I don’t know if its just me, but every now and then I have a night out where I don’t realize how much fun I am having until hours, sometimes even days after the night has finished. This isn’t to say I wasn’t enjoying the night when I was there, but maybe there was something that was irritating me at the time, or I just didn’t take everything in properly. Anyway the point of this rambling is that the ITM.05 party was one of these nights.

I arrived considerably earlier then I usually would so I could at least catch some of Boogs’s opening set and the one thing that caught me by surprise was the fact that the place was already beginning to fill, which in a place the size of the Metro caught me by surprise. From what I caught of Boogs’s set it was his usual affair, not to my personal taste, but the crowd was lapping it up which is the most important thing.

Come the start of Grant Smillie’s set the dance floor was still filling up, which isn’t much of a surprise when you think of Smillie’s popularity around Melbourne. One thing which did surprise me however was his set. Now I’ll be the first to acknowledge I’m sometimes very narrow minded when it comes to the music I’ll listen too but his set really did catch me by surprise. Dropping the awesome Booka Shade track Mandarin Girl, along with crowd pleasers Snoop Dogg’s Drop it Like its Hot & your obligatory rock remix in Evermore’s Ride On, but all in all I along with many punters was impressed.

Next was Sydney DJ Ajax, not having seen him play before but having heard much about him in the lead up to the night I had good expectations which he did not let down. Playing many favourites of mine including Bloc Party, Soulwax & the Tiefschwarz remix of Goldfrapp’s Ooh La La. By now the crowd was jammed into the Metro, with spaces on the dance floor becoming very hard to find.

It was now time for Tiga to take the decks to what would have been nearly a capacity crowd. Tiga began in a flurry and did not relent, dropping some huge bass lines and quirky electro including an awesome remix of the Kaiser Chiefs Everyday I Love you Less and Less. The big popular crowd pleasers really didn’t come till the last half of his set however when they came they came a plenty with a few of his new tracks in Louder than a Bomb and the club hit You Gonna Want Me. He also managed to drop a couple of sneaky mashups with New Order’s Blue Monday being mixed together with his hit Sunglasses at Night and Prince’s Kiss also getting a play. He closed what was a highly entertaining set with his stunning remix of LCD Soundsystem’s Tribulations.

It was now 5am, a time I would usually be thinking of leaving the club, not on this occasion however as two of my favourite Melbourne DJ’s were taking to the decks in Mike Callandar & Dave Pham to a still very respectable crowd. Now my expectations from these two playing the main room were huge and my oh my they didn’t let me down producing a set nearly equal to Tiga’s in my eyes. Playing a variety of electro, house, techno and tech-house, including tracks and remixes from James Holden, Nathan Fake, the Gorrillaz and Snoop Dogg (again) and the Wighnomy Brothers. Come the last 45 minutes of there set however the crowd did die down, however I doubt this was any fault of these twos’.

Overall it was an awesome night, sometimes hampered by the huge crowd, but without this sheer number of people I probably would be writing the atmosphere could have been better, which in this case was far from the truth. It had all the aspects of a great night: awesome music, a quality performance from an international, great support from the locals and an up for it crowd.