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Event Review: Bugged Out! @ The Hydra: Dusky 6hr set
House | Wednesday 8th October 2014 | Annalisa
What do you get when you cross two of the UK's most respected club night promoters with two of the UK's most successful producer/dj duos playing for 6 hours? Add in some other huge names and exciting new talents and throw it all together in an enormous photographic studio in east London, and you have one serious party!
We turned up at half 1am. The pounding bassline, enormous queue and flustered door staff made it immediately obvious that this was going to be a huge night.
Inside, the floors and walls were vibrating, lasers and projectors spewed mind-boggling multicouloured shapes, the air was thick with sweat, and the venue was packed to full capacity with hundreds of London's most up-for-it clubbers. It was a scene of total madness - the kind that you have no choice but to join in with.
Necking our first drinks, we navigated a truly awful toilet queue to get into the slightly cooler, calmer and darker Black Studios. Swamp 81 boss Zed Bias was going b2b with labelmate Paleman. Zed is something of a living legend who is planning on stepping back from the frontline of DJing soon, so it was a great opportunity to catch him doing his thing alongside one of the younger, but more than capable DJs signed to his label.
They were followed by Juan Atkins, one of the legendary originators of Detroit techno. His set mixed tunes from the full 3 decade timespan that he's been on the scene, evoking a real old-school, sweat-on-the-walls Detroit warehouse vibe. One of the nice things about the Studio Spaces venue is that the DJ booths aren't raised up or excluded in anyway - if you can fight your way to the front, you are just a metre away from the decks - it was a privilege to be able to get so close to a living legend and be able to see him working his magic on the decks.
However, it was hard to ignore the pounding bassline and hype coming from Dusky in the Warehouse room, so after once more navigating a truly awful smoking area queue we decided to face up to the heat and get involved. Fighting our way through the crowd, we were soon swept away in Dusky's peak time set, sweaty bodies bouncing back to back as "Love Taking Over" got dropped around 3am.
We decided to take a break from the intensity to check out Will Saul going b2b with Trevino back over in the Black Studios. Although more comfortable temperature wise, this was by no means a tame or filler set. As boss of seminal underground label Aus Music, I'd been wanting to see Will Saul for years. He duly delivered a true showcase of what the label is all about whilst complimenting Trevino's turns. You may not yet have heard of Trevino, but this is no newcomer DJ - Trevino is in fact Marcus Intalex's new house and techno alias. Although he is extremely popular and well-known in the DnB world, Marcus has recently started exploring his more experimental side under this new alias, and his years of experience DJing at some of the world's biggest DnB events has clearly transferred across genres. The pulsating grooves of the duo's leftfield house and techo sounded stunning on the Hydra's excellent soundsystem, and was the perfect way to carry us through the sometimes difficult 4am timeslot.
After another quick breather in the large smoking area - noticeably less busy this time - we were ready to take on the last hour of this marathon night. The Warehouse was as hot as ever, but by 5am, the less committed had been filtered out and we had enough space to lose ourselves in the intoxicating mixture of lasers, humidity, end-of-night euphoria and of course, Dusky's magical, slowly mellowing set. These guys were in their sixth hour of playing and must've sweated buckets, but they still kept the entire crowd utterly captivated with their more chilled out - yet still devastatingly bass-y - tunes. Even the lasers slowed right down to roll us into 6am.
At the final notes, everyone cheered - there was a true sense of appreciation, respect and mutual understanding that we had all witnessed perhaps one of London's best and biggest nights of the year. The Hydra never fails to deliver, but those of us who made it to the end felt like we had all witnessed something truly special. There were moments of frustration - Studio Spaces is a relatively new venue for clubbing, and at times it felt like it might be reaching its limits. At peak time, the toilet queue was excrutiatingly long and the queue into and out of the smoking area was verging on becoming a crowd crush, but the staff did a good job of managing the madness. Big respect to Dusky for not only battling but bringing the heat for 6 hours! Passing the 4am mark was worth the wait, and left us with one of those lasting "wow" clubbing moments that we'll remember for years to come.
@MiriamEJohnson
