Saturday evening was the last night of VibeSquad’s Australian tour. The Denver resident was the headliner for a night that also included the talents of brokenbeat marvel, Spoonbill.
Landing at The Hi-Fi to a sparse, but building crowd (the last Saturday of back-to-back long weekends had left West End a virtual ghost town), Spoonbill was already on stage, surrounded by a number of projection screens that bathed the Victorian in all manner of psychedelic colours.
The dedicated punters patrolling the dancefloor were already beginning their feet pounding with Spoonbill directing them through a collection of melodic broken beats and warped sounds that were glued together by a funk-drenched rhythm — while he manoeurved through a number of different genres, funk seemed to be the one constant throughout his marvellous set.
With VibeSquad setting up as Spoonbill was bringing his set to a close, the American soon had the mood switched up with bass levels markedly increased... the bass bins under the floor (they were there right?) to the left of the stage were rattling away nicely! While my neck was snapping back and forth at more than a gentle rate.
Morphing across a range of styles — house to glitch to dubstep and back again — it wasn’t long before VibeSquad was belting out the big bass and funk goodness, and the crowd came along for the ride. I saw one dancer using a five-metre-by-five-metre space to exercise some form of rapid-fire limb movements I hadn’t encountered before — brilliant!
While the crowd may have suffered because of public holiday syndrome, those attending knew they’d captured something pretty intense. Till next time VibeSquad... hopefully we’ll have a few more friends for you to entertain.
