Subservice feat. Dave Pham @ The Cross, Sydney (22/02/08)
Sydney is a pretty good place to be right now. The summer is trailing off (if not growing a little damp) and the festive season is but a distant memory, replaced by the daily flickering of fluorescent light above your anonymous office cubicle. But I’m not bitter, no, because the party in Sydney hasn’t stopped. Every week there’s at least three options to satisfy the tech chinstrokers, and that doesn’t necessarily include events at big clubs for Bogans on Ice (the hit new musical spectacular from Disney). Sydney has been blessed with a slew of parties put on by people who, like you, want to hear good music with likeminded people.
That’s one of the tenets Subservice was founded on, and a year after they started they’ve featured everyone from Ben Morris to Danny Bonicci. Good music comes in many forms. Tonight however, the plat du jour is ‘Fucking Techno’ – with a couple of surprises in the new side room. Dave Pham and Dean Millson aren’t household names in Sydney as they are in their hometown of Melbourne, but thanks to the convergence of techno, prog, electro and anything else a dance music hack is calling ‘minimal’ these days, Sydney is primed for a southern invasion. And thanks to nights like Subservice, they’re able to come up here and make their mark with their great music.
The Glitch boys warm up The Cross as the crowd trickles in. Not much needs to be said about Aubusson and Choe – their Glitch night started on essentially the same premise as Subservice, and look where they’ve taken that. And yes, they’ve got the skills too. Millson’s up next. His music is stripped back melodic tech, betraying his previous persona as the DJ behind Melbourne progressive night Private Function. And although it’s certainly not ‘Fucking Techno’, it’s certainly Fucking Good. The evolution of Millson’s style is evident in his fresh and forward-thinking selection. He reads the crowd, teasing the dancefloor with some more upfront beats peppering the mix.
It’s more of the same from Dave Pham. His set is techy and upbeat, but you feel like he’s holding back. This is after all one of Australia’s best DJs, with almost a decade of accolades, screaming fans and moist panties to his name. Eventually Pham does unleash all hell, and when it comes the stayers are rewarded with Fucking Techno as advertised. Delicious.
Subservice’s Andrew Wowk finishes up with a jaunt down memory lane, pulling out some tasty techno classics. Exit stage left, and Typhonic has wrapped up a successful debut for new sounds in the side room. If you like your drum n’ bass scratched up hip hop stylee, Typho is the man for you. He’s destroyed dancefloors with ghetto bass and is now making a name doing the same thing with dnb. Earlier it was Morphee, a none-too-shabby dnb DJ himself, getting heads nodding with dubstep. It was an impressive display of the music industry pundits are calling ‘the new prog’ (well ok, maybe just Morphee), and also an impressive dubstep debut for MC Dazed.
Dubstep, drumnbass, tech, and of course Fucking Techno… Subservice has always featured a diverse lineup, the common factor being the music is pretty damn good. It’s sort of like a house party at a house that looks suspiciously like a Kings Cross nightclub: the hosts pick great DJs that play whatever style of music they want to hear, fill the fridge full of Smirnoff RTDs and invite their mates. Which is not to say it’s an ITM love-in – just people up for a night of good tunes. It’s this family atmosphere that is uniting these smaller parties in their quest to spoil us with the best music in Sydney. Come on down and join the Subservice massif.
fat_tony says...
nice review.