We may cry like little bitches if there’s too much milk in our macchiatos, but let it be known: the people of Melbourne are hard core. Saturday night’s efforts for Espionage at KUBIK proved beyond doubt that if there’s a night of cutting-edge electronica on offer, M-towners will turn out in force, come rain, rain or more rain.

The crowd gathered in the mud puddle that was Birrarung Marr may not have filled the pop-up KUBIK venue to capacity, but given the torrential rain that poured down all day and did not stop for a millisecond all night, the numbers were pretty miraculous. Garbage bags were the night’s informal dress code, handed out by friendly staff at the bar and far better value than UDL cans for $10.

Bounding onstage after a solid, hip-hop inflected set by Fugative, Gaslamp Killer (a.k.a. William Benjamin Bensussen) seemed genuinely appreciative: “You motherfuckers came out in the rain?!” Beaming down at us, Bensussen said that might not be much for Melbourne “but in L.A. that is a fucking miracle so I’m going to treat it like a motherfucking miracle”. As a reward, he said he’d play us a brand new Flying Lotus track to begin a set he warned we’d better start stretching for, screaming “I’m a puppet and Satan’s got his strings on me!”

Gaslamp’s showmanship did not disappoint: with moments of his trademark head-banging and air-guitar like antics, where he ran around clawing at what looked like an iPad but could’ve been some other kind of touch-screen slash synth-like device. The water-filled cubes around KUBIK changed from green to red to blue and white as the beats got harder and darker, with remixes of hip-hop tracks like Hard in Da Paint the biggest crowd-pleasers. Scattered in between the turbine hums and frenzied bleeps of the more experimental parts of his set were tracks like House of the Rising Sun, James Blake’s I Never Learnt to Share and Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place setting a starkly different but well-timed break of pace.

Following on from Gaslamp Killer, JPS and SYreneisscreamy put in a valiant effort to keep the crowd going, with Syrene’s vocals especially providing some much-needed staying power against the rain that would just not let up. The rest of the crowd cut their losses and trudged back out through the mud: four hours spent standing in the pouring rain without cover being more than enough for one night.

To make the obvious criticism: if you’re running an outdoor event in Melbourne pretty much any time of year, you need either a heavy rain contingency plan or a big eff-off tarp. But besides this blaring oversight, the rest of the event ran relatively smoothly and while Gaslamp Killer would’ve killed it in any environment, his dark, crazed beats lighting up the KUBIK containers against the stormy night sky really was a sight worth beholding.