I’ve always suspected that Sydney progressive DJ and producer Matt Rowan may not be entirely human. Now I have proof. Apparently he wrote off his car on the way to tonight’s gig, yet he still managed to retrieve his CD bag and pull off cracking set! The man is a machine. Parts of him at least. Even if I’ve got that completely wrong, he still gets serious props for his awesome support of the prog house scene in this city.

It had all started for me a few hours earlier as I slunk down the stairs and into the Civic Underground, one of my favourite club venues in Sydney. Sadly there were no signs or set times posted to convince me I was in the right place, but the music soon sorted that. Gavyn Vincze was working hard to get a sparse crowd cutting loose, and it was working. Most of the peeps in the room were on the dancefloor grooving to sweet progressive goodness like Thomas Schwartz’s ‘Jupiter Calling’ and several ‘homage to the master’ tracks like Matt Rowan’s ‘Scam’ and ‘K9’, a track that Matt produced with his production partner Jaytech.

Matt Rowan himself stepped up at midnight and started working hard to move a crowd that was still surprisingly small for this venue. He’d sussed out pretty quickly that straight pumping 4/4 was keeping most of the crew happy and he was playing pretty safe. All great tracks, but not the braintingling hard-groovin’ basslines you’d expect from his bag. A good hour and a half of this pumped by before he packed up his CDs, rolled up his headphones and cued Jason Ballard’s first record. Then something strange happened, not that I’m complaining at all…

What looked like a mix-up with the set times saw Matt throw his headphones back on and get back to mixing. And this time he unlocked the safety, blew the hatch on the emergency portal and cut loose with the good stuff. At last hands started reaching for air! Most of this part of the set was his own material, too. Nice. He launched it with a remix of Jaytech’s ‘Groove Nova’, progressed through a wonderland of breakdowns and vocal lushness and crazy keys, and bound it all together with some stinging funky basslines. Matt, I really wish you’d smashed this out, right from the start.

One of his final cranking tracks was ‘Mister 80’, which like, ‘Scam’, is off his new artist album ‘I Play This’. It’s released this month on Baroque Records. The reigns were handed over to Jason Ballard, for real this time. Jason went straight in hard and was still driving it home when I stumbled into the night an indeterminable time later. It’s not often you get to hear great progressive in Sydney, so a night at the Civic Underground with a ‘non-lame’ crowd, awesome sound and a DJ like Matt Rowan is just packed with chocolatey goodness. Hope we get another bite soon.