Mike Midnight/Jeffery Annert
The Bakery
Saturday, January 10, 2015
The beginning of January can be a tricky time for promoters, potential punters can be all partied out after the festive season, guiltily detoxing or just saving the dollars for the next big celebration at the end of the month; so full credit must go to Astral People and Move for booking one of the best DJs on the scene at the moment and coaxing a sizeable, and knowledgeable, crowd out to The Bakery tonight.
Events here can sometimes be slow to get going but the warm up DJs Mike Midnight and Jeffery Annert playing a great set of house and tech house managed to get an early throng out of the beer garden and onto the dancefloor in some part due to them dropping the Chicago classic by Fast Eddie and Kenny ‘Jammin’ Jason, Can U Dance. But it was the man from Detroit everyone was here to see and, after 11, Alexander Omar Smith aka Omar-S duly obliged and guided the young crowd along an excursion through the annals of electronic history.
For some reason the stage wasn’t utilised tonight. But that seemed to personalise the experience more with Smith positioned right at the front of the dance-floor within touching distance of his audience in a similar fashion to the high-school party clubs which were a precursor to the emergence of techno in his homeland. But anyone expecting an evening packed full of the genre would be sorely disappointed, for the next three hours the crowd was treated to the full gamut of dance music from ‘80s electro and italo disco, through ‘90s US garage and R’n’B to upfront house and techno with many classics from the last 30 years thrown in for good measure.
Kicking off proceedings with his own track Triangulum Australe, the hypnotic groove lured the remaining onlookers onto the floor and there they lingered, enthusiastically rocking and cheering to every track whether it was the seventies piano jam of Beyond The Clouds by Quartz, the eighties popped out disco of Koto’s Visitor or the nineties minimal tech of Maurizio’s Domina. Just as it seemed obvious down which path Smith was heading he would twist off in another direction dropping a track like the jackin’ garage boogie of God Made Me Phunky by MD X-Spress or the complete curve ball of Thuggish Ruggish Bone by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, but he never once lost the crowd, if anything it seemed to fire them up more.
The set was peppered with his own tracks too including his collaborations with L’Renee (S.E.X.) and Ob Ignitt (Wayne County Hill Cop’s (Part 2) )and most notably the immense The Shit Baby from the 2013 album, Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself and each served to stop the numbers dwindling even when though we had by now breached the early hours. But soon it was time to draw a close to proceedings, which he did with aplomb, dropping the feel good nineties piano house of Got A Love For You by Jomanda and Caught In The Middle by Juliette Roberts, before an encore of the a Capella of Colonel Abrams’ Trapped, the vintage crackle emanating from the vinyl disclosing the number of times the track had been played.
The audience left ecstatic, all lining up to shake the DJs hand but it seems most appropriate to leave the last word to the man himself, whose quote was posted on Facebook, ‘They completely caught me off guard. I mean, the last time I was in Perth there were two people in the room. Wasn’t expecting that shit’.
ANDREW NELSON
