Transmission: Return of the Superstar DJ Battle @ State Olympic Sports Centre, Sydney (27/09/08)
Saturday night saw hard dance institution Transmission celebrating their 12th birthday at their spiritual home of recent years, the State Olympic Sports Centre. To observe the milestone, the crew threw one of their trademark ‘Superstar DJ Battle’ parties, with partners in crime Chromatic Productions bringing the razzamatazz. As 9.30pm rolled on, a healthy sized crowd of 3000 shook their furry boots and camo pants down Olympic Boulevard towards the endless waves of shuddering bass.
The evening began with some mixed performances from the local Transmission talent. Matrix in particular didn’t cover himself in glory, with some over the top scratching over a trance anthem ‘mega mix’ from the likes of Sander van Doorn and Richard Durand that was tired and out of place so early in the night. Marcel Woods soon hit the stage to oversee an immediate shift upwards in quality, throwing down a genuinely varied set that carried across all sorts of tech, trance and hard dance as well as an appearance from the eternal Advanced.
Next Scot Project took over with his no-nonsense take on hard dance, going head to head with Woods for a while before taking the reigns solo and treating the crowd to self-produced bulldozers Overdrive, L and his famous rejig of Yakooza’s crowd favourite “Cocaine.” My third time of seeing the DRUCK head honcho was probably the most disappointing, as the sawing basslines and hard kicks seemed to float over the heads of the crowd. For a guy who normally reads an audience so well, this time the dreadlocked German seemed intent on playing his own show, and while his set was solid enough, it never reached the hedonistic heights of previous visits.
It was not long before Kan Cold and ASYS took over the stage with a ripping back to back set full of classic anthems that was one of the highlights of the night. From the killer Voodoo People sample to the whooping war cry of Joy Kitikonti’s Joy Energiser and the Derb remix of Space Frog and The Grim Reaper’s hard trance classic Follow Me, the legendary hard trancers managed to gee the main room into a frenzy before ASYS began to drop a mixture of jump and hard styles to ease the floor into the full on bass assault of DJ Isaac and Italian bison Tatanka. With a mixture of big room anthems old and new, the crowd rose as one to recent favorites from Showtek and Blademasterz, before Tatanka dropped the delicious Let’s Rock and Isaac scratched up a storm on the CDJs. Looping and tweaking throughout, the duo fooled more than a few people on the drop but managed to maintain the energy as the crowd bayed for Scantraxx upstarts D-Block and S-Te-Fan. One of the crowd favourites on the night, I was a little nonplussed by the duo as they dropped huge build-ups and breakdowns in quick succession without much care for the flow, but Church of the Darkside and Sound of Goodbye still had me reaching high in rapture. That was before a creepy militant national anthem hit me like a wave of paranoia.
All in all, a pretty good shindig from the Transmission crew, if not one of their most spectacular; but hey – over the past twelve years, they have set their own bar pretty high in terms of hard dance parties. The production levels were typically impressive throughout the night, with a cracking laser show and on-stage neon pugilists drawing the eye. Making use of the length of the complex rather than the width, the sound flowed evenly throughout with just a touch of reverb off the sides, and as always the tiered seating was a welcome relief for aching legs. As Blutonium Boy and production partner Neo reaped their way through the tiring crowd, I headed for the exit exhausted but content, with the X-Qlusive announcement ringing in my ears, Moby’s Go stuck in my head and the promise of more Transmissions to come in 2009.
UberPwnage says...
I would like to add that the sound in at least one of the small rooms, where the up n coming Djs were playing, was absolutely horrible! Not sure if it was the system at fault, or the Djs just turning the levels up WAY too high, but it was so bad at certain points that I could not even stay in the room..felt like my ears were bleeding...seriously!