You were already there. You were ready to cast our fate to the wind.

The perception, when you aren’t from somewhere big and famous, is that big, famous, populated places have so much more ‘night-life’ than wherever you live. When I didn’t live in Sydney, the dream was to either move there or Melbourne, or if not, London, New York or somewhere else that knows how to party, because there would be enough people there to support the kind of scene that us perma-alterna kids so long for.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Sydney isn’t all that, but it takes its sweet time exposing the true flavours of awesome that you dreamed of before moving up here, and for me it exposed them pretty much a week or two after I got over the whole wishing for some scene to save me anyway. So sucks to be it, but at least that allowed me to go along on Thursday night to the intimate, not quite there venue “The Sound Lounge” in the Seymour Centre, to catch the first of Feral Media’s PowWow events. Essentially, over the last year or so, this Sydney based label-of-awesome has been putting out a really great selection of low-fi, indie, underground, eclectic musicians work in a series called PowWow, but also have got around to releasing acclaimed records by groups such as Sydney bliss-rockers Underlapper… Understandably I was curious to check out what their night would be like, and the kind of post-rocky shoegazy Longest Day.

Upon arrival I was caught my the incredibly good looking merch table… It reminded me of a more organised idea of what the punk boys used to do back home – just go to shows and set up a table, selling all manner of different records they chose to be the local distro for – a box of 7″s and a couple of racks of cds. This was that, but more colourful (the whole set of Pow Wow discs is really pretty on display), and all obviously to do with the record label itself.

Upon entering, I slunk across to the bar and ordered a wine – this wasn’t a night where one smacks back longnecks in paper bags stamped with the clubs brand on the bag, nor the type of place that scene kids would create a new dance for. This is a classy little space, with tables, red lighting, tea candles and a grand piano. The sound system wasn’t cranking too hard, which was nice, but Alistair Erskine’s tunes were nicely presented in stereo by the set-up. He played a mixture of downtempo electronica – from the bassy to the funky to the glitchy, not particularly well mixed, but really quite well chosen. I think I heard tracks by Cepia, The Flashbulb and Boom Bip in there, and was kind of chuffed.

The bands were good. Aheadphonehome comes across kind of like if Billy Corgan got boxes and never was famous and he probably had a little more creativity and heart, and due to some calling infulenced by his tropical surrounds, he would make music kind of as endearing and ultimately beautiful amongst its abrasiveness as what we witnessed. Honest, sometimes almost awkwardly so, the songs were played with a video beamed into the background – two African girls attempting to halt the work of a labourer, just trying to unravel a bunch of cords. It was a pretty blatant metaphor, but reminded me of old ACAT end of year projects, and thats a nice bit of nostalgia.
The Longest Day take the shoegazy-post-rocky place from another angle – more spacey, atmospheric, ultimately definably British influenced. I had first come across them when someone pointed me towards one of the members Livejourals a few years ago and they had decided to just put their entire album online for free – one of the first local artists I had ever seen do that. Their music has gone a long, long way from then, and is now quite encapsulating and warm. Indeed, it lulled me into a false sense of doonaness, and once the DJ started up again, I took my leave and tottled off home to maintain that comfort.

But it was a grand night of music, and I’m really glad I went along. Not only did it dispel, for the evening anyway, the notion that nothing good ever happens in this town, but I didn’t feel alone or under any pressure to be a stalwart of keeping this scene alive, and I consider that a very healthy thing, something that a lot of other marginalised music scenes in this town might do well to learn from.

Anyway, tonight I am going to battle an entirely different beast – the typical rammed Sydney indie night. I may or may not report back.