The Peacock Society 2016: Five key performances

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  • In the space of four years, The Peacock Society has blossomed into one of the most interesting dance music festivals in France. The three-day event takes place at a large exhibition centre right in the heart of Parc Floral De Paris, a lush park and botanical garden in the 12th arrondissement. The fourth edition of the summer session was attended by between 10- and 15,000 people each night, and was nothing short of world-class in terms of programming, scale and sound. The overwhelmingly French crowd, most of them Parisians, cracked on in high spirits all weekend. They party hard: from the minute the music began around 8 PM until after the last kick drum, thousands of young ravers were on their feet. Here are five key performances from across the weekend.
    Busy P & Eclair Fifi Curating interesting back-to-backs has become increasingly en vogue at festivals in recent years. Saturday night saw Pedro Winter and Clair Stirling, AKA Busy P and Eclair Fifi, share the decks for the first time, a partnership that Winter himself proposed to the bookers, who jumped at the idea. I knew it would be lively, though there was no way of telling what the chemistry would be like between them. Their two-hour set was nothing but fluid, going one-for-one at the smaller of the festival's two warehouse spaces, Squarehouse. Big room anthems like Tony Lionni's "Found A Place" and Late Night Tuff Guy's edit of DJ Le Roi's "I Get Deep" went down a storm, as did Strip Steve's O.S. edit of Mickey Oliver's "Never Let Go." In between mixes, Busy P danced backwards across the front of the stage like a showman. The large space, which is essentially a shed, got so hot that Stirling took to fanning them both with a sleeve from of one of her Serato plates.
    Max D Andrew Field-Pickering, AKA Max D, has a taste for taking things in all sorts of different directions. The Future Times boss closed the RA-hosted Nightclub on Friday night, following Tama Sumo's soulful house and disco with a hearty sack of oddball jams. At one point, he perfectly mixed the spaced out dub house of JTC's "Dusselmorph" into a lively house track with a trumpet solo that I sincerely hope is forthcoming on Future Times. Soichi Terada's "Saturday Love Sunday" also went down a treat, and I've got to give a special mention to one of my favourite Prince tunes, "A Love Bizarre," written alongside instrumentalist Sheila E. It's hard not to be mesmerised by Pickering's animated presence behind the decks. The way he grooved along, engulfed by the stage's decorative jungle foliage, was dreamy.
    Cyrillic (AKA KiNK) It's no secret that Strahil Velchev is happiest when he's making people lose their shit to pounding electronic music. As KiNK, he's featured prominently in RA's end-of-year live poll for the past five years, so I was intrigued to catch his new Cyrillic project for the first time on Friday night. The concept, though still under development, goes down a more techno-orientated path than his work as KiNK. He uses a hybrid live/DJ setup, creating beats on the fly with a Roland TR-8, which he then beatmatches by ear and plays back in real time using two turntables and a mixer. The result was an hour of shapeshifting techno that teetered on boiling point for the duration. With each new progression, the sea of people at the Squarehouse arena erupted into a frenzy.
    Margaret Dygas b2b Bambounou After meeting backstage in 2015, Margaret Dygas and Bambounou—two artists with Polish heritage—decided to go head-to-head for the first time at this year's festival. The first hour was a crusade of linear techno, geared for the big room. The zealous crowd were all for it, but I was after something with a bit more variety. Things got ravier in the final 30 minutes, by which point the energy in the main warehouse was electric. Dygas dropped Jam & Spoon's remix of The Age Of Love's "The Age Of Love," a track I've heard out several times this summer. At the end, the pair embraced and beamed their way off stage.
    Mumdance & Logos Taking over from local upstart Simo Cell, Mumdance & Logos opened with "Legion" from their first collaborative EP on Tectonic. Within 30 seconds, Riko Dan's thick vocals permeated the room, followed closely by the skeletal bassline from Pinch & Mumdance's "Big Slug." For the next two hours, the focus was on fusing grime with techno, a sound they explored on last year's Proto LP. The intense sonics of Dominowe's "Africa's Cry" blended into the bludgeoning mechanics of Regis's "Allies," before taking a left turn into the ornate melody from Mumdance's own "Smasher." Flavours of UK garage, dubstep and hardcore were peppered throughout at machine-gun pace. Things went a bit loony in the last 20 minutes, as Mumdance, ever the joker, blasted the room with an overload of happy hardcore. Photo credit / Jacob Khrist - All except Mumdance & Logos
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