Hanging grey, muggy and oppressive heat. Air sticks to the back of my neck, unmoving. Static flicker in the atmosphere and the promise of rain. The city is grey also; a reflection of the sky. Or perhaps it is the other way around. Gusts of wind flick in and out of alleys, losing momentum on the main streets and fading, only to reappear 50 metres down the road. It is early evening, or late afternoon, a time neither here nor there. I’m hitting the streets only now as the petulant weather of the day begins to slacken, allowing the slight possibility of respite from a day humid and burning.
There is a low-slung rumble and rhythmic pounding rising to meet me as I near the corner. Then around, and into an alley painted up like a temple-prostitute in colours gaudy and lewd. The clamour of a hundred voices from the walls; a culture losing itself in its attempts to decide whether it is art or politics or just the base pissing-instinct of those who would otherwise fear themselves unheard. I reach for an aural prophylactic as I near the epicentre of the pulsing music, the sound runs to 100dB.
A shipping container, transported at great expense from the docks and painted blood-red, serves as the bar, heavy wire fencing and loose corrugated plastic enclose the remainder of the venue; reclaimed urban wasteland. 200 meters in any direction shoppers and tourists and diners prowl the main streets. These alleyways are the best-published secret of the city.
Through the chain link and past the world’s happiest security guard a hundred aged ravers and post-hippies sway and grind to a regular sucking pulse. Bass and more bass, alternating to create a meta wave hidden, encoded in a twin-binary sequence. Here and there a face under 30 looks out of place, near the entrance a half-dozen of them cluster together. I pause to share greetings with a few friends and familiar faces, then move through the loose-pressed crowd, occasionally touching an elbow and nodding hello, more acquaintances now, recognised from times when this sort of outing was a more regular part of my life.
I turn back toward the entrance and a small cluster of friends and find a place to settle; a corner of the twisted, tiered plywood hillside that serves the clientele as seat, table, and, occasionally, dance-floor. Some relaxed chatter passes back-and-forth between us, but neither the music, nor the earplugs we wear to mute it really encourage discourse. The DJ has been playing basically the same song since I arrived, and I’m beginning to suspect that the sound system is poorly balanced; obscuring the mid- and high-frequencies, diminishing the variation between tracks, but perhaps he only likes one, very narrow, slice of subgenre and the other frequencies just aren’t there. It certainly works for the crowd, most of whom are moving easily with the beat. Personally I find this kind of music too cynical; all the elements required to make people dance are included, but nothing more, no dressing. It’s like a movie written by a bunch of producers who have zeroed in on what the lowest-common-denominator wants through focus groups and have dispensed with the need for creatives to be involved at all.
Music-by-the-numbers aside, the vibe is open and friendly; even the staff, struggling amongst the punters with wicker baskets to collect spent beverages, are smiling at everyone. I can think of many worse environments to be in at 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon. Thoughts of conversation abandoned, I decide to get up and dance. As if on cue, the music shifts now; off-beat stabs double the thickness of the sound immediately and I realise there is nothing wrong with the sound system at all. The DJ is actually a duo and they have swapped places now, between track-selection and effects-tweaking. The music swells and the crowd reacts positively. A syncopated disco groove builds over the four-four rhythm, joined by a simple looping melody that sounds like a sonata after a half-hour of cynic-house. My friend calls me a sell-out for liking disco, but I note that it’s drawn him to the floor also, though perhaps he made the journey purely to mock me.
I stay awhile on the dance-floor, edging slowly toward the centre, always seeking to gain that extra couple of square-centimetres of space, observing the crowd as they jostle around me. I’m locked into an auto-pilot sway and I scope the style of other punters, most have their own peculiar aesthetic; acquired over the last decade in bits and pieces. Despite this there is an overall cohesion to the look of the group.
The rain has been coming and going for a while, but halfheartedly. It begins now in earnest; releasing the smell of wet bitumen form the lane-way and quickly revealing the many flaws in the corrugated-plastic roofing. As it happens one of them is almost directly over the site of the temporary DJ-booth so the organisers spring into action to tarp over the equipment where possible without impeding the performers. One grabs a large, corporate-logoed umbrella and stands behind the DJs, sheltering them. Behind him another promoter drops liquid-LSD on his eyeballs with a prescription eye-dropper. He allows the drug to settle for a moment before trading places with the umbrella-holder.
Later, the world turned a darker grey by the gathering storm, I stand in a queue for the toilets, in a second shipping-container at the rear of the venue. The acoustic quality in the box is bizarre; a collection of modes built by its internal-dimensions and the density of worked steel. I lean my head back against the wall and the sound is transmitted mechanically through my skull, the pulsing amplified in presence by an order of magnitude; resonant within and whithout.
