Melbourne Underground plan on throwing secret, retro techno parties
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Melbourne Underground plan on throwing secret, retro techno parties

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Where aesthetic and taste are factors, there’s an inextricable desire for authenticity. That’s why Melbourne Underground, an incoming techno group, want to throw parties born of similar values to those that started techno on its path to global prominence around 30 years ago: discreet locations, parties that go from one night into the next, word-of-mouth biz and relentless high-energy music.

From the outside looking in, scepticism could be forgiven. Aren’t many trying desperately to emulate the authenticity of earlier days? Isn’t underground the new overground? In the house and techno scene, there’s certainly a growing admiration for and pursuit of the discreet, the most exciting TBA location and that rare gig that wasn’t spruiked online but still got a decent turn out. 

So what does it take to host a good techno party? Whatever your answer is, chances are it’s hard to imagine there’s a group better poised to fill the brief than Melbourne Underground.

Why? Not just because of the name, but because from the little we know about them, they’ve been doing this for a long, long time. The longest time, in fact. The man who started the group, who asked to remain anonymous, put on acid-house parties in the UK in the late ‘80s and techno parties thereafter. According to DJ Dave Pham, who is one of three confirmed DJs set to play for Melbourne Underground, “he’s come from the roots of where it all began.”

And Pham is no newbie either. He reckons he was one of maybe 15 to 20 DJs in Melbourne during the early noughties “doing non-stop DJing from Thursday to Sunday,” amounting to about nine or ten gigs over the weekend. “You’d go from one venue to another … with a half-hour pocket just to get to the other venue,” Pham recalled.

Bear in mind, this is back when techno was, in some more indisputable sense, underground. These guys were doing it when it wasn’t lucrative or even trendy (at least outside a very niche sub-culture). So what do they mean when they say they want to put on shows by “going back to the old school ways,” as Pham put it? Just doing what they always did, it seems.

Melbourne Underground wants to become Melbourne’s premier group for all things techno: an events group, a booking agency and a record store and label. Some of those branches are more developed than others, but their event-planning seems to be coming along nicely.

This is what they’ll look like, according to the mysterious head of the group: weekly nights called ‘Sessions with’ at an underground club in North Melbourne, followed immediately by a day party, ‘In bed with’, which will “always will be at a different location”. The North Melbourne spot will be rigged up with a Funktion One soundsystem, which is more often than not a reliable indicator of good sound.

“It’s less going to be about a whole tonne of social media, advertising and those sorts of things,” Pham explained. “The only [info] you might get from it is the DJs who are playing … but then everything else is left up to the imagination. That’s the really alluring part of this concept: you need to go and check it out for yourself.”

Along with Pham, the other two thus-far confirmed Melbourne Underground DJs are Rainbow Serpent veteran, Dean Benson, and longtime Melbourne DJ, Lucca Tan. “It will be all shades of techno,” Dave said.

“Lucca will be playing more of the deeper style of techno – it will be a touch slower. Dean will play super hard, super fast, pretty banging. For me, I love lots of different flavours of techno … depending on how I wake up that day and what I feel you’ll get a different set from me not just the next day, but the next hour.”

But they’ll be plenty others, too. A strong focus of the brand, it seems, is pushing local techno artists closer to the fore and Pham said there was a good chance live electronic musicians would be getting some healthy representation. This can’t be a bad thing, given Melbourne’s house and techno scene is packed with DJs.

“I always say to anyone who’s putting on parties in Melbourne, ‘if you have four DJs, at least have one live act in there’.”

“The fact that you’re hearing something that hasn’t been recorded before, that no one has heard at all … that experience itself is pretty special.”

The group’s lead man also said he was open to occasionally hosting international artists at special locations if good opportunities came up. “Maybe on a Monday night,” he added to the end of a text.

As organised as they seem, Melbourne Underground isn’t rigid on how they’ll go about doing what they do. But what they want to do seems pretty sured up: putting on long parties with good sound systems and top quality local artists at seldom-used venues. If this sounds like your thing, you could safely bet you’ll find some like-minded folk at their events, because it’ll be tough to find yourself there by accident.

By Jacob Nazroo