After a massive day at the Future Music Festival, Pharmacy’s Labour Day Eve party ‘Our Law’ wasn’t necessarily the number one place I wanted to be at for the wee hours of Monday morning. My battered and bruised body from serious body thrusting at the front barrier of the main stage was unsure if it could handle the harder sounds that Pharmacy parties are well known for. However with UK’s Organ Donors and Kutski plus Holland’s Dyewitness/DJ Misjah head-lining, curiosity got the better of me and off I went.

Ravers, Future Festival party-goers and a mixture of hangers-on with a serious higher male-to-female ratio, the Metro wasn’t at full capacity so finding a space to cut some moves wasn’t difficult at all. That said however the crowd that was there was certainly up for it and for anything that was thrown at them – Boy, do they like it hard! I love really bouncy UK hard house but hell, Melbourne’s rave scene blows me away with just how hard and dark they like it, so damn hard it’ll make your ears, nose and eyes bleed! Or maybe I was just feeling precious after my huge day….

Only getting in at 1am, we caught a glimpse of 9th Insight (Master Kaos vs LCK) going mental with heavy chaotic beats, pounding bass, scratching, rock and just extreme noise. To some it may have seemed to be chaos in itself! Jumping on the decks at about 1.30am, Sydney’s legendary hard NRG DJ, Nik Fish, started with cleaner banging beats, keeping up the pace, moving into really heavy beats, going much heavier and harder than I expected him to go, though I was going off the last time I saw him back in 2001 at Sublime @ Home, Sydney. He has obviously adapted and updated his sound since then. Finishing on a mixture of drum’n’bass and breakbeats, Nik Fish’s short and sweet set was surprisingly less than an hour.

UK’s Kutski, a diverse DJ within the hard dance scene, played hard house, hard trance, hardstyle and hardcore all interlaced with incredible scratching skills. He pulled out classics such as ‘Joyenergizer’ by Joy Kitikonti and some vocal 90s sounds, getting everyone singing along. He definitely got the crowd moving with his energetic and melodic style, and was the perfect lead-in for the Organ Donors (UK) as they came on with their proper UK bouncy yet banging style. Melodic, energetic and highly animated, Organ Donors definitely knew how to put on a show. I’m sure the Pharmacy crew were slightly worried at moments with their antics! Unfortunately my weekend had caught up to me by now so I headed home, missing Holland’s Dyewitness/DJ Misjah.

Don’t know what happened with the advertised PHD Sound Lab and Digital Butchery rooms? Numbers must have not been big enough to support these originally planned rooms. Shame.

Now I’ll admit that I haven’t been to many Pharmacy parties since arriving in Melbourne one and a half years ago, so I’m no expert on this scene, its people, or its sound. I will say however, that one thing that impressed me completely at this party was the overall friendliness by its punters. You have to give it to them for having one of the friendliest crowds. When you bump into people at least you get a smile and a step aside compared to the what-the-hell-you-doing-in-my-space snub that you get from some of the crowd at other major parties. ‘Our Law’ was Pharmacy continuing to do what they do best: putting on stomping hard-as parties.