Last Friday, I heard the best two DJ sets of the year. In one night.

The two headline acts for Freefall on Friday night were a couple of duo’s from Europe: W&W, a tech trance team from Amsterdam and Kamui, pioneers of hardfunk from Germany who made a much anticipated return to Melbourne. Both of these acts were worth every penny, delivering solid performances that were energetic, technically good and captivating to listen to.

The venue was dark and loud with a couple of plasma screens dangling from the roof, and two multi-coloured lasers perched in the top corners of the rig. What’s more, there were somewhere in the region of about 20-30 life-size blow-up dolls. At least, at the start of the night there were 20-30, however it would appear that I was not the only punter that thought about taking one of them home as a memento of the night.

The crowd was a typical Melbourne crowd – a diverse bunch of friendly people that were clearly there for the love of music. The club filled up slowly but steadily as the local DJ’s did a great job of building up the night before the two international acts rocked out. You could sense the anticipation build slowly in the club until 2 am, when W&W started their set. What followed was an expertly mixed set of uplifting tech trance that hit all the right notes with the crowd and included many of their own tunes. Kamui followed, with the two German DJ’s energetically smashing together funky beats, distorted synths and plain old noise pitched at 140 bpm.

The overall result? Two different but equally great sets, predominantly made up from new tunes, but punctuated by some bona-fide anthems, including Exposure, Stranger to Stability, and Kamui’s own Electro Slut, which gave me a much-needed burst of energy at 4 am. All up, it was a great night, featuring two international acts that I would love to see again in the future.