- This past Wednesday evening, the London label PC Music held its first event since signing a major-label deal with Columbia Records. It took place at XOYO, a dark, high-ceilinged club on a backstreet in Shoreditch, and if an exec from Columbia attended the event, they might have left feeling excited and a little nervous. The party was great. From its early stages until close at 2AM the room fizzed with energy, a rarity for a midweek show in London. The venue, which sold out, was full of people in their late teens and early 20s who marketing types might call "early adopters." The DJs and live acts emphasised the qualities for which PC Music has become both loved and loathed, and the night was unpredictable in a way that's unusual for club events. But could the style of music that was so ecstatically received here—wild, experimental, at times extremely weird—really affect the mainstream?
Danny L Harle has so far written the track with the most crossover potential. "Broken Flowers," which is being rereleased as part of an EP of the same name (the first collaboration with Columbia) is an anthem in an early '90s pop-dance vein. The response to this one was a moment. Most people recognised it from the first gentle swirls of its intro, and they continued jumping around as Harle mixed into a happy hardcore version of the track. "In My Dreams," his other signature tune, also got a wild reaction, as kids in "Huge Danny" T-shirts (a free gift on the way into the venue) linked arms and sang along. His set was more rave than pop, but Harle's obvious knack for hooks was a beacon in the chaos.
A.G. Cook, the PC Music head and a frequent collaborator of Harle's, was even more extreme. He opened with "DAMAGE," a nutty, cut-up track from his recent mix, and bashed out rhythms using the CDJ's cue button. There's still a theory that PC Music is some sort of prolonged practical joke, but seeing Cook DJ for a few minutes should be enough to prove otherwise. He played like he was entranced, swaying and wiping back his hair as he teased out mostly his own warped creations, such as "Beautiful." Cook favoured a style of DJing that was the inverse of EDM drop culture: his beats rarely landed after his builds, which made the performance, although brightly coloured, tense and disorientating.
A few weeks back, Hannah Diamond, the closest thing PC Music has to a normal pop star, released a glossy video for "Hi," and she made a surprise appearance during Cook's set to perform the track. She was only onstage for a few minutes, lip-synching and posing, but it was enough for her to exit to "Hannah!" chants. GFOTY, the yin to Diamond's yang, brought more bite to her surprise two-track set. "Don't Wanna / Let's Do It" and "LOVER" sounded vicious, and she further hyped the crowd by throwing foam letters at them.
It's unlikely Kane West will be coming to chart near you any time soon, but his acid- and electro-soaked club set was a bit of a revelation. I hadn't initially warmed to his recent EP for Turbo, but in this context, with him miming to the music from behind bad sunglasses, the tracks sounded surprisingly fresh. West's music—also see his Western Beats mix from last year—uses a comically simple toolkit, but his arrangements flow with a sense of abandon that house producers don't tend to go for. Spinee, who closed the night, also played a set that was, relatively speaking, more rooted in the club. There were bits of grime, Jersey club and something that could have been a Jimmy Edgar track. In the spirit of the night and the label, she frequently used radical tempo shifts and sharp left-turns to keep things as messy as possible.
Earlier this year, PC Music staged Pop Cube, a big-budget showcase in New York that gave life to the label's pop music fantasies. By contrast, the party at XOYO, with no such conceptual context, seemed more like an experiment in using lowbrow club music aesthetics to highbrow ends. The charts might not be ready for this sort of "multi-tier attack," as AG Cook put it at the time of the Columbia deal, but it seems like PC Music already has at least one reality in which it's a star.