Review: Röyksopp at East Perth Power Station

Röyksopp at East Perth Power Station
w/ PTMC
Saturday, February 8, 2025

It’s one of the best times of the year in our city, as over the weekend, Perth Festival was launched, and its impressive new central hub at the old East Perth Power Station burst into life. Electricity rippled through the building once again in a dazzling array of colourful neon lights, projections, and a booming sound system that was put to work on Saturday night with a DJ set from Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp.

The venue is spectacular. Lying dormant and derelict for many years, it’s undergone a renovation of sorts in recent times, and the sprawling riverside grounds and the giant imposing structures make for a wondrous industrial playground.

While there is no access to inside the building, all the space around it has been well and truly activated. There’s a huge free area with plenty of big tables, mats, and cushions to chill on, whilst enjoying some food and beverages, and checking out the entertainment on the Casa Musica stage, or the magnificent commissioned projections on the walls of the building by First Nations artists, Boorloo Contemporary.

There are some dark alleyways and more intimate areas to explore, and further down and around the back is where the ticketed events are hosted on the main stage—a space that is the real pièce de résistance. Walking under the towering old skeleton of the building, bare steel beams exposed, you emerge in a large courtyard in front of the massive stage with a huge lighting rig, flanked on one side by a giant corrugated iron wall and on the other by an old stone wall, atop of which was a VIP balcony bar.

The sheer scale and spectacle of it felt unlike anything we’ve seen in WA, and in fact, many were heard to comment that it didn’t feel like we were in Perth at all. It more had the run-down, industrial chic, and warehouse vibes of Friedrichshain in Berlin, down near the train tracks, home of that more famous old power station, Berghain. It’s just so great to see Perth investing in such world-class cultural endeavours.

And Röyksopp kicked things off in fine fashion with a huge set. From the quirky electro days of their debut Melody A.M. in 2001, the mysterious duo of Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland have tread their own path through the rise and fall and rise again of electronic music. Their latter material is darker and more haunting, heavy tech house—more in fitting with the contemporary house sounds, compared to the sort of sounds they were producing in the 2000s, unsurprisingly—but these analogue studio geniuses have always had their own unique, distinct sound.

After their final official traditional album release in 2014 with The Inevitable End, Röyksopp disappeared, only to then reemerge eight years later with a new concept album series—a trilogy called Profound Mysteries. Then in 2024 they released an epic ambient album project, Nebulous Nights, which was a live recorded ambient reinterpretation of tracks from the Profound Mysteries series. The guys are always exploring new and interesting artistic concepts.

The only other time Röyksopp came to Perth was for the 2012 Big Day Out in McCallum Park, where they blew everyone away with their impressive live show featuring a female vocalist and band, as well as costumes. Over the years, their tracks have featured some of the biggest and best vocalists on the Scandinavian scene (Robyn, Erlend Øye, Susanne Sundfør, Karin Dreijer of Fever Ray and The Knife). While it was a shame they didn’t bring the live element this time, it’s just great they came to Perth, and the duo still put on a heck of a DJ show—the mammoth stage and amazing industrial backdrop certainly didn’t hurt to add to the atmosphere and grandness of the occasion.

Earlier on, warming up the giant stage, was PTMC. Co-founder of local label and party promoter Midnight Elevator and host of RTRFM’s Out To Lunch, PTMC has become a fixture in Perth’s underground dance scene. He played a great set and was having a good time on the big stage, which featured some seriously impressive lighting effects.

He cleverly selected some tracks from some Nordic artists, working his way through shimmering tech house like the Sofia Kourtesis remix of Aurora’s Some Type of Skin and some deeper, harder numbers like Big Boys by Sweden’s Elfenberg, before finishing on a mix of Björk’s Big Time Sensuality.

Pretty soon it was 9pm and time for the main event, and the Röyksopp boys stepped behind the decks, somewhat dwarfed by the giant stage. They started slow under a veil of smoke and a wash of sparkling lights with the lush, orchestral sounds of Danny Elfman’s Ice Dance from the Edward Scissorhands soundtrack. After the ambient intro, they signalled their intent by dropping straight into the heavy, electro throb of their huge Robyn collab, Monument, from the Do It Again EP.

This set the tone of what was a harder, club-edged set that saw them mixing a lot of their own tunes in with some other like-minded luminaries, such as the driving, trancey beat of Corren Cavini’s Solutions.

Working two digital decks each, Berge and Brundtland were hard to make out most of the time but were locked in together, working the mix, the whole night. The lighting rig exploded in a sea of blue and strobes, as patterns were cast upon the corrugated iron wall, as the crowd erupted in compulsive dance.

The only criticism would be that it could have turned up a little bit more to really make you feel the beat. But no doubt this was due to compliance with Perth’s infamously anal noise restrictions.

True musical artists and sound sculptors, they crafted their set in a way that you almost didn’t notice it getting more intense, as they dropped the huge &ME remix of their track Impossible featuring Alison Goldfrapp.

For a group that made their name on more downtempo tunes featured on chillout compilations, Röyksopp have certainly evolved, and this was a relentless set of bangers that only occasionally let up at times, such as when they dropped a couple of early singles from their debut, Eple, as well as Remind Me (featuring Erlend Øye)—though they came and went before you knew it and were mixed with harder beats.

Another highlight was when they dropped their new release, What Else Is There? [True Electric], an intense new version of their huge track featuring Fever Ray and Trentemoller from 2005’s The Understanding.

Their set got better as it went on, and things got surprisingly heavy towards the end, with the lighting rig becoming more overwhelming than the music. The harder vibe really suited the venue, and the crowd was immersed and loving it, so much so that the boys decided to keep going well past the scheduled finish time of 11pm, through to about 11.30pm!

The driving synth of Soon You’ll Be Gone by Tinlicker feat. Thomas Oliver kept things rolling nicely, and they worked in their own track, Like An Old Dog, featuring Pixx from 2022’s Profound Mysteries III, before finally winding up their set.

They grabbed the mic for the first time all night to humbly thank the crowd and then wandered off stage waving. They could have kept playing for another hour, such did the artists and crowd seem to be enjoying this special moment. An epic set from a couple of enduring legends of the game, in the coolest venue Perth’s ever seen.

ALFRED GORMAN

Photos by Adrian Thomson