Arc Tangent

The first round of the Pang! DJ Comp at Lot33 was — to put it bluntly — awesome.

Many of Canberra’s best and bright­est upcom­ing DJs were out in force. The com­pe­ti­tion organ­is­ers left the field pretty open, ask­ing for trance, pro­gres­sive, elec­tro, breaks, dub­step, techno, tech house or min­i­mal — and I doubt they were dis­ap­pointed; entrants gave us a pretty full sam­pling of the world of elec­tronic music.

Entrants were given a half hour to wow the crowd, using their own equip­ment or the pro­vided CDJ1000s, DJM800 and two Tech­nics 1200 vinyl turntables.

Sadly, I must con­fess, I got to the event a lit­tle late. A mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion with a friend (oops) landed me at the event a full hour after it started, so I missed some of the ear­lier acts. The crowd was ini­tially pretty sparse — sort of to be expected, in Can­berra — which left the ear­lier DJs down on their luck for the ‘crowd reac­tion’ cri­te­ria of the com­pe­ti­tion. Hope­fully the judges took it into consideration!

Not once was I dis­ap­pointed by what I was hear­ing. It’s a dirty cliché, but the stan­dard of com­pe­ti­tion really was high.

Chris D threw down a great set, and for my money, this is where the night really started to take off — keep­ing in mind, of course, that I came late to the party.

The debut pub­lic per­for­mance of primary-​school buddy duo The Invig­i­la­tors fol­lowed. The duo got the crowd’s atten­tion mix­ing trance on vinyl turnta­bles; their efforts were marred only by some messy lev­els — due to shoddy Vinyl — and I sus­pect that’s the only rea­son they didn’t make it through to the next round.

Tim Heaney put on a very solid set and had amaz­ing stage pres­ence; he worked the sound mas­ter­fully. I could only liken the vibrancy and enthu­si­asm he dis­played to see­ing Armin van Buuren live. I heard that Heaney was asked to do an open­ing set for another event later this month, so if that’s true — well done Tim!

Faux Real gave us some pow­er­ful dub­step, an unusual sound for Lot33. Faux Real didn’t make it through to the next round — but the judges did give him a sec­ond chance set, as they felt the club wasn’t used to dub­step but his sound deserved more attention.

My per­sonal high­light of the night was the per­for­mance of Staky. Allegedly a few drinks up, she played the best techno set I’ve ever heard, and played it flaw­lessly. Staky really wowed the crowd — even a few who don’t usu­ally care much for techno — and the judges agreed.

Beetham capped the night off — lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively. If you’ve ever heard him play, you know he doesn’t muck about, and this per­for­mance was no exception.

By the end of the night the club was packed, and I’d be sur­prised if any­one went home disappointed.

The judges have since spo­ken, and the results are in — the fol­low­ing make it through to the next round: Staky, Chris D, Beetham and Tim Heaney, with Faux Real get­ting a sec­ond shot at a date to be announced.

There was only really one quib­ble I could raise about the event — not hav­ing some kind of shout-​out for the DJs as they came up on stage, or left stage. These artists deserve some respect, and not every­one in the crowd knew the lineup off by heart. Even a poster with set times and artist names would have been awe­some. I’m sure it was just a tech­ni­cal glitch with the mic, and with any luck it’ll be sorted by round two.

I’d call the Pang! DJ comp one of the best things to hap­pen in Can­berra. We get to see tal­ent that might oth­er­wise lan­guish in obscu­rity, the artists get a chance to make a name for them­selves and Pang! get their claws into artists that are guar­an­teed to bring the house down.

Round Two of the comp is a fort­night away (Thurs­day 23/​04/​2009) — don’t miss it!

UPDATE: As pointed out to me in the com­ments below, I did miss out on a few peo­ple. If you’re one of the DJs I didn’t men­tion in this arti­cle — sorry! I didn’t want to com­ment on things I didn’t see/​hear. Feel free to drop me a line (com­ment here, or email me) and I’ll put together a follow-​up arti­cle of some sort … somehow.