This gig was like Cobra Killer a year or two back: some random promoter no one's ever heard of puts on a gig at FU with some support acts that no one's ever heard of. k5k spends the weeks leading up to said gig trying to get himself on the bill, and eventually it just comes down to him, Herr Denton and myself going to the gig and bitching.
I managed to arrive quite late, and am assured that I haven't missed anything. Someone, I assume a parallel universe DJ, is playing IDM off a CD-mixer.
Then some guy gets up, and I assume it's raw fx, and he does this beat-box routine. The crowd goes wild, but others such as myself assume that electronic trickery is involved, and k5k tells me that the whole routine is stolen and he's heard it done better.
It's over in about five minutes, and then just like that kid 606 is on, and everyone moves towards the DJ box, craning around the stupid pillars that hold up the roof to get a better view.
I watch for about five minutes, and no one seems to be dancing, and I think "that's fucking typical" and find a gap and I'm down the front and up for it. And then these really young looking, really drunk looking guys come up the front, and do some munter dancing, and keep waving their cigerettes around and hitting each other with them, and I shrink away and keep a wary eye out. Fuck I can't stand people like that on the dance floor.
Kid 606 keeps the action going, using two laptops and a few other little gadgets to do a little live manipulation. A rousing cover of Missy Elliot's «Get Your Freq On» was a good touch, the ambient track that seemed to go on forever wasn't, especially because I was the only one dancing to it, and had to keep on moving so as to look suitably freaked out on acid (I wasn't).
After about an hour, certainly no more than 90 minutes, I needed a break and went outside to buy a drink. I came back five minutes later to find that that was it. His set was over and he was packing up. I was more than a little disappointed. I was only just getting started, and here was the international DJ done for the night.
Phelps and Munro were playing though, and the dancefloor had cleared out, so everyone who was up for it was going nuts. They were using CD-mixer, a laptop, and some other equipement, playing some drum'n'bass and a cool Kylie remix, where I assume they were just using the sample function on their CD-mixer to make parts of it all skippy and broken.
k5k handed out flyers to people, and then we left, and I for one was rather disappointed. k5k somehow had the inside information: that he'd only arrived at about 16:30 and was leaving again that night after the gig (he stopped playing at about 00:15). And that he usually charged US$1500 for a gig, so he must have cut his rates ridiculously to come here. 100 tickets at NZ$20 each would hardly cover air fares, promotion and venue hire, let alone his fucking profit.
I dunno about some of those punters, but the lasting impression I got was that kid 606 is lame.
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5 years ago
