Live Review: 1200 Mics, GMS, James Corbett, Imperfect Cicle, Adam Stapleton

A Sunday evening, expensive ticket pricing and the presence of South Australia’s largest outdoor music festival in coming weeks meant that the appearance of GMS and 1200 Mics in Adelaide was not the bumper-to-bumper rave it could have been for its whopping seven-hour duration, but it certainly glimpsed such a status in its last two hours when the headline sets picked people up out of their dreary Sunday stupor and into a frenetic dancing frenzy. 

Fortunately the psytrance event featured some highly efficacious decorations and multimedia presentations that transformed the top room of HQ into a psychedelic wonderland. Neon colours and spaced-out tapestries adorned every inch of the club and dozens of TV screens complemented the heavy and progressive doses of electronic psytrance. Adam Stapleton did a good job of warming up the crowd as they began to amble in from 4pm onwards, his speciality cutting the driving bass back in and holding the dance floor’s anticipation, manipulating it at will. 

Imperfect Circle made for a special bonus for this tour, jumping the state border from Victoria to perform for SA crowds. His selection of psytrance cuts brought an awesome element of groove to the fray. Those moments where Imperfect Circle slips in a deep, dark slice of groovy ambience are when you convince yourself you should stay and dance for the entire set, lest you miss another of those moments. As it was, the atmosphere and party vibes were most definitely spiking at this point, and the audience members were fully assimilating into the mode of a seven-hour music event. 

James Corbett, the second of the local acts on the bill, took over duties and amped things up from lighter and groovy to super fast, hard and dark. Corbett has a knack for incorporating tracks with killer samples and it made for a good segue into the GMS live set. The level of command over the dance space was classic in its implementation as GMS levelled the crowd and left the now pumping space in a state of hardcore boogie. As GMS is a member of 1200 Mics it was GMS who provided the 1200 Mics DJ set, technically rendering the two sets one fantastic journey that spanned more than an hour. It’s hard to describe the way psytrance can mobilise a modest dancefloor, but this was a great example.