Win tickets to see The Herbaliser perform this Friday!

The fine folks at Lacuna Entertainment and [010] Productions have given Shanghaiist two free tickets to The Herbaliser's gig at Block 60 on Tongren Lu this Friday. We'd like to pass along those tickets to two lucky Shanghaiist readers. Simply email your full name to info@shanghaiist.com before 5 pm on Thursday. We will pick two winners at random, who will be notified by email and tickets in their name will be waiting at the door Friday night. Sound good?

A little info about the venue. Block 60, on the Tongren Lu bar strip, opened late last fall as a Japanese club. We have been told that it's already got new owners. Recently, it was home to a fetish party.

For those of you not familiar with The Herbaliser, a snippet from their bio at allmusic.com:

The Herbaliser are one of the more purely hip-hop oriented acts on Ninja Tune's roster of sample-based pocket-funk. Combining deft, mid-tempo beats, well-chosen jazz and funk figures, sparse scratching, and even the odd rap, Herbaliser bridge the gap between dusty B-side instrumental hip-hop and London's new school of psychotropic beat scientists. Formed by Ollie Teeba and Jake Wherry in the early '90s, Herbaliser, unlike many of London's abstract beat scene's acid house-steeped big-name artists, trace their roots to American jazz and funk (Roy Ayers, Johnny Pate, Ramsey Lewis) as well as old-school hip-hop (particularly of the New York variety -- Grandmixer D.ST, Sugarhill, Jungle Brothers). A bass player in acid jazz/funk group the Propheteers, Wherry met local DJ Teeba in South London, where they both lived. The pair assembled a few tracks in Wherry's tiny studio, which they subsequently passed to Ninja Tune bosses Matt Black and Jonathan More (aka Coldcut) in a club.

The Herbaliser are touring in support of their recent album Take London. Read reviews of that album at allmusic.com, Fly, BBC, indieLONDON, Sound Generator, In The Mix and Dusted.

Tickets for this show are RMB 80 at the door and RMB 60 in advance. If you are not feeling lucky and want to book your tickets now, call Aaron at 13023287014. But if you are feeling lucky email your full name to info@shanghaiist.com before 5 pm on Thursday. (We're still trying to find out the start time for the show and opening act info -- will pass along when we get it.)

Good luck!

Block 60, 60 Tongren Lu, near Yan'an Lu (铜仁路60号，近延安路). Tel: 6289 4538.

UPDATE: Winners have been announced!