It was my contribution to the best issue of weekly street press Brisbane has ever seen – Time Off taking on the Queensland Government over its draconian lockout legislation.
The front cover, which sadly doesn’t exist in its own right on the internet, depicted Sir Joh Bjekle Peterson’s face blurring into then-Premier Anna Bligh’s. The headline twisted a knife in an iconic tourism slogan: “Queensland – Perfect one day, shut down the next”. (If you click here and zoom in on the timeline along the bottom of the page, it’s the sixth cover from the left.)
I did my bit by visiting renegade party series Kana, infamous for setting up a generator, decks and speakers at public spaces around Brisbane’s CBD. This time, they took over a covered area atop the Kangaroo Point cliffs.
The full story is reproduced below the tear-sheets below.
RENEGADES WITH A CONSCIENCE
KANA ARE TAKING BRISBANE’S HOUSE AND TECHNO FRATERNITY OUT OF CLUBS AND INTO PUBLIC SPACES FOR PARTIES WHICH SHARE A COMMON SPIRIT WITH THE UK’S SEMINAL ACID HOUSE RAVES – IN WHAT COULD BECOME NOT JUST AN ALTERNATIVE TO BRISBANE CLUBBING, BUT THE ONLY WAY FOR PROMOTERS TO WORK IF QUEENSLAND RETURNS TO THE DARK AGES. ELLIOT CLARKE AND LEO HEDE TAKE ZEBRA BEHIND THE SCENES OF WHAT BECAME THEIR MOST VISIBLE OUTING TO DATE. PHOTOS BY TERRY SOO.
The party is pumping. Brisbane’s favourite adopted son Kazu Kimura deploys wave upon wave of throbbing tribal techno on a rapturous dancefloor, much as he has here for nearly two decades. A laser ripples over the crowd, who roar their appreciation as each new bomb drops while one of their number anoints himself unofficial hypeman and claps (mostly) in time behind the decks. The beaming promoters wander through the crowd making sure everything is running to script, humbly accepting the backslapping for the latest instalment of what is now one of the most hotly anticipated recurring events on the Brisbane clubbing calendar.
But this isn’t another dance music festival. It isn’t the main room of a local superclub. It’s not even a fresh new club night at a hipster bar. This dancefloor is situated atop the Kangaroo Point Cliffs at 6pm on a Saturday night. This crowd didn’t even know where the party was until seven hours earlier. This party is something special. This is Kana.
***
“Rooftop of valley train station carpark. 7.15. Kana.” The text message comes through to the Zebra office from Elliot Clarke at 6:20pm on Thursday – two days out from the sixth edition of the renegade party series – and symbolically requests our presence at the site of the very first Kana event on Sunday Sep 30, 2007. While many were still in the midst of recovery from the previous day’s Parklife festival, a small crew of party people were that day watching their mobile phone inboxes for instructions on how to join what has now become a phenomenon.
The scene tonight is as incongruous as it must have been over two years ago when Clarke and now London-based cohort Adam Gillett inducted those first 30 curious souls into the Kana mythology. This time around Clarke and current co-conspirator Leo Hede are seated in business attire (Clarke works in the finance sector while Hede is a social worker) on plastic garden chairs, Joris Voorn’s Balance 014 compilation gently piping out of Hede’s car as the neon of the Cardno building glares down from above.
When Hede was here last it was as a punter, and he recalls the scene fondly. “Just to get that message saying ‘on top of a car park’, I was like ‘are we really doing that? Okay – I’m interested’!”
“We weren’t even sure people would turn up,” Clarke joins in. “Adam and I had just thought about doing it in the car park, we’d never thought about doing it anywhere else or doing it ever again after the first time we did it. The rationale behind doing it was that we loved this space and just wanted to do something up here.”
“To see if you could, almost,” Hede suggests.
“Exactly, to see if we could,” Clarke agrees. “And that was the defining thing of if we felt like doing one again. If people hadn’t been so happy with it you probably wouldn’t have seen a second one.”
Fortunately those first patrons ensured there was a second Kana on the riverside walkway under the Story Bridge a month later, another on the Goodwill Bridge a month after that. Following Gillett’s departure there was some downtime until the first anniversary was celebrated at a slightly less audacious locale under the William Jolly Bridge, before a return to the Goodwill Bridge for the event’s second anniversary in September 2009 was roundly hailed by many of the 80-odd crowd who crammed onto the bridge’s observation deck as one of the year’s best parties – club, festival or otherwise.
Given these spaces aren’t exactly designated for hosting dance music, Kana has attracted its share of attention from authorities over the years.
“Usually the local security don’t like it, but both times where we’ve spoken to the police they’ve been reasonable about it because they can see that we’re not causing any trouble and we are there to have a good time,” Clarke says. “It’s all about how you present yourself as well – it’s the same story as what you’d get in the Valley on any Saturday night, and I’d say [the police] are a pretty good judge of character.”
