Aussie acts rule at Stereosonic
For seven years Stereosonic has descended on Claremont Showground and helped Perth folk welcome summer at 150 beats per minute. The dance festival will come back for another seven years if the past weekend was anything to go by.
The 2014 instalment again used the popular two-day format introduced last year - people just love the extra day to show off their sleeve tattoos. The fans also loved the line-up, which was stacked to the brim with homegrown acts.
On Saturday afternoon, Melbourne producer twin sisters Miriam and Olivia Nervo, aka NERVO, and fellow Victorian Will Sparks dominated the main stage.
While they were only on for half an hour, Canberra stars on the rise Peking Duk were the best act of the weekend. The ARIA Award- winning duo kicked off their set with a video introduction from Today show host Karl Stefanovic and played breakout hits High and Take Me Over.
On Sunday, Sydney DJs What So Not (made up of Harley Streten of Flume and Emoh Instead's Chris Emerson) laid out some heavy trap as a homecoming present after spending the past few months on international tours.
With locals kicking so many goals, punters were let down by some of the bigger international DJs. Ultra-rich Scottish producer Calvin Harris and Dutch trance royalty Tiesto played carbon-copy sets on the first day: samples, build-ups then drops with some pyrotechnics thrown in for good measure.
It was the same on Sunday. Bigger DJs such as Swede Alesso and Wouter and Sjoerd Janssen, better known as Showtek, relied on banger after banger and didn't let any of their songs sink in.
Reprieves came in the form of trap onslaughts from US bass music producers RL Grime (Henry Steinway) and Diplo, the king of moombahton - a white-hot fusion of house and reggae.
A highlight of day two saw anonymous minimalist house producer Zhu win over a small crowd at his stage with his recent hit Faded.
Miami's Steve Aoki, famed for throwing cakes at the crowd, got a taste of his own medicine for his birthday and copped two in the face.
Headlining the Stereo stage on Sunday, Skrillex proved dubstep wasn't dead.
The Californian super-producer remixed a lot of his biggest tunes, such as Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, keeping things loud and interesting, ensuring residents of Claremont will have reasons to complain about festivals in their suburb for months and years to come.
