I arrived to find Break Inn cranking to the sounds of the Impossibles; Sydney’s mapcap breaks trio. From humble beginnings these guys have developed a unique, trademark sound of thumpin’ beats, dirty basslines and cheesy acapellas all overlaid with Forey’s rhymes - which just keep getting tighter and tighter. It’s a killer combination which seems never to fail to get a club jumping and tonight was no exception. The heat, however, was pretty intense in the Laundry so I decided to go check out the Cave and see what Synik was up to. A chunky serve of nasty, pounding electro tech was on offer which had me so wrapped up that by the time I next looked at my watch it was twenty past one and the dreaded one was almost halfway through his set. Frantically I rushed back over to the mirrored den of sweltering, dancefloor mayhem, that once was a Chinese laundromat to see Freq Nasty in action.

From the moment I stepped in I new we were in for a treat and was instantly regretting the last hour I’d spent in the cave. The set was a little different to what you’d usually hear at a Sydney breaks night but quite possibly one of the best I’ve seen. It was heavy, very heavy and borrowed more from ragga, jungle and grime than the current trend of electro, club inspired breakbeats. Freq Nasty is a veteran of the old days of early 90s London, illegal outdoor raves or grimey bashment clubs and it shows in his music. Having said this, the genius of his style is that he incorporates the newer breed of sounds and everything in between all with more acapellas than a harlem church service, enough probably, to match even the six hands worth of acapella dropping The Impossibles are famous for.  

For example he is letting Public Enemy’s Bring The Noise acapella rock out over some beats he then transitions to a slow dark ragga track which is somehow smoothly mixed into the Stantons remix of Feel Good Inc complete with rewind and a sample of a crowd cheering. Then he moves onto what I originally thought was a crazy mashup of acapellas and beats, but after hearing Z-trip drop the exact same thing at the Good Vibes after party I now believe it to be Freq’s new booty of Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name Of complete with a ‘welcome to the terradome’ sample and a vivaldi inspired ending.  Now dropping the RATM classic is nothing new, I’ve seen Krafty Kuts do it, I’ve seen Adam Freeland do it and I’ve seen the Loose Cannons do it, but no one did it quite as well as Freq Nasty did it. Maybe it was the construction of the bootleg but either way the man is responsible for the best Killing In The Name Of drop ever…

The set continued in this frantic vein fearlessly fusing genres and tempos without skipping a beat. We heard Beastie Boys – Intergalactic, we heard Prodigy – No Good and we heard a NIN remix. The tempo was anywhere between 80 and 180 using beat drops and sometimes crazily speeding or slowing down tracks to turn say a breaks beat (130) into a rap (90) or drum and bass (180) one before mixing the next tune. There aren’t too many DJs out there who can claim to vary 100BPM during a set and it shows how much more there is to DJing than simply beat matching. He left us with an acapella of one of my favourite rap songs in Nas – Made You Look his final departure heralded by blaring air raid sirens as an awed Stu Tyson took to the decks. 

Bass Kleph opened with a medley of his own tracks and pulled out plenty of big tunes early to try and maintain the crowd. Somehow though I don’t feel he was quite on song and so I wandered over to the Cave where the Steve Higgins advertised on the walls had been cheerfully replaced with Defcon and MC D-Tech. These two were up to some D&B madness which felt like a more logical progression to Freq Nasty’s set. I had a good thrash around to Slam and Smack My Bitch Up before leaving sweaty and happy to await my next viewing of the Freq a mere 12 hours away at Good Vibrations.