Last Saturday the Future Classic crew was tasked with closing out this year’s Sydney Festival with a party at the Festival Bar in Hyde Park. And with typically impeccable programming taste, they crafted a doozy of a bill: Prins Thomas, Oslo’s finest, back to back on the decks with the one and only DJ Koze all the way from Hamburg in his first tour of Australia. That’s a lot of bang for your buck.

A couple of days out, it was made known that Thomas would be opening the party at 8pm. I thought it was a smart move, giving the space-disco wizard plenty of time to get things shaking before bringing on the merry prankster Koze to stir things into a frenzy with his trippy tech-house and electronica. A good clean bill with no warm-up acts, no live sets to interrupt, just two long sets from two passionate music geeks at the top of their game.

When I arrived at 8:30, Thomas was on, playing to a mostly empty marquee. The sun had just gone down, and for some weird reason it wasn’t raining. Perfect night for a party. The sound system was kicking. All systems go.

Even with only a few punters gathered so early, Thomas was laying down some nasty grooves just as advertised – on vinyl at that. As with his production work, the early part of his set blurred the lines between funk, garage instrumentals, breakbeats, indie and psych, with the odd bit of spaghetti-western flavour on the side. Appreciatively I noticed the man knows how to mix.

But the great thing about Thomas’ set is that he mixed up the obscure nuggets and crusty esoterica with some truly banging party music, proving he knows how to have fun. With the floor getting more crowded, he shifted gears, letting loose some proper house jams. When we were good and warmed up, he cut back again, dropping Shalamar’s 1983 anthem A Night to Remember. In some ways it was the most devastating cut I heard all night. At a certain point you’re never going to find a better sound for a packed dancefloor on a Saturday night than that kind of classic electronic garage – a supreme groove, celebratory and dripping with soul.

Soon after he played a great version of Rhythm of the Night by Corona – one of those all-out vocals from the early ‘90s tainted by its association with cheesy Brand X club music, but actually fantastic when mixed into a proper set. It says a lot that he wasn’t too cool to go there. Need some fine cheese from time to time.

As Koze was lurking around the stage getting ready, Thomas played The Emotions’ 1978 garage-soul bomb I Don’t Wanna Lose Your Love (familiar from 2 Bad Mice’s breakbeat classic Hold It Down). By this time the place was full of peak-time energy; it wasn’t even 11pm.

When Koze got on, the crowd surged forward as if at a concert. Clearly they were up for it – and quite a few of them were, shall we say, pretty tweaked, so it looked like it was bound to get serious. With a cheeky smile, Koze put on a rather minimal, flatline track and fiddled with the sound, while Thomas stayed onstage to uncork a bottle of champagne. As he and Koze had a toast, the track kicked in, and the place started jumping.

I’ve already done what every other writer does and called Koze a ‘prankster’. Talking to him on the phone the other week only confirmed he doesn’t like being labelled ‘funny’. All right, the guy likes weird vocals and out-there sounds, and visibly enjoys the reaction they get. As he was getting into gear, he dropped a raw Chicago-ghetto-style track with a hilarious (but kind of hypnotic) “Work it bitch” refrain and a wicked groove.

But he soon proved to be a thoughtful selector who goes after tracks with beauty and power, and obviously appreciates the melody and hints of soul essential for good techno. The first hour or so of his set was an expertly-navigated foray into glitchy housey tracks with sharp percussion, dramatic keys and bursts of echo – and mixed much more smoothly than I was led to expect. (My personal highlight was Marcel Dettmann’s pulsating remix of Junior Boys’ Work. Gotta find a copy of that one.) Koze has a fine feel for playing styles off each other, taking the mix in different directions to construct a theme. He was quite a sight behind the decks too, a big man with an unkempt growth of beard, hunched over the decks in deep concentration like a bohemian maestro, or a slightly mad professor.

About the time the punters were getting too excited – pogoing, clambering onstage, getting bounced off, waving lightsabres around – Koze’s set got loopier, with helium-pitched vocal snippets and long excursions into dark tracks that often featured one or two droning elements – say a kickdrum and keyboard stab with no highs and no bassline for ten minutes – mixed with some thin-sounding high-NRG Euro-tech. It’s not my favourite sound. But with a DJ as good as Koze, there’s a level of trust; he might go off in a direction you don’t like (maybe just to prove a point), but he’s always going to bring it back, reconstruct the vibe, take it somewhere better. So he did – and so it was that this party was ace from start to finish, and Future Classic provided a high point of the Sydney Festival.