Starting out the night was Jay Dubz who unfortunately had to play to a small early audience.

His set was impressive with plenty of driving bass, a few well-placed vocal tracks and a couple of blinding tracks, one featuring haunting tribal drums and the other with marching band-style drum sounds.

Next up was The Utting who played a half-hour live set on a desk set up at the side of the stage, to the left of the dance floor. The rapidly growing crowd watched and bopped with interest as The Utting clicked a mouse button to create sounds on his laptop with one hand, and twiddled knobs on his mixer with the other hand.

While he created plenty of interesting electronic sounds, his set didn’t really go anywhere and lacked cohesion. Despite only being on for a short time The Utting didn’t manage to keep punters on the dance floor. He was followed by another local lad, Puff, who paved the way for Sims in inspired style.

He started with an explosion of nagging, punky guitar sounds and then moved in to some darker, moody sounds. His varied, well-crafted set moved effortlessly and intelligently through breaks, some smooth harder-house, lush French-like house and some real glam 80s electronica. But the pouding, classic-techno bass never took long to kick back in and whip the now packed, and noticeably impressed, dance floor in to a frenzy.

I last saw Ben Sims at Global at Belmont Park in December 2003 and his incredibly inventive, energetic set made me desperate to see him play ever since. When I discovered a month or two ago that I would finally get that opportunity I was like a man obsessed- running around telling all my friends they had to come with me as this guy was awesome!

It proved difficult to convince people who weren’t necessarily techno nuts (like myself) that they should come and see a DJ who primarily played techno. Techno is a genre that can be truly terrible if played by someone without enough skill and/or passion for what they’re playing. Relentlessness can soon turn to monotony and the dark, hard sound can easily become boring and depressing.

But when those masters out there, like Jeff Mills, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and, ofcourse, Ben Sims, play techno- they make you remember why you like your music hard and fast. Although Sims played hard, driving music he, as a turntablist of sublime skill on three decks, proved once again that he is, in fact, a master of subtlety.

His sense of timing and mixing skills are absolutely exemplary- and although he takes you on a journey through various styles and sounds, his set feels like a well-oiled machine. It was full of fantastic elements but was also an amazing final package.

Throughout a thrilling three hours, Sims kept things hard and heavy. But along with the driving bass-lines came some deep house sounds and vocals which created soulfulness, pounding tribal drum and other percussive sounds which lent his set a chilling,

He moved between more melodic tracks and punishing techno beats with incredible precision, never losing the attention of the awestruck crowd for a minute of his three hours. Sound and lighting in Ambar was typically impressive.

A group of fascinated fans watched Sims’ wizardry on the three decks (and 2 CD players) for most of the night and gave him pats on the back and records to sign when his set finished close to 5am.

Locals Cee and Clint W ended proceedings successfully with more well-mixed, hard yet inventive techno.