Upon arriving to the Metro, the beats of Gsan were met mostly with frowns. Not in any part due to his performance, which I regarded as being of high quality but that my plus one (not suggesting that is he is anything less to me than a dear, dear friend) and I were confronted by a dense space with barely ten percent of the venue filled. Just a half hour later however, the venue was astoundingly filled with punters that had flowed in at a rate faster than which the overpriced beers had flowed down our throats.

Plus One suggested that we go and have a boogie and we were greeted by funk and hip-hop delivered by two revered men of the genre, Steinski and DJ Signify. Steinski, armed with laptops and enough hardware to make it appear as though he was trying to hack into the Pentagon defence grid, was embroiled in the ‘cut and paste’ and live creation of beats while his counterpart for the tour Signify, scratched to a vibed up audience.

The enthusiasm of punters got the better of them and room was cleared in the centre of the dance floor for some tidy break-dancers to strut their stuff, almost stealing the show at times. Midway through their set, funk classics made way for big and nasty beats as Steinski showed us what he does in his spare time. They were dark and they were big and I noticed that this wasn’t so much the party set of the evening, this was the ‘chin stroke’ part of the evening, where hip hop geeks could tap their toes and awe at the talent that is Steinski and Signify. The set was hardly the most dynamic I’ve ever heard but one which didn’t surprise me considering that the two performers were icons within the ‘intelligent’ hip hop community.

Their set gave way later to the Nextmen and Dynamite MC and these guys shared little of the concern for prestige or impression. They came out to rock us stupid and they did. The Nextmen scratched away to their hearts content and dropped numbers that would force envy from anyone that had to settle for second hand reports of the party, while Dynamite danced and posed his way through the two hour set making sure the audience didn’t get lonely. One of the most charismatic MCs out there regardless of genres Dynamite has definitely refined the art of performer/audience connection.

Big jiggy hip hop numbers from the old to the new, funk, dancehall, reggae, even David Bowie all poured out of the speakers to a dance floor that just couldn’t get enough. Considering that most tracks were vocal tracks however meant that little space was left for Dynamite to do much of his own rhyming and his role was relegated to that of just complimenting the music… until the twilight of the set however when the Nextmen snuck in a couple of drum and bass tracks, in particular ‘Brown Paper Bag’, where I thought by arms were going to break from punching the air so hard.

After a slow start (which I put down to Sydney punters’ obsession being fashionably late) the party ended up being one of the most fun I’ve attended in a long time. My favourite nights have to be the ones where good music and good friends get you by and this show was probably the first Sydney party I’d been to in so long where people weren’t concerned with anything other than having a rollicking good time. The performers tonight made sure of that… and my good buddy Plus One.