“At the last one on the Goodwill Bridge, I’d gone back across the bridge and saw three police officers walking along,” Hede says. “I remember running up behind them madly texting people to warn them with a genuine concern that it was going to be shut down. The police happened to walk by [the party] just as there was a breakdown in the music, and people caught them out of the corner of their eye as it built up again – they kept walking and a cheer came out.
“We were both surprised by the way they were open to it, but also [that they were] concerned moreso for the safety and the managing of the people in a public space rather than what we were doing was a problem.”
Kana’s Facebook page has some 400 confirmed attendees for the March 2010 edition, and as Clarke and Hede lead Zebra on a recon mission to a shortlisted future site (unsurprisingly a bridge looms large in the background) they’re acutely aware of the hazards of their brand’s increasing popularity.
“I think also one of the biggest things we think about is whether it draws undue attention, and we also want to maintain some sort of edge to what we’re doing so we don’t want to be too safe about it,” Clarke says. “As long as it’s still challenging and people are having a good time, we don’t care how big it is. We can make up whatever rules we want – we don’t have to be underground.”
“We also are conscious of not popping out the other side of it and looking around and realising we’re running another club night,” Hede says. “We’ll always keep what originally motivated us in mind.”
***
“Top of Kangaroo Point cliffs. From 3:30 onwards. Special guest Kazu Kimura, starting at 4:30. Bring it on.” So commands the voicemail message on the mobile phone number fans are instructed to call at 11am Saturday, a homage from Clarke and Hede to the UK’s illegal acid house party forefathers who they freely admit provide the inspiration for their vision. The rain which has fallen almost constantly since the previous week’s Future Music Festival is still a factor, meaning the original setting further up the new parklands is abandoned for an empty covered space which will soon house tables and chairs in front of an as yet unopened café.
Opening DJ Adam Swain and entourage are already there when the Kana wagon rolls in at 2:30pm, everyone pitching in for the gear lug and set-up at such pace that Swain rolls the first beat at 2:57 – appropriately layering the “I want you to get together” vocal a capella from St Germain’s ‘Rose Rouge’ over the top like a call to arms. And slowly but surely people roll in, many wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the Kana logo, ensuring a steady dancefloor builds through the final third of Swain’s set thanks to tracks like Culoe De Song’s ‘The Bright Forest’ and Ben Watt’s ‘Just A Blip’. Then Arku of the predominately dubstep-flavoured White Rhino crew steps up with a set perhaps not so straight-forward as Kana regulars are used to – not that this edition is a regulars-only affair.
“There’s a lot of new people here,” Clarke says while surveying the scene. “I think after the last party people had such a good time that word has got around. I can see a resemblance with the core group of people, but a lot of people have brought their friends as well which is great.”
Student Joey Cooney is one of many first-timers here today because of the post-event hype surrounding the previous party.
“A lot of club nights now are same-same – they try to bring that extra factor, but Kana’s got that down pat,” Cooney shares while Kimura is rocking the 150-person strong dancefloor behind him. “The thing that mainly hits you is the family vibe about it. You may not know everyone, but you know you can go up to someone and talk to them and they’ll be friendly and on the same wavelength because everyone is here for the same thing. That’s what you don’t usually get in clubs these days, so it’s good to have that intimate vibe.”
The Kana vision of inclusiveness is all around, with members of the local house, techno, drum’n’bass, breakbeat, dubstep and doof tribes rubbing shoulders with DJ heroes of best-nights-ever past nursing their young children, and passers-by (including a bemused wedding party in the adjacent park) looking on like this is something which belongs rather than an intrusion. The Urban Doof Productions crew have even turned up unannounced, requesting a powerpoint so they can mount a laser over the makeshift DJ booth.
But it’s not all blissful utopia. Like any gathering this big there are problems – bottles are inadvertently smashed, empties litter the dancefloor surrounds, and some punters are openly rolling around on the footpath with the sort of wide-eyed fervour which is usually best confined to the most secluded of nightclub booths.
When an impromptu back-to-back set of slamming techno and progressive from Hede and Mike Redfern (featuring Underworld’s ‘Cowgirl’ remixed by Tim Davison and Bedrock taking the scissors to Way Out West’s ‘The Fall’) wraps up at 7:45, Clarke anxiously paces the party perimeter, senses the change in atmosphere, and declares “That’s it, it’s time to end it”. And right on 8pm he does just that, pulling the pin just as Zebra’s 2009 DJ Of The Year Fuzion closes off his truncated set with the piano house splendour of Joris Voorn’s aptly-named ‘Incident’.
