- A city with a lively and ever-expanding dub scene, Vancouver has somewhat fallen to the wayside in terms of house and techno, but things are looking up. Partly due to the efforts of organizers like A/V CLUB and new nights like BODY, which brought Omar-S to Vancouver's New Forms Festival in Fall 2010 and outdid themselves with Levon Vincent for their second party. Held in the recently reopened Open Studios, one of Vancouver's best-loved underground venues, strict newly-imposed capacity limits kept the crowd small and intimate. While the room never felt close to full as a result, the crowd's dedication and passion made up for the empty space. Who said a little extra room to dance was ever a bad thing?
The show's joint promoters each played perfectly suitable opening sets; MITIM opened with an agreeable and subdued set of subtly pumping house flavours. Scott Woodworth, AKA Scott W, took over decks duty around midnight, playing a memorable and eccentric set spanning about three decades, peaking early with vintage Aphex Twin and ruthlessly attacking all niches from vintage house to acid to sweeping dub techno, and kept the vibe going at maximum potential for a good two hours. The crowd was thoroughly enraptured to the point where it seemed like Scott W could have played until the end of the night without complaint.
Regardless, the headliner was the focus, and the booking of Levon Vincent for Vancouver was not unappreciated by the night's attendees (one attendee flew in from another province just for the show). Vincent helmed turntables and two CDJs—presumably for the purposes of his own new material—and played a set that kept people on their toes. The New York producer played little to none of his own lauded catalogue of releases, and also stayed firmly glued to the decks, only sidestepping to the CDJs once to play a rather straightforward and decadent old school rave-out track.
Expectations flouted or not, Vincent showed impeccable taste, flipping through genres at will in a manner that revealed the multiple influences at work in his own productions. Labels from Underground Quality, Delsin, Steadfast, among others could be spotted being thrown down onto the platters. Vincent's mixing was ecstatic, quick and playful, and his visible energy was infectious as he went to town on the filters; he never let a record play without mercilessly abusing it, contorting it, reshaping it or interrupting it several times. A "live" DJ to be certain, he brought it to an extreme at one particular moment as he completely stopped the records, tapped out his own beat on the stationary wax and then looped a few bars of another record seemingly for several minutes. The small crowd stopped dancing, crowding the decks in what was either dumbfounded admiration or annoyed impatience.
The set quickly resumed with renewed aplomb as Vincent powered right past the designated 4 AM end time, ending around 4:30 at peak energy as Scott W took over the decks again to close out the night in typically dependable style. While a set low on original material and heavy on filters might not have been what some expected, it was hard to argue with the man's record collection and mixing acrobatics, and the crowd's mostly consistent adoration painted a bright future for a slowly reviving 4/4 scene in Vancouver.