- The roving Australian festival brings Music From Memory and Dopplereffekt to an open-air velodrome near Melbourne.
- It was a beautiful winter's day at Coburg Velodrome, the venue just north of Melbourne that held the June edition of the traveling Australian electronic music festival Freedom Time. The one-day event began in the mid-afternoon, as sun streamed past rain clouds onto attendees lounging and drinking beer on the steep concrete sides of the velodrome's track.
Each of the festival's three stages was curated by a different dance music outfit. The Melbourne label Butter Sessions took the biggest stage in the middle of the velodrome, while Tako Reyenga and Jamie Tiller's Music From Memory outlet held court in a smaller tent. The Australian disco heads Wax'o Paradiso (billed as Wax'o Dystopio for this chilly event) played out of a larger tent near the entrance.
Holding a dance music festival on a bike racing track is an original and surprisingly sensible idea. Though the grounds were small—you could walk from one end to the other in less than five minutes—noise bleed was kept to a minimum by the velodrome's sloped sides, which separated the Butter Sessions stage from the other two. The venue also provided some interesting spots to explore. The side of the track that wasn't occupied by Butter Sessions was used as a giant screen for projections, while a tunnel beneath provided a grungy sanctuary for anyone after some privacy.
By 5 PM, the sun was nearly down, and as festivalgoers continued to trickle in, the temperature dropped. Some people came prepared, decked out in neon '80s ski suits and fake fur coats, but others, like me, could have used a few more layers. There were no campfires or mobile heaters, though the festival did provide hobo-style oil-drum fires scattered throughout the grounds, which gave things a bit of a post-apocalyptic edge.
In addition to DJs, Freedom Time is known for hosting experimental live acts. This time, the crowd was treated to the Japanese pop duo Dip In The Pool and Melbourne's art-pop act Sui Zhen, who added variety to the dance music-heavy day. But the live electronic acts were where the real action was. Dopplereffekt's set on the Wax'o Dystopio stage was transcendent, bringing their thrilling futurism through analog sounds and mesmerizing visuals that shifted between crisp, geometric CG fractals and space-age images of the Large Hadron Collider and NASA control rooms. As the evening crept on, Sleep D hit the Butter Sessions stage, performing a live set that took the party up a few notches. Even so, it was already 7 PM and it still didn't feel like a rager.
That changed when Tiller and Reyenga began the second of their three joyful back-to-backs at the Music From Memory stage. Inside the small humid tent filled with a few hundred ravers, it was easy to forget where you were and how cold it was outside. For the first time, the festival felt intimate and exciting. Tiller and Reyenga clearly like to have fun—they were dancing as hard as the crowd, chain-smoking cigarettes and dropping tunes like Moby's "Next Is The E" and the camp 1979 horror-pop tune "Walk The Night" by the cult LA band The Skatt Bros., who were much more popular in Australia than they ever were in the US. Meanwhile, over at Wax'o Dystopio, Veronica Vasicka was playing a more aggressive techno set, unleashing The Floor's remix of the proto-techno song "Computer Bank" by Five Times Of Dust.
Wax'o Dystopio's closing two-hour set got the large tent into a groove, exploring disco, house and world music, including a remix of the Hong Kong pop star Priscilla Chan. At the Butter Sessions tent, headliner Joe Claussell, who DJed from behind a car painted with flames, warmed the spirits of the remaining crowd with joyful house and wonderfully incongruous classical guitar tracks. But Music From Memory won the night, and in the festival's final hour, there was no question of where I'd be. As 10 PM approached, I was excited to finally have warmed up, but sad to see the party end. Freedom Time's thoughtful booking policy left the crowd hungry for more.
Photo credits /
Greta Richmond - Lead, Slope
David Boyd Smiley - All others
By 5 PM, the sun was nearly down, and as festivalgoers continued to trickle in, the temperature dropped. Some people came prepared, decked out in neon '80s ski suits and fake fur coats, but others, like me, could have used a few more layers. There were no campfires or mobile heaters, though the festival did provide hobo-style oil-drum fires scattered throughout the grounds, which gave things a bit of a post-apocalyptic edge. In addition to DJs, Freedom Time is known for hosting experimental live acts. This time, the crowd was treated to the Japanese pop duo Dip In The Pool and Melbourne's art-pop act Sui Zhen, who added variety to the dance music-heavy day. But the live electronic acts were where the real action was. Dopplereffekt's set on the Wax'o Dystopio stage was transcendent, bringing their thrilling futurism through analog sounds and mesmerizing visuals that shifted between crisp, geometric CG fractals and space-age images of the Large Hadron Collider and NASA control rooms. As the evening crept on, Sleep D hit the Butter Sessions stage, performing a live set that took the party up a few notches. Even so, it was already 7 PM and it still didn't feel like a rager.
That changed when Tiller and Reyenga began the second of their three joyful back-to-backs at the Music From Memory stage. Inside the small humid tent filled with a few hundred ravers, it was easy to forget where you were and how cold it was outside. For the first time, the festival felt intimate and exciting. Tiller and Reyenga clearly like to have fun—they were dancing as hard as the crowd, chain-smoking cigarettes and dropping tunes like Moby's "Next Is The E" and the camp 1979 horror-pop tune "Walk The Night" by the cult LA band The Skatt Bros., who were much more popular in Australia than they ever were in the US. Meanwhile, over at Wax'o Dystopio, Veronica Vasicka was playing a more aggressive techno set, unleashing The Floor's remix of the proto-techno song "Computer Bank" by Five Times Of Dust. Wax'o Dystopio's closing two-hour set got the large tent into a groove, exploring disco, house and world music, including a remix of the Hong Kong pop star Priscilla Chan. At the Butter Sessions tent, headliner Joe Claussell, who DJed from behind a car painted with flames, warmed the spirits of the remaining crowd with joyful house and wonderfully incongruous classical guitar tracks. But Music From Memory won the night, and in the festival's final hour, there was no question of where I'd be. As 10 PM approached, I was excited to finally have warmed up, but sad to see the party end. Freedom Time's thoughtful booking policy left the crowd hungry for more. Photo credits / Greta Richmond - Lead, Slope David Boyd Smiley - All others