Sunday, March 11, 2007

DMZ, Mass, London, 10.3.2007

A year ago DMZ got so busy that they had to stop the party half way through Joe Nice's set and move everyone upstairs to the main room. At their second birthday last night, a similar tipping point was achieved; the world's favourite dubstep club was sold out by ten o'clock and they had to open the downstairs 3rd Base – where the club started – to cope with the overflow. Now that's what I call massive. The international crew also thought so too: over sixty people travelled from America and mainland Europe for it - and to hear the biggest international dubstep tune so far, Matty G's 50,000 Watts, get wheeled four times.

Big things!

Ned adds: I didn't notice more than a dozen indie kids on Saturday, even after last week's rather belated dubstep primer in the NME raised fears of an invasion of four-dimensional fringes and fluorescent green waistcoats. A good thing too: as Emma says, the place was sold out long before most people would even think to leave the pub. Opening up 3rd Base gave the promoters an excuse to let in a few more people, but since everyone crowded in to the big room anyway for Digital Mystikz (and DMZ seems to attract a lot of mountain men) the result was a fatal lack of skanking space. Luckily there were no such problems during the earlier set by Pinch and Distance, the highlight of the evening, with Pinch's tributes to minimal techno flawlessly balancing Distance's tributes to metal. By the way, I'm delighted to report that ponderous half-step, which I've been moaning about for ages, has been mostly banished in favour of gut-shot kick drums all over the place - although I'm starting to tire of those little gulpy percussion sounds which sound like someone slapping a water pipe with a metal ruler and which seem to turn up in every single Mystikz track.

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