It is the seventh of the seventh, oh seven, and along with a great mass of people from the Live Earth concert, I am walking to the Clare tonight for the latest installment of Dust Tones in order to reduce my carbon footprint. It is also, just quietly, no warmer than about seven degrees. Quite what the numerological significance of the temperature is I don’t know, but it encourages my speedy movement through the streets.

Not speedy enough however, to catch Leigh Wood, so it is Trevor Parkee who is playing as I step into the Clare. But ‘playing’ doesn’t begin to do justice to what Trevor is doing. Rather, he seems to have mastered the art and science of extracting pure sunlight from vinyl records, using only a stylus. There are wonderful Brazilian flavours flowing through this music and if the set had gotten any better, I probably would have had to pop out into the cold again for some SPF 30+. To come in out of the cold to such warming and sustaining music is an excellent start to the night.

Alchemy of a different kind next, with DJ Jonah from the SBS program Alchemy coupled with Altafari. They start well in a territory I’d call world hip hop, but they are making a lot of noise in what’s a pretty small space with still not that many folks in it. So I wander outside into the Clare’s salubrious new ‘junkie alley’ style smoking ‘lounge’ where the listening is a little more comfortable.

Percussion Junction follow, and by this stage the room is starting to fill up. Percussion Junction featuring a few blokes playing percussion, and one bloke who isn’t but instead plays records. Percussion Junction probably get the inside line on being booked for Dust Tones events by reason of the fact that their record-playing-bloke is Dust Tones supremo Bentley, but this is no “it’s my party and I’ll play if I want to” fill in – these guys are seriously good, and it was good to see them at floor level rather than up on a stage as was the case last time I saw them.

Then the diverse rhythms of the many give way to the diverse rhythms of the one, as Ben Walsh. Ben Walsh plays with The Bird, he plays as Sound of Human, he plays with the Groovelands Percussion ensemble, he plays with Circle of Rhythm and probably in many other guises as well. But he always plays strong, as I would say if I took more of my linguistic cues from Jack Gibson. Tonight he was in Groovelands mode: just him, some records to play along to, and the majesty of the rhythms he was creating. Ben Walsh is rarely less than mesmerising in this mode, and mesmerised we were. Until a bloke entered the Clare carrying a record box and wearing what looked like it used to be a polar bear, and flanked by minders. Mesmerism broken. What’s going on here?

Well as it transpired, what was going on was the carefully choreographed entry of the Cartel, aka the Coy Pez Cartel (they need to do a bit of work on their branding – the Cartel logo looks good but I think there is someone else in Sydney playing electro-haus under that moniker at the moment.) The Coy Pez Cartel do not play electro-haus; they do work in some proper electro but bhangra and baile funk are amongst the staples of their sound.

Their press release says that “the laydiez love ‘em”, and I quote this for a couple of reasons; first to record how impressed I am that they had a press release ready to stick in my mitt but also to sound the note of warning that most right-thinking people experience when confronted with “laydiez” or “laydeeeez” or any variant thereof.

Where this warning took me was in this unfortunate direction; the music that Coy Pez Cartel like is music that I don’t. I had a listen to the mix CD that they thoughtfully pressed into my hand into my hand with the press release, but I don’t much like that either. I do appreciate the way its put together, just as I appreciate that “get the party started” attitude the Coy Pez Cartel brought to their work tonight. It just wasn’t my thing.

But that’s the beauty of the sort of party that Dust Tones is: you don’t have to like all of it to have had a brilliant night, which I certainly still did. It’s a very welcome way to hear new sounds, and there are certainly many more hits than misses (especially on a night as percussion driven as tonight). And it was certainly the source of enough warmth to carry me back through freezing streets and to bed.