Thursday night in Melbourne – often a risky punt for the average promoter, but it looked right from the start as though this was no risk – there is still a lot of love in Melbourne for Krush. We walked in to the sounds of Kuya. An established player in Melbourne town, he has nothing to prove in warming up for Krus, however we found ourselves somewhat perplexed: Kuya didn’t use a turntablist approach – sampling and scratching or a deliberate musical approach – beatmixing and blending the blunted and strange with more conventional sounds. In fact, I couldn’t really tell by Kuya’s drops that he was warming up for Krush at all – it sounded like just another night on the plates, with r n b, hip hop and party funk sounds dropped in a utilitarian fashion. By no means was he playing badly, it just seemed a little out of place for a Krush warm up. No matter. It didn’t seem to offend the masses, nor did it detract from the obvious excitement growing as the time ticked on. As gigs go, this one was timed to end quite early, with Krush forecasted to be on and off stage by 1am. So by 11.30pm the whole space of the band room was full to brimming with everyone from wizened jazz sages to callow yoofs, wiggers to squares, sons of japan in the house representing and more… there was a healthy gender balance on display too: something all too rare in the hip hop scene sometimes.

As though someone had struck a gong backstage, Krush ascended at 11.30 almost on the dot. The cheers went up, the necks craned, the reviewers (ahem) held their blackberries at the ready, awaiting the next level of Krush dynamics. As per his trademark openings he started on vinyl, with mournful Japanese traditional flute. Made sense – his most recent work has been with Japanese traditional musicians. He kept us anticipating for a good couple of minutes before crashing in with some quite jarring and boisterous hip hop. Those non-linguists amongst us shrugged and speculated – was this Japanese hip hop? Bets are on, but we couldn’t tell for sure. Whatever it was it was sharp and pretty rough – not slinky smooth or cavernously deep. And so the show began to roll up and down the intensometre, gathering kinetic energy towards a rhythmic peak, and then emptying out into another Zen like emptiness we called the z-hole. He fused hip hop, deep dub, ambient and even lounge and drum and bass with his own jams and compositions, using his intriguing custom kit to edit and develop tracks. It wasn’t a set of fan favourites, crowd pleasers or Krush-by-numbers instrumentals. It was a dj/producer who is defining his own sound and lives firmly in his own idiom. And the crowd loved it as they should. There was nodding, shuffling, swaying, and closed eyes, raised hands, cheers and whistles.

However, tonight, the main point of interest for this humble review wasn’t the tunes. It wasn’t the vibe. It wasn’t the mystifying way Krush never seems to age, prompting speculation that he is in fact an android, or runs on rechargable batteries. It was, in fact, the fact that for Krush – hip hop assassin, turntable wizard and all round dissembler of the boundaries between dj and musician – the turntable is now just an adjunct to the act, not the act itself. Most of his sounds were coming from custom built samplers and bits of kit, with the main interest being his live drum patterning jams, where he took his premade samples (here’s what we prepared earlier), and started developing the patterns live, adding layers and embellishments until a simple beat grew in intensity and changed rhythmic shape. Simple breaks became almost drum and bass, or latin jazz, or noise. Most, in the end became a cacophony as his deck of drum-pattern cards reached its’ logical peak and came crashing down to an ambient wash over and over. His turntables were there for simple sound samples, which he then sampled again, layerd with effects and used from the gear, and ampified or modified them with the existing vinyl sample. Basically, even with the most traditionally vinyl-driven genre of electronic music we have – ie hip hop – we ain’t in Kansas anymore. Forward thinking artists like Krush are forging ahead and giving simple drops and scratches the heave-ho in favour of next level technology to give the most scope to live performance. It seems that we really are seeing the death throes of the relevance of a strictly vinyl set up. In fact, a number of dj types I saw at the show further reinforced this speculative claim, listing a cdj and/or final scratch amongst their current or next kit. When someone like Krush, with a brainpan bigger than Telstra Dome, few imaginative limits and funds a-plenty moves along technologically you know it’s because, artistically, it seems like the most relevant set of tools for him to use. And vinyl seems to be making its way shamefacedly to the back of the pile.

After just over an hour of moving from the sublime to the familiar and back again, going through some dark and deep rolling sounds between hip hop, dub and drum and bass, Krush finished his set on a loungy house tip, on time, and left the stage after taking the obligatory “me with crowd” shot no Japanese tourist of any kind can resist snapping. No encores, just plenty of tasty food for thought, and some amazing steps along the journey from beats to fast breaks, stopping in at the ambient parking zone (the z-hole) along the way. The crowd yelled and cheered, heads nodded in unison, and then – precisely when expected – it was over and people started flooding out, leaving the poor follow-on dj without much to go on. But that’s what you get when you’re swervin with the Krush. A lesser mortal might, in fact have ended by saying “well, them’s the breaks”.