Liquid Rooms 08/11/2014
Descending into the belly of the Liquid Rooms on a freezing Saturday night is something many of us are now familiar with. From the moment you enter the deep black of the dance floor you’re instantly warmed by the anticipating smiles of punters, for tonight they know that something special is on its way.
Joy Orbison and Boddika have been best buddies and collaborators since the pair released ‘Swims’ back in 2012, and have been creating sweat ridden pits of bliss with their brand of acid drenched techno ever since. Also, tonight the lovely Nightvision folks have managed to wrangle a 4am license and their altar piece as it were, a large florescent ‘V’, hangs over proceedings with a certain wonderfully smug sense of its own achievement. Levon Vincent does a stellar job of building up some tension for the headliners through what can, weirdly, only be described as an onslaught of minimal beats. Perhaps envisage your chest being beaten in by a rolling pin in a huge sparse, white room and you might be part way to envisaging the feeling.
Joy Orb and Boddika take over the reigns come half one, and replace white washed walls for burning colour and sporadic clicks that range from the organic to the heavily industrial. These serve to slap you in the face rather than get your foot tapping though – we’re not at a jazz night after all. Most impressive tonight is how the pair play in tandem together so well. Playing back to back rather than together, the pair are rarely seen on stage together for all that long, and the fact that you’re hard pressed to notice any change over is testament to the two’s experience in crowd pleasing, and without feeling the need to hold-court every time they enter a room as an ego massage. These guys simply produce a spectacle of sound alone, one that seems to warp time and makes that 4am curfew come around far too quickly. Devotees caught in the thralls won’t let them leave without a sufficient effort at gaining ‘one more tune’, but despite the efforts of Boddika to feed them they, still hungry, trail out of the darkness into a distinctly brown Victoria street. The verdict: all hail at the church of Nightvision.