If a friend phoned you up mid-week and said, “Hey do you want to go listen to a DJ in the open air, surrounded by giant luminescent water tanks down by a river on Saturday?” 95% of you fine upstanding citizens would reply, ‘No I don’t you dirty hippy, how in Zeus’ name did you get my number?’ Let’s be honest, that description makes it sound like some two-bit psytrance doof in a forest filthier than a hobo’s where everybody is chewing their own faces off on mushrooms and it is impossible to distinguish the crowd from the ancient slimy lichen that constitutes the chill out area. And we all know that nobody should spend their weekend like that.
Thankfully though it was explained to me that the venue for this was actually the amazing open-aired Kubik down by Birrarung Marr and the DJ in question was none other than Tokyo’s finest turntablist and producer – DJ Krush. So having apologised to my mate for casting aspersions on his character (and to a lesser extent hobo’s) I signed up and rolled down to the banks of the Yarra on Saturday.
Kubik as a venue was worth going to see alone. Honestly, I would have been happy simply taking a goonbag down to the grassy slopes outside the ever changing glowing cubes and getting happily smashed pretending I was in Space Odyessy: 2001. Luckily though I didn’t number amongst the countless poor uni students who were doing exactly that and rolled on in as Mike Hunt hit us with suitably relaxed fair such as Cypress Hill’s Everybody Must Get Stoned.
Krush soon blessed the stage with perfect timing (as I’d just completed a beer run) and both the crowd and our glowing spaceship of a venue pulsed. He first set our speed at lazy headnod as he threw out Shadow’s Midnight in a Perfect World and other smokers delight boom-bap flavoured treats. The man then proved that even though he is turning 50 next year, he still has open ears as he dropped enough glitch and heavy bass to make my stomach regret having not eaten. The tempo was still stuck in lowriding in a Chevie gear though, so the transition into classics from his Meiso LP such as the suitably creeping What’s Behind Darkness and the title track with the oldskool The Roots duo of Black Thought and Malik B was sublime.
As the walls shifted from blue, to green, to red the crowd tried valiantly to not catch neck injuries as they struggled to catch a glimpse of Krush, who should have been given milk crates to stand on, and from compulsive nodding to the neck-snapping kicks and snares he was laying down.
As the night pushed on Hideaki Ishi started ramping up the BPM, shifting the focus from headnods to footwork. He flexed his crates smashing everything from classic 90’s hip hop to dubstep and grime. Son was on his game, but never forgot the soul that runs throughout all his music. It was a perfect soundscape for midnight down by the river… surrounded by giant flickering cubes of light.
