The last time I saw Stacey Pullen was almost a decade ago at the Guvernment – a sprawling mega club in Toronto’s waterfront district. It was the big room – the one where the DJs look down upon the crowd like Moses descending from the mountain. You wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a person up there at all, or sock puppets prancing over turntables while a mix CD provided the sounds. At that moment, I felt like I had entered the wrong room. The room where your mind feels disconnected with what’s actually coming out of the speakers; and you aren’t even sure how people are dancing to this music.

That was just before Stacey Pullen began his set (he was right before Derrick May and later on, Underground Resistance). On that evening years ago, techno was at its most minimal, and the influence of Canadian boy gone global Richie Hawtin was pervasive in the scene. So it was jarring to hear Stacey and Derrick put some funk back into things. It wasn’t full on disco, but so much less cerebral and as antiseptic as what was on before. It was easy enough to make the distinction for what is ‘Detroit Techno’: if you had a booty, you could dance to it.

Seeing Stacey Pullen at Favela was going to be a bit of a blast from the past for me. I’d never been to the club before, and the entrance does give it a lovely sense of the underground, with an opening underneath the bridge over Kellet Street in Kings Cross. We arrived around midnight, and entrance was easily sorted, friendly door staff and quick moving line-ups. The clubs interior is far more spacious, and the upstairs main room really showcases an intimate area for the DJs and the people. You don’t feel like the performer is a million miles away, and you’re close enough to show him a text message (which many people did throughout the night)

You have to enjoy walking into a dance floor when people are already grooving; and not just sitting there nursing drinks and waiting for a headliner. Tim Lloyd from Parallel Sound was holding it down pretty well in terms of getting people to move. Playing a set of house inspired tracks, he kept the crowd on its feet.

Before Pullen’s set, I asked him about the last time he played in Toronto. He last played at Footwork, which is a small sparse club in the city’s west end right outside the clubbing district. Having been to Footwork many times, it has nothing on the designs and general ‘sexy party’ vibe that Favela brings to the table. The sound architecture at Favela is well suited to delivering that intimate vibe, loud enough without being overbearing.

As things go, we both commiserated about the NBA playoffs, “Ay don’t remind me man,” said Stacey as he grinned. But D-troit basketball has got nothing on D-troit techno anyway. He started with a few minimal and classic tracks, not assaulting the crowd with complexity, but bringing them back to the beginning and building up. Somewhere along the way techno got eminently more danceable, and you could see the minimalist trappings give way to more melodies, less bleeps and something curiously approaching mainstream house beats. It was more than just Detroit techno; and through a few tracks in the set, a welcome reminder that disparate types of electronic music were once played in the same room, on the same sound system.

The dancefloor may not have been like a fully packed can of tuna, but it wasn’t obvious either. The people on the floor weren’t just onlookers who wandered into the club out of happy coincidence looking for a drink, but people who grooved to every beat and didn’t spend anytime trainspotting. When you’ve played as long as Stacey has, people from different walks of life show up at your gig, and it’s bloody refreshing to chat with a diverse crowd – including ladies who decided to hold a hen’s night – rocking out in proper masquerade gear.

The lights started to go up at around 3am, but the crowd was not planning on leaving without seeing things through to the end and waiting until Stacey could play that one more tune. The crowd was appreciative to say the least, rocking on until the very end and the inevitable “Y’all can party, but you can’t stay here” motions from security. As I wandered out in search for that bloody elusive after-hours taxi, I realized that throughout the night, I’d never felt like I was in the wrong room; just the right one.