- Located just a skip off of Bedford Avenue, the Music Hall of Williamsburg is a Brooklyn concert venue which primarily plays host to quality indie rock shows frequented by the hipster set. It boasts a massive, centralized stage, full lighting rig and balcony bar decked out with murals by street artist Shepard Fairey. Many of the electronic music fans that gathered there earlier this month for Dark Disco wondered whether a full-on dance party could be achieved in such a formal setting.
Chillwave darling Chaz Bundick (Toro Y Moi) opened the show, playing his first ever DJ set. He didn't mix his selections, which included hip-pop from the likes of Outkast, Drake and Lil Wayne, but managed to garner applause from some of the crowd in the end by throwing down Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." Then, aerialist Anya Sapozhnikova, co-founder of the quirky East Williamsburg art space House of Yes, descended from black silk fabric swaths (donning only tights and a bustier) to wow onlookers with her acrobatic antics.
Rolling herself out of the silk and onto the ground, Anya flitted offstage and the lights dimmed, making way for one of the foremost purveyors of the LA beat scene sound, Nosaj Thing. While he's played here before, this performance marked the NYC premiere of his much-lauded visuals show by Fair Enough (the duo of Adam Guzman and Julia Tsao). Brightly colored geometric shapes pulsated and receded all around Nosaj while he played, providing a hypnotic physical incarnation of tracks like "IOIO," "Fog" and "1685/Bach," off his debut LP, 2009's Drift. It is precisely these visuals that made his act really gel, offering a clever response to the common problem of artists who appear to be checking e-mail.
Finally, London's "Queen of Dubstep" and former BBC Radio 1 hostess Mary Anne Hobbs took to the decks, after a reportedly grueling day of traveling. Her set included dubstep and UK funky jams which quickly worked the audience into a frenzy; everyone giddily bounced along to Breach's "Fatherless," Breakage's "Hard" and Donaeo's "I'm Fly." At one point, two professional (read: hired) dancing girls manned either side of the stage and sensually gyrated along to the music, which felt amateurish and out of place in comparison to Anya's earlier performance.
Winding down, Hobbs humbly thanked the crowd (and yes, her actual speaking voice is significantly less sultry than that of her on-air persona). "Yesterday, Photek hit me up," she enthused, referring to the late '90s drum & bass bigwig. "It seems he's been making dubstep! And I've got his first tune." She then gave the track its premiere in-club spin, showcasing a crawling, croaking, frog-like bassline.
While this seemed a fitting culmination to the festivities, Philadelphian rapper Dirty South Joe of the Mad Decent-backed Brick Bandits crew came on next, rhyming atop bass-heavy street beats like Girl Unit's "Wut." The crowd was spent from dancing though, and most people filed out of the venue, which proved to be a fitting location for a proper rave-out after all.