For my second Stereosonic report, I thought I’d get the cheap and easy comment out of the way first – seeing a deflated ‘E’ in the blow-up Stereosonic heading on the main stage wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to see upon first entering the festival.

I like to think it was an in-joke on the part of the organisers or the stage crew, or sabotage by some bird with an amazing sense of humour and massive beak. Fortunately, it didn’t prove to be some kind of ominous sign, and the day turned out to be as musically awesome as last weekend in Sydney, although the usual ‘four seasons in one day’ Melbourne weather meant it wasn’t as meteorologically awesome.

In terms of their career, I was a little late to the Pnau party, but, as the saying goes, better late than never. So my first port of call was the main stage, and Nick Littlemore and Peter Mayes put on an impressive show, proving to be masters of the ‘live band at a dance music festival’ format.

Baby and Embrace generated some mass crowd sing-alongs, and it was good to see new material like Something Special and The Truth go down a storm as well. I’ll never understand why The Truth didn’t crossover to become the pop phenomenon it so deservedly should have been, so it was heartening to see so many get into it at Stereosonic, and there’s something delightfully twisted about such bittersweet lyrical content getting the masses bouncing along.

Taking a quick round-trip of the site for exploratory purposes, I managed to squeeze into the space of an hour some hard trance courtesy of Papa Smurf on the Kabuki stage, some electro-house from Bobby Vena on the Innercity stage playing to a depressingly small crowd, and some tech-house from Beni in the Outrage space. By the looks of the swarming sea of bodies in front of the main stage, most people opted to catch the commercial sounds of Grant Smillie.