Live Review: Jlin, Howie Lee With Veeeky & Thoiid (Sydney Festival)

Within minutes of Howie Lee beginning his collaborative set with Veeeky & Thoiid, it was apparent that the headliner would need to bring something of special significance to outshine her support. There are no words to fully describe what the Beijing DJ and pair of Taiwanese visualists concocted for their set - an aggressively surreal blend of mangled Chinese percussion, crushingly heavy hip hop rhythms, outright noise and a tableau of CGI scenography spanning everything from a cubist Buddha statue next to a scuba diver to a man fleeing across a desert with a pizza circling his neck.

It was a haunting and hilarious experience; horrific and hackneyed. And, utterly fantastic. Genius beyond logic or question.

In following such a singular experience, Jerrilynn Patton, aka Jlin, was savvy enough to offer a different approach - albeit one almost equally confounding. Launching into her set with the unsettling Guantanamo (replete with full-throated screams and eerie children's voices ruminating on hurting people), she flooded the venue with smoke; jagged flashes of purple light emanating from the darkness and brief surges of flame and molten metal flickering fleetingly in the background. Where her supporting artist presented a missive of another world, Patton transported the audience to one.

In the darkness and the smoke, one could just discern the outline of the exit door and what lay beyond. It felt like staring from the endless void back into concrete, mundane reality. With Patton's blend of spiralling melodic phrases, high-velocity rhythms and spontaneous blasts of silence, time grew elasticised. Had minutes passed? Or hours? The audience was confronted. Dancers seemed unsure of how to dance. Seated onlookers regularly uprooted themselves to either attempt to conquer the floor or surrender entirely by making a bee-line for the exit.

While operating within the frenetic and seemingly messy aesthetic of footwork, Patton displayed a clear grasp of dynamics - evolving her set from the austere rhythms of her driest work into the more layered, cerebral melodies of last year's Black Origami. At times, she struggled to blend her disparate ideas. The set felt increasingly fragmented as it progressed. But, that didn't truly detract from the unique miasma that she flooded the room with and used to challenge audiences.

A bloody inimitable showcase of artists operating at the cutting-edge; the Sydney Festival should be especially proud of delivering this evening's line-up.