I haven’t been to YU in a long time… it constantly reminds me of how behind the times I am. This week on my to-do list is the purchase of some crotch hugging jeans and a nice low-chested t-shirt to show off my lovely masculine chest. But the reason why I keep coming back are the wonderful parties that this club plays host to. Recently hosting such luminaries as Michael Mayer and Nic Fanciulli, the club also boasts an impressive sound system that ranks highly amongst any nightclub across Sydney. With its new décor and stylish interior, the club is guaranteed to be a future hot-spot for forward thinking events.

With a lineup featuring Ewan Pearson and Bjorn Wilke, tonight’s event was no compromise either. I arrived at the club just in time to see Wilke inserting his first CD into the CDJ. Having seen him earlier in the week at the Burdekin Bar, I was keen to hear him again on a sound system that would do justice to his music.

Bjorn played a very electro-heavy set, playing around with lots of warning siren noises and other computerised bleeps and squeaks. He was extremely fond of the mixers filters, using it to create many ‘hands in the air’ moments. His tracks were in your face and he managed to keep the level of intensity throughout his entire set.

Whilst his ability to get you dancing is commendable, after awhile the track selection and mixing style tended to get a bit repetitive with the same breakdowns and build ups being used throughout. The highlight for me was Donna Summer’s I Feel Love which was met with a gay applause from the crowd. This was later followed up with Audion’s Mouth to Mouth to which Ewan mixed into perfectly.

Without looking at the DJ booth you wouldn’t have realised that Ewan had stepped up to the decks. His first song was a hauntingly hypnotic track of repetitious ramblings about being a teenager. Ewan played a very ‘in your face’ set with hits such as Radioslave’s remix of the Kills’ No Wow and the italo-madness of Serge Santiago.

I found Ewan’s style to be a lot more palatable than Bjorn Wilke’s with a more subtle and drawn out mixing style. I personally would have liked to see Ewan play before Bjorn Wilke: after hearing his RA podcast, it would have been nice to see him build up his set rather than have to keep up with the electronic hysteria that his predecessor had set earlier in the evening. And whilst it was a pleasure to hear Ewan play, at four o clock in the morning I found it too hard for my legs to keep up with my head.

The reason why I enjoy hearing international DJs like Ewan Pearson and Bjorn Wilke is not so much their technical ability (although this is a plus), but the arsenal of quality tunes they have under their belt. With such a vibrant pool of producers and DJs from places like Berlin and the UK, it is to be expected that these guys have good tracks. But what sets apart great DJs from the average ones are how they use these tracks to build the audience up and gently let them down, which I thought Ewan did to great perfection.

So with top quality music on a top quality sound system, you couldn’t ask for much more from a Saturday night. And with the promoters of Beware the Cat promising more exciting gigs to come, 2007 is set to just get better and better and keep us stuck on the dance floor throughout the summer (or winter due to the radical effects of global warming).