No label or marketing ploy to sugar coat it, just two names: Ben UFO and Joy Orbison. One heralded for his mixing the other for his productions. Together they went tit for tat in the belly of Studio Spaces for The Hydra last Saturday, forging a set that will live long in the memory.
If you can’t mess around with seven hours at your disposal when can you and whoever’s decision it was to coax open the evening with a mix of dub and reggae is a genius. Tracks were left to play out for their duration and tempos were changed flippantly, inviting the crowd to actually listen rather than simply bop. The laid back sway of the lightly-filled crowd around midnight to ‘Queen’s Gambit’ was an unexpected but treasured moment.
It didn’t take too long for the tracks to take a headier turn. The Funktion One Soundsystem was put through its paces with A Made Up Sound’s ‘Half Hour Jam on a Borrowed Synth’ shattering the dance floor and the crowds’ chests alike. There’s always a niggling worry with a party of this magnitude that it might not live up to the hype, but Pete and Ben surpassed our wildest expectations. We couldn’t have asked for a wider and more on point range of music; from reggae to garage to house to techno to dubstep, it had it all, and mixed in a way that kept us on our toes all night.
From what was a behemoth track listing we have trawled together a digestible serving of ten tracks, to capture the eclecticism while also showing off a couple that were taken to another level on The Hydra’s world class soundsystem. We’ll let you guess which ones.
