Previously teased at the end of Sephi Hakubi’s sets at both WeekEND Rave Smash Virtual Music Festival and Avalanche, the Maverick of AnimEDM is officially bringing back his weekly episodic dance music show, officially known as just Rave Smash. For those that were just aware of HakubiVerse or just started following Sephi Hakubi, Rave Smash is based from Sephi’s previous radio show, Weekly Rave Smash, which aired every week for 50 weeks a year in 2016 and 2017 and was first broadcasted on ToukuFM online and then on Honolulu, Hawaii’s FM station, My959 (KXRG-LP 95.9FM). Sephi decided to take a hiatus after 100 episodes to focus on other musical interests, although it very much seems now that his interests now involves streaming and after a fun and successful experience at WeekEND Rave Smash, Sephi is moving full-speed ahead in bringing back weekly radio show, this time on Twitch.
Over the past several weeks, as a somewhat reaction to the COVID-19 epidemic, HakubiVerse along with Hard Dance Texas had experimented with both broadcasting on Twitch along with hosting an online music festival on internet radio to continue bringing rave music to our fans. We’ve thought about doing a virtual festival way before Coronavirus was a thing but we were never able to pinpoint an opportunity as we were always booking and performing; 2019 personally was my busiest year of my career. We had planned way in advanced to do Smash! Festa 2020 featuring Hartshorn as our headliner, but of course COVID-19 ruined those plans along with the rest of the world’s last month. As online events started gaining momentum, I knew then now would be a good time to host an event and I came up with WeekEND Rave Smash since Smash! Festa was supposed to be the live show giving tribute to Weekly Rave Smash. We had over 20 or so artists, including Hartshorn who headlined on Sunday and it took place over internet radio and Discord and although I was personally sweating through most of it because I was managing the infrastructure and operations, everyone including me were having a lot of fun. The fans as well as the other DJs wanted to see more of these soon and at the time I was building HakubiVerse’s Twitch channel so I started seeing the possibility of doing something like this every week and at the end of my set and WRS Festival I pretty much went all in the moment and said that I’m bringing back Weekly Rave Smash. I would confer with the rest of the Board as to when to do this and we were keying in on July. Yes, we officially decided to do this the first week of July…Thursday, July 2nd to be exact. We’re very excited as this will be an evolution to the former Weekly Rave Smash program, some differences in the new Rave Smash are: a real-time visual livestream instead of a pre-recorded, pre-formatted radio show, the leveraging of Twitch and other livestream tools, and a 2-hour show every week instead of just 1 hour. Some elements we’re still keeping are that we’re still doing this every week we can, that it will take place on Thursday nights at 7PM Central just like how Weekly Rave Smash started in 2016, and that I’m hosting it…and I hope this time to be hosting Rave Smash for a very, very long time; although, I’m down to have some guests if anyone wants to join me in this fun weekly ritual.
Christian “Sephi Hakubi” Lalinde
HakubiVerse Managing Director
Rave Smash Host
Rave Smash will premier on Twitch.tv/HakubiVerse on Thursday, July 2nd, 2020 at 8PM Eastern / 7PM Central / 5PM Pacific / 9AM Japan (Friday) and will air every Thursday with an audio replay made available on Mixcloud.com/SephiHakubi released on Saturdays.