THE HYDRA: INNERVISIONS x PERMANENT VACATION

w/ Dixon & Âme, Todd Terje, Tensnake, Prins Thomas

ICan Studios | October 27th

The zombies emerged at 6am, heads clutched, mumbling about their achy ‘brains’. They were one group among many grim-looking creatures that gingerly space-walked out of ICan Studios, with Halloween providing a more-legitimate-than-otherwise excuse for leaving a club at 6am, pallid-faced and spattered with blood.

They had just seen a heavyweight line-up of Dixon & Âme, Todd Terje, Prins Thomas and Tensnake play for a Permanent Vacations x Innervisions night, put on by Broken & Uneven and Electric Minds. ICan Studios, their ‘haunt’ (sorry) for the evening, has two, fairly large rooms. One looks and sounds like a ‘proper club’: white walls, high-ceilings, big speaker stacks and even a mezzanine balcony. The other is a more utilitarian warehouse space: exposed brickwork, piping and cabling, some functional pillars and screed flooring. Dixon and (Kristian from) Âme held court for Innervisions, back-to-back in the former, all night long whilst Prins Thomas, Tensnake and Todd Terje flew the flag for Permanent Vacation in the latter.

We spent most of our time in the Innervisions room. Others have raved about (and to) Dixon’s DJing plenty of times before, so we’ll save you another obsequious fanboy write-up; suffice it to say, the man knows his craft. He went in for melodic (don’t say ‘trance-y’) house and techno, with plenty of Innervisions material thrown in, and even a Frank Ocean track in there towards the end. Kristian held his own too, generally playing deeper tracks, the ‘straight man’ to Dixon’s more pumping selections. B2B bookings often simply don’t work, with one DJ pushing the crowd in one direction whilst the other drags them off in another; Dixon and Kristian managed to get the balance right, though, and seemed to be enjoying themselves much more than other B2B acts we’ve seen recently.

On the few occasions where we managed to tear ourselves away from the Innervisions room, the Permanent Vacation crew seemed to be doing a decent job. In the post-industrial setting, Prins Thomas, Tensnake and then Todd Terje opted for a dark italo-disco sound: lots of throbbing, arpeggiated bass lines, claps, occasional vocals, fist-pumping. Given that Terje, in particular, is best known for edits and twee, bubblegum-fun crowd-pleasers (see Inspector Norse and Eurodans), we weren’t surprised when a disgruntled vampire demanded thus: ‘THRILLER. T-H-R-I-L-L-E-R. IT’S BY MICH-AEL JACK-SON. IT’S HALLOWEEN, IT’LL WORK’; clearly desperate for something they recognise. Terje handled this with good grace but stuck to his guns, occasionally chucking in a funk or disco track to lighten the mood but generally plying a dark (Halloweeny) line. However, most punters we spoke to said they were expecting an edit-fest with a few discoid bangers thrown-in — on that point, maybe, Terje et al didn’t quite deliver.