Future Music Festival @ Garden Of Unearthly Delights - 12.3.2007

There could not have been a more appropriate venue than Rundle Park's Garden of Unearthly Delights to hold Adelaide's leg of the Future Music Festival. Set up as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, the venue provided a fun, carnival-like vibe with stages and attractions around every corner. With the sun shining bright and not a cloud in the sky, the day promised to be a pleasurable experience.

We started at the main stage with Adelaide's own Mobin Master and Bill Fragos. It was good to see these locals getting the crowd moving early with their selection of electro/house tracks and energetic stage presence. One track in particular really pumped up the revelers (Starkillers' Discoteka to the rich bass beat of Green Velvet's La La Land). These resident musicologists proved that the locals could hold it with the rest.

Next on the agenda was to make our way to the Bosco Stage to see another set of great Australian entertainers, TV Rock. Comprised of Melbourne's Grant Smillie and Ivan Gough, this dynamic duo mixed classics like Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up and House of Pain's Jump Around (which extremely upped the vibe), to their more recent remix, Duke of Windsor's The Others, a favorite of mine. The set was dominated by electro beats which I found to get a little monotonous at times; constant beat pauses that lasted much longer than the usual beat got me frustrated at times, but despite this, they did know how to work a crowd. What I found to be extremely off-putting actually had nothing to do with the DJs at all. The Bosco arena was incredibly dusty and the more people danced and jumped around, the thicker the cloud of dust hovered above our heads to create mass suffocation! I was happy to leave.

So it was back to the Main Stage for a bit of Drum 'n' Bass. Admittedly not a connoisseur of the genre, I was told to check out LTJ Bukem & MC Conrad. I must say I loved what I heard and it was a pleasant change from the similar beats I had been hearing all day. So when Sander Van Doorn came to the decks and started playing more great music, I decided to stay instead of going to see Sebastien Leger as planned. I was really getting into the beats, when half an hour into the set, the power to the main stage failed and we were left listening to the doof doof coming from the other distant stages. It was quite some time until the music started - when it did, the excitement from the crowd brought such an energy and happiness that I got butterflies in my stomach!

Felix Da Housecat came out next and was a big disappointment. The set sounded the same for the most part and sounded all too similar to what I had been hearing all day. Again, Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up was played and was not as good the second time around. The highlight for me was when he played his hit track Silver Screen Shower Scene, but it failed to impress.

We then made our way to see Tom Novy who was absolutely amazing! Despite being back within the dust, I did not want to leave. The German DJ really put on a great set playing a bassy remix of Raven Maize's The Real Life and Eric Prydz vs. Pink Floyd's Proper Education. He got the crowd wired and pumping. It was hard to leave early and miss the last of his set to go see Carl Cox.

Maybe I was expecting too much from the first ever DJ to play three turntables at once. Personally, Carl Cox played a disappointing set. It was boring and monotonous. Each track sounded the same as the next. No vocal tunes, nothing to get me hyped up. The sun had set and the weather turned very cold and that was excuse enough for me to find somewhere else to go. Whilst not on our agenda, we headed to the SoCo Cargo area.

SoCo Cargo resembled something of a lounge bar with a< Tags

• fmf
• future music festival
• adelaide