some more atmosphere to our plight.

As mister trunks goes to start his car, he turns the key and thats right, he left the stereo on and his car is now DEAD. As he call's me from his car in front of us and says he need's a jump so.....

J5 will have to jump him so, he turns the key and LO AND BEHOLD J5's FUCKING CAR IS DEAD because he left his stereo and headlights on!!!!

Now it just so happened that this venue was right across the street from where i lived at the time... and it just so happened that my car was parked in the parking garage.. and so i went to my car, went to start it so i could jump start both dead vehicles, and it just so happened...

THAT MY CAR WAS DEAD FOR NO APPARENT REASON. This is where i started feeling woozy with defeat but i managed to make it back to the car with my jumper cables yelling that my car was dead and hearing shouts of something along the lines of "this is no time to fuck around !" When i confirmed that i indeed was not fucking around, we had to do the old push the car and pop the clutch trick on J5's beemer in the pouring rain and he jumped mister trunks and we were off again. the second we got in the cars, it stopped raining.

as i brief D1 on these happenings i hear him repeat our saga to Qbert and i hear him and his crew going OH SHIT! NO WAY MAN!!! as it turns out Qbert and his crew were just on pins and needles as they were updated on point by point details of the night as it drilled on. glad we could provide entertainment boys!

Remember The Lying Russian... yeah.. The Lying Russian was no where to be seen. this guy just vaporized and well its a good thing seeing as how his "friend" who okayed our use of the warehouse had been a sham all along. As we drive to pick up some people, i hear on the radio that there is unusual traffic near a parking garage downtown and traffic is gridlocked. i laugh as i realize that our infoline and map point girls have gotten our new venue location and had been directing everyone who was coming to this event from various cities and hours away to park in that parking garage. Yep we caused gridlock.

people from my old loft had also been redirected to the new venue and i saw some of them looking bewildered for more than a few reasons as they walked to the now third venue for the same event.

12:00AM The Cinco de Mayo crowd is trashed and starting to slowly filter out of the venue and our crowd is moving in. The line is stretching around the block and holy shit things seem to be coming together. is this really happening right now? have we pulled it off??? could this be??????????

i see the police arrive. they have tracked our event somehow, maybe an undercover who went to the map point. this time however WE ARE LEGIT. The club owner turns them away and well .. the boys in Blue now have no jurisdiction. Ultima 2 is safe!

12:30AM D1 arrives with Qbert in tow in the navigator. We are all introduced to the man.. Qbert himself... an autograph line starts but are told after the performance. Somehow we are still able to project Qbert's film "Wave Twisters" on the projector. The venue is PACKED AND I MEAN PACKED.... clamoring for the show. I see people in the crowed and some are as surprised as we are that the show has went on... Qbert tells us that he will come back for us ANY TIME and that he has never seen a crew work so hard to keep an event going.

1AM Qbert Takes The Stage. D1, Mister Trunks, J5, Ben and the crew are all just to the left of him looking at the massive crowd and just before he throws on his first plate, who taps me on the shoulder but Mighty and with him are Stigma and Mel... looking SHAKEN AND STIRRED and fresh outta the slammer... trust me when i saw we now ALL know Stigma's last name.

Ultima Chamber of Skillz begins and the whole crew is present. Qbert puts on a performance to be reckoned with and suddenly i feel like Sisyphus except that the job is finally done.

The crowd proceeds to go ape shit and Ultima Chamber of Skillz becomes a rager to remember for the ages....

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PICTURES!

Afterword : When this event ended around 7AM our crew got together and asked random club kids if they had seen The Lying Russian. Around noon we all pulled up in 3 vehicles to his house Reservoir Dogs style. D1 went to his door and as planned, we invited him to come have lunch with us at the china buffet and i think the looks on our faces made him aware that "no thanks" was not an option.

now let me just set the animosity level here for a minute. remember that The Lying Russian is the one who not only caused this fiasco in the first place with his bullshit about the venue, but also on night we were setting up the warehouse , scoured my old car which i lent to him to pick up some crap stole a pile of ultima 2 tickets out of my trunk. hel apparently he sold them for $5 a pop when they were actually $25. We realized this when we compared our head counter VS total money all the ticket vendors had around the state plus the ones sold at the door. so he also jacked us out thousands in potential revenue.

During lunch, The Lying Russian did not say ONE SINGLE WORD while the rest of us were going off describing basically the story you have just read but from everyone's point of view including those views from jail.. of course this may have something to do with the fact that we put him at the head of a very long table with the rest of the crew he had royally fucked in perfect position to stare at him if necessary. this kid was scared and i mean in the biblical sense like last supper type shit which worked out just as beatifully as we had envisiyeaoned... friends close.. enemies closer.. my favorite part was when he asked me aside if D1 had ever killed anyone... i just looked at him wide eyed and scooped up some kung pao and joined the crew at our table... and that my friends was that.

Finally it may interest you to know that while this seems like the fates were angry at us, it was in fact, nature looking out for its precious children. As we found out the next week, the REASON that we found the third floor of the infamous warehouse so empty compared to the rest of the building was because it was UNSTABLE. Had this event gone off without a hitch as planned, Ultima 2: Chamber of Skillz, along with the fusion crew, world famous DJ Qbert, water, cinderblocks equipment and 1500 plus dancing lunatics and all would have collapsed through the floor and dropped to doom or serious injury.