Section 8 – yes, it’s that bar. The one in the city, it’s open air you know, and they’ve used a shipping container which is how it’s done in Berlin, or Milan to, you know, appropriate industrial objects and temporary space to build, like, art and culture. OK – this review has begun on maybe a note which is a little too cynical. Which is kind of like inviting a friend over for dinner, and then stabbing them with a fork before they’ve even sat down. However, in this case my cynicism about the ephemeral “cool” of this venue is a good lead for how the night went, so excuse my heavyhandedness, buckle your belt, and read on.

We arrived on an extremely chilly evening to said shipping
container-behind-cyclone-fencing-with-palettes-for-seats and attempted to find warmth and shelter. Not a great night for either, unfortunately, and we were pretty uncomfortably cold most of the night. The place was quite full already, and once we made it through the security and had grabbed a drink from the bar (uncanny how a shipping container charges night-club bar prices) we settled in. Although I think the hype around this bar misses a lot of the point of reappropriation of industrial space for artistic and open subcultural use etc etc etc (sorry but I didn’t invent the damn concept), it’s incredibly popular. And mercifully for us, they’ve installed some decent sound so we weren’t entirely uncatered for.

James Midget was on the decks, playing his usual crisp mixture of minimal-lite, house-deep and classics-from golden to questionable (Paul Simon – diamonds on the soles of her shoes definitely resides in the “questionable” camp for me) and the crowd was responding favourably. When I say “crowd” i don’t mean to imply homogeneity – every type from hippies to suits, goths to fashionistas and friday night casualties (you know, the type that end up with their shirt unbuttoned dancing on the palettes) were in attendance this night. Knowing types (and Justin Timberlake impersonators) started flowing in, and somehow we could just smell a chin about to be stroked. Not too far off, as these were the types who flocked immediately towards the decks like microchips to a motherboard. D-JCB took to the decks and gave us a Minimal Of Today set, which varied from the utterly cut up to the utterly upfront, and started to get people moving. Deadbeat, meanwhile, was setting up his laptop and controller to the right of the decks, and chins began to twitch with the thought of a good stroke imminent, with attention focussed to the front and side of the decks with increasing interest.

By the time Mr Beat took the stage there was a very-nearly dancefloor happening: or as much as can happen in a packed bar with many milling types. His sound was Minus-adjacent: crisp, processed and very danceable which actually surprised me: I had been expecting from reports of other sets he had done in town something more strange and spontaneous. However, this was his Dance Floor set, and it was indeed bouncy and almost house influenced with strong modulating basslines and even some cut up and heavily processed female vocal samples. He was working that controller hard – with a lot of arrangement on the fly of the existing lines and tracks. At the height of the interest in this, however, an unexpected change of tack: off the laptop and onto the decks. And once on the decks, the tempo dropped to way below the 100 line to… Dub and Reggae! I’m sad to say that once he made this transition a lot of the dancefloor interest waned almost instantly. His sounds were indeed pretty mellow, but it seems that once he stopped the 4/4 kick, the air went right out of the sails and people resumed their chat-and-bevvy stance like any normal Friday night. I imagine that the cold wasn’t helping with this at all – not only does it make it more difficult to embrace that Jamaican vibe, but literally the lack of bobbing about started to set internal thermometers to “chill” once again.

After his last dubbed out drop, a ripple of claps and cheers went through the chins and hands of the cognoscenti, and James Midget resumed his deck-ward stance. At this point though, last tram to Trancentral was beckoning, and we bid this expensive iron edifice and prison-camp-wire a frozen farewell to seek the beckoning land of the Warm Fire. To be perfectly honest, this night seemed a little anticlimactic – but I think on a nicer night in a more amenable setting it could have been more akin to expectation. As it was, the Beat was certainly Live, but just not kicking.