The night started off with our man Bass Kleph who got the ball rolling with some more laid back, funk inspired and hip-hop infused breakbeats. It was nice to hear him rock a more chilled style for a while and a nice display of his versatility. With a 2.5 hour set to fill, however, he had plenty of room to build it up and moved gradually into more typical Bass Kleph territory; big funky dancefloor driven breaks with a sprinkling of cheese to get the non-aficionado punter moving. He had a laptop up with him as well, although it definitely wasn’t a live show, as far as I can tell he was using Final Scratch – a very nice platform for his particular array of tricks and FX. With the odd look in at the Impossibles, who were doing their best to get the cave cranking (also using laptops), I watched the place gradually fill up, although not quite to the extent which I had expected. The rain, the $30 price tag and an early morning start that day to watch the Socceroos may have helped in keeping people away.

Although my view of the box was obscured by a mass of sweaty dancers, I knew straight away when Phil stepped up with an awesome opening track (which I wish I knew the name of!) From there, over the course of the next hour and a half, things where – in a word – diverse. The music chopped suddenly and often with poor mixing, from minimal tech to nuskool breaks, to weird 80s remixes, with a couple of classic and more laid back Orbital tracks thrown. The songs were all good in their own right, but somehow neither the music nor the crowd were meshing. I even considered abandoning the night, but fortunately for me I stayed…

At 3am my night changed drastically as it seemed that Phil finally found his groove and for the next hour I heard one of the best sets of my life, and easily my set of the year (although Freq Nasty’s performance from the very same club in February is a close contender). It was at the same time, trancey, techy, breaksy, dark, euphoric, rhythmic, melodic, psychedelic , minimalist, creative and brilliant, often lacking some of the polish we are used to nowadays but with an energy and creativity which transcends the need for the clinically mixed and solidly defined, almost plastic sound. What we heard is where dance music started, before the clinical separation of elements into sharply defined genres and boundaries. I get the feeling that going to your average club these days you might be likely to hear one element taken from his style only refined and then repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated.

If I was a bigger Orbital fan I probably would have been able to provide a much better tracklist, but I think my unfamiliarity with the music in some ways intensified the magic I was witnessing. All too many times I opened my eyes to a static dancefloor, which at first I mistook for a mass of over consumptive non-music lovers, but after overhearing conversation I realise was probably half comprised of jaded chinstrokers to whom the brilliance of Orbital’s style has already worn off, reduced to an impressed yet uninvolved appreciation. Phil himself was getting more into the music than most of the crowd donning a dirty wife beater singlet with his signature torchlight eyeglasses and raised arms making him look like the Maestro of the new millennium, conducting his orchestra of arpegiattors, basslines, bleeps and sawtooths into a majestic frenzy of dancefloor extasia.

Orbital were named for the Orbital highway around London, near which the massive outdoor raves which catapulted both them and dance music into fame were once held. I get the impression that his set would have been much better suited to this environment. To be fair though Chinese Laundry is perhaps the only place in Sydney where I would be likely to hear music like this. I can imagine other promoters standing to one side fretting about how this lunatic is going to get away with dropping a jungle track in a house club?! Either way the night gave me what I wanted, a glimpse into the raw feelings and power of the music that helped launch not just a genre but a movement. Perhaps the crowd and venue could have been better suited, but unfortunately I don’t own a time machine and the chances of Orbital getting back together to perform live at an illegal outdoor rave in front of 20,000 people somehow seem pretty slim. In other words, I’m very, very happy with what I got!