Live Review: Touch Sensitive

Tonight it’s Future Classic stalwart Touch Sensitive’s turn to appear as part of the well-curated music program for Friday Nights At Jean Paul Gaultier: a bit of house funk for the after-dark set.

National Gallery Of Victoria is always beautiful at night, but it’s kind of a weird scene. People are turned out in their finery, with various degrees of success; a sea of sequins and peplum skirts, loud shirts and overly tailored pants. It’s a med-couture crowd with haute aspirations, dressed as though they thought Jean Paul Gaultier would be scoring their outfits at the door. (God spare us all if that were the case.) Herding through the exhibition proper and sipping Chardonnay in the Great Hall, the audience is only mildly interested in the headline musical act, which gives Touch Sensitive the air of a cruise ship entertainer. To his credit, he is completely unfazed. Taking to the stage in a Gaultier-inspired horizontal stripe tee, tidy moustache and baggy pleated pants, he is a natural extension of the exhibition. Stick a sailor hat on his head and he’d be indistinguishable from the mannequins around the corner.

On stage, Touch Sensitive (aka Michael Di Francesco) adopts a cute electro/analogue gimmick, playing live bass over the lines of music coming out of his MacBook. The glassy house tunes more or less run themselves, except for the odd tap of a trigger pad and very occasional knob twiddling. Live music in the salad days of EDM is a bizarre phenomenon, isn’t it? It’s like a contract exists between artist and audience in which they pretend they have performance skills and we pretend we can’t see how little they’re doing.

The small knot of Gaultier fans in front of the stage are on board, anyway. Touch Sensitive grins and bounces his hands on the bass strings, and roughly 50 people in front of the stage waggle their hips atop designer boots and platform heels. Several hundred others occupy café tables around the hall and, while they don’t seem especially engaged, they don’t clear out either. A couple of LBD-sporting ladies toward the front get a bit excited when Pizza Guy turns up in the set and at one point there is a bona fide dance circle happening. Two very fashionable gents, one in a white suit, spend a few glorious moments in the centre of the crowd rocking a bunny hop/running man routine. Not bad for a gallery crowd.