- Ahead of the London leg of Sound Signature's 20th anniversary tour, Theo Parrish stressed the importance of doing away with scheduling—sets would be completely ad-hoc. "The manner in which we play is as if we are all playing from the same bag...," he said. "No need to treat this like a boxing match."
In the spirit of things, I arrived at 10 PM on the nose to find a few out-of-town devotees in label attire already queuing up. This dedication caught E1, the revamped Wapping venue formerly known as Studio Spaces, off guard. The door staff laughed at how different this was to the other shows at the club, where the headliner was very much the headliner. In the end it took 30 minutes to get inside, though this was pretty much the night's only hiccup.
Thomas Xu and Julion De'Angelo, two Sound Signature newcomers who debuted with a split EP last year, underscored Parrish's point. Their tone-setting was pretty much what I'd have expected from any of the five DJs. Warm fusion by Lonnie Liston Smith and Donald Byrd moved into slow-stepping burners by Amp Fiddler and Leroy Burgess. De'Angelo's mixing style––singing to the heavens while working the rotary––even felt positively Parrish-esque.
The most noticeable upgrade to the venue was E1's smaller room, Black Studio, which, when it was Studio Spaces, had always felt like a scrappy, secondary concern. Now it was arguably on par with the main space, Warehouse. A row of new, sub-heavy speaker units undergirding the booth meant some of the subtleties in the records were lost with the volume cranked up, but the basslines felt positively 4D. Every plucked string seemed to be vibrating through and all around you. The command to move was strong. An early burst of joy came when Xu unexpectedly mixed "Release The Tension" by Circuit into the copy of Azymuth's "Maracanã" that a distracted De'Angelo had left spinning, causing the pair to leap in the air and high-five as the crowd cheered. It was one of many moments that left me grinning.
Parrish began playing in pleasingly inconspicuous fashion. Peering through doors I (and seemingly everyone else) assumed were shut, I saw pockets of dancers moving to a low soundtrack at the other end of the long Warehouse tunnel, illuminated by a solitary light. Word got around, so the space filled, as Parrish ramped upward through robotic, robust jams. It can be easy to forget just how fun and charismatic he is behind the decks, his endless EQing colouring and accentuating each track. When he reached his own "Dusty Cabinets," the B-side to fan favourite "Ebonics" from '98, the purple and blue strip lights kicked into action, glinting off the side of a hitherto-disguised disco ball.
Parrish didn't want Sound Signature 20 to be a competition between the acts, and the mixed crowd, which spanned ages 18 to 60-plus, didn't treat it that way. Each DJ was afforded equal energy. That said, because I was constantly bundling around to try and catch all the action, I didn't get lost in the music as much as I would have liked. From 2 AM onwards, both rooms were in total synergy. In Black Studio, an excitable De'Angelo was going back-to-back with Jay Daniel, pushing him out of his cooler comfort zone and toward flamboyant jack tracks. Meanwhile, Parrish and Specter were rocking Warehouse, cutting freely between the relentless (Sleezy D's "I've Lost Control") and the breezy (what sounded like a Japanese version of Earth Wind & Fire's "Running"). At lights up, Parrish brought his labelmates onstage for a final bow, imploring the crowd to applaud them all equally. He needn't have.
Photo credit /
Andrew Twort