- Vancouver's W2 venue has developed into a haven for the city's dubstep community, and the recent night that hosted headliners from London, Berlin and Milwaukee was undoubtedly its biggest triumph yet. Split into two rooms, Room 1 featured the big names Silkie and Lorn, as well as French dubstepper Malilone and local producers Max Ulis and Michael Red. The smaller, Panospria-curated Room 2 was host to intimate sets from British Columbian acts Longshanks, Ruairi Lazers, Tomas Jirku and Donkey Dong. Periodic dips into Room 2 revealed a vibrant and diverse array of music ranging from breaks to techno to bass music of all kinds, but this night was all about the main room.
Vancouver DJ and producer Max Ulis opened Room 1 with a steady all-vinyl set, coaxing the sparse but growing crowd into dancing right from the beginning. Malilone, a French DJ based in Berlin, came on after with an idiosyncratic and mercurial set of breaks-driven material that recklessly switched between tempos, though her mixing was smooth enough that it never sounded jarring. She kept to what sounded like her own bank of tunes, playing little that was recognizable, and the best moments were the unexpected sprints into drum & bass territory and even a little bit of jungle.
Lorn performed a live set, and his dark, bass-heavy sonics struck a note somewhere in between IDM and hip-hop, and fit in remarkably well with the rest of the night's more explicitly dubstep performers. London's Anti-Social Entertainment DJ Silkie was the focus of the night, and he performed a peaktime set that focused on rapid-fire whiplash percussion rather than his more laidback jazzy material. The unmistakable melodies of Silkie originals like "Bass Junkie" provided a wonderful contrast to Lorn's nightmares, and showcased a number of new dubplates that see the producer further incorporating horns and other samples into a more assertive framework.
Immediately succeeding Silkie was the return of Max Ulis for an approximately twenty-minute set of all original material. He loosed waves of sub frequencies that blanketed the room, a solid foundation for his spindly percussion and robust melodies: easily the night's most cerebral moments. The show ended with a barnstormer from Vancouver local and promoter Michael Red, who memorably led off with Distance's "Ill Kontent" before traversing through a crowd-pleasing set littered with the psychedelic stylings of Scientist's dubstep remixes for the Tectonic label. It was a near-perfect night that went off without any conceivable flaws, and I think the crowd that braved freezing weather and icy streets to fill the place would agree.