Live Review: The Community's Tenth Birthday - The Bakery

If there's one thing that's done right when it comes to gigs in Perth, it's birthdays. Forget the bitter cold; when an organisation that has brought as much to the musical landscape as The Community wants to have a few drinks to celebrate growing up, then by god people are going to turn up to help.
It still took a while for The Bakery to get going, though, as Sibalance and Maxy Bills laid down the theme for the night: deep, thoughtful hip hop and electronica delivered with honesty and the shared sense of enjoyment that comes with community-minded music.
It was a different story in the side room; dark and claustrophobic, this was the arena of experimental DJing, Tripl M.U.M and DVS both bringing out some pretty cool and colourful visuals during their sets.
Back in the main room, Ylem started to amp up the night with some higher vibe tracks, before Mathas took over the stage, delivering his conscious hip hop to what was becoming a capacity crowd – at least if the bar line was any example. Mathas' attachment to the audience, as always, was impeccable, the shoeless MC finding enough space on the stage to make it seem like we were watching him perform in his own lounge room; a pretty classy skill. Vishnu, Ourobonic Plague and Archi kept things weird and wonderful before Wisdom 2th delivered one of the more direct sets of the night. Naik's long-awaited visual show was all that it was cracked up to be: mind-blowing, with an impeccable balance between 3D visuals and a few awesome new tracks keeping everyone enthralled.
Naik's set led up to another launch in DJ Silence's In The Shadows EP, which couldn't be better named. While the side room struggled slightly to entrap as many people as the main stage, Silence's set was deep, eclectic and ever-surprising, much like a lot of the music in the room.
The night was capped by a DJ marathon, community hero Diger Rokwell and night-ender Lowaski delivering particularly potent sets. Here's to another ten years.