Just twenty minutes after the generator is switched off, the transformation is stunning – the PA has been dismantled, gaffer tape lifted, rubbish disposed of, and the Kana crew are back at HQ for debriefing. The only sign of the their dance music flash mob’s presence is an unusually high concentration of cigarette butts and a lurking gaggle of satisfied customers, perhaps so lost in their own conversation that they’re unaware the party is even over…
***
Two hours earlier the party’s secret headliner barely has a minute to soak up the atmosphere after his set, with a car waiting to transport him to the airport for a Sydney club show and away from a setting even he hadn’t anticipated before his arrival.
“You look here and the view is amazing and the crowd is so up for it,” gushes Kimura, who in 2010 is regarded as something of a deity here given his role in Brisbane club culture’s formative years upon his arrival in 1993. “It’s so much different to anything else I’ve ever played at the clubs or the festivals or anything.
“For me, it’s the party of the year already.”
WHAT: Kana
WHERE & WHEN: Unknown
| T |
he party is pumping. Brisbane’s favourite adopted son Kazu Kimura deploys wave upon wave of throbbing tribal techno on a rapturous dancefloor. A laser ripples over the crowd, who roar their appreciation while one of their number anoints himself hypeman and claps (mostly) in time behind the decks. The promoters wander through the crowd making sure everything is running to script, humbly accepting the backslapping for the latest instalment of what is now one of the most hotly anticipated events on the Brisbane clubbing calendar.
But this isn’t another dance music festival. It isn’t a superclub main room. It’s not even a fresh new club night at a hipster bar. This dancefloor is atop the Kangaroo Point Cliffs at 6 o’clock on a Saturday night. This crowd didn’t even know where the party was seven hours ago. This party is something special. This is Kana.
***
“Rooftop of valley train station carpark. 7.15. Kana.” The text message comes through to Zebra from Elliot Clarke two days out from the sixth edition of the renegade party series, and requests our presence at the site of the very first Kana on Sunday Sep 30, 2007. While many that day were still recovering from the previous day’s Parklife festival, a small crew of party people were watching their mobile phone inboxes for instructions on how to join what has now become a phenomenon. The scene tonight is as incongruous as it must have been over two years ago when Clarke and now London-based Adam Gillett inducted those first 30 patrons into the Kana mythology. But tonight Clarke and current co-conspirator Leo Hede are seated on plastic garden chairs in business attire (Clarke works in the finance sector while Hede is a social worker), Joris Voorn’s Balance 014 mix gently piping out of Hede’s car as the neon of the Cardno building glares down from above.
When Hede was here last it was as a punter, and he recalls the scene fondly. “Just to get that message saying ‘on top of a car park’, I was like ‘are we really doing that?’”
“We weren’t even sure people would turn up,” Clarke joins in. “Adam and I had just thought about doing it in the car park, we’d never thought about doing it anywhere else or doing it ever again. We loved this space and just wanted to do something up here.”
“To see if you could, almost,” Hede suggests.
“Exactly, to see if we could,” Clarke agrees. “And that was the defining thing of if we felt like doing one again. If people hadn’t been so happy with it you probably wouldn’t have seen a second one.”
Those first curious souls ensured there was a second Kana on the riverside walkway under the Story Bridge three weeks later, another on the Goodwill Bridge a month after that. Following Gillett’s departure there was some downtime until the first anniversary was celebrated under the William Jolly Bridge, before a return to the Goodwill Bridge for the second anniversary in September ‘09 was hailed by those who crammed onto the bridge’s observation deck as one of the year’s best parties – club, festival or otherwise.
Given these locales aren’t exactly designated club spaces, Kana has attracted its share of attention from authorities over the years.
“Both times where we’ve spoken to the police they’ve been reasonable about it because they can see that we’re not causing any trouble and we are there to have a good time,” Clarke says. “It’s all about how you present yourself – it’s the same as what you’d get in the Valley on any Saturday night, and [the police] are a pretty good judge of character.”
“At the last one on the Goodwill Bridge, I’d gone back across the bridge and saw three police officers walking [towards the party],” Hede adds. “I remember madly texting people to warn them with a genuine concern that it was going to be shut down. The police happened to walk by just as there was a breakdown in the music, and people caught them out of the corner of their eye as it built up again – they kept walking and a cheer came out.
“We were both surprised that they were open to it, but also [that they were] concerned moreso for the safety and the managing of people in a public space rather than what we were doing was a problem.”
Kana’s Facebook page has some 400 confirmed attendees for the March 2010 edition, and as Clarke and Hede lead Zebra on a recon mission to a shortlisted future site (unsurprisingly a bridge looms large in the background) they’re acutely aware of the hazards of their brand’s increasing popularity.
“One of the biggest things we think about is whether it draws undue attention, but we want to maintain some sort of edge to what we’re doing so we don’t want to be too safe about it,” Clarke says. “As long as it’s still challenging and people are having a good time, we don’t care how big it is.”
“We also are conscious of not popping out the other side of it and looking around and realising we’re running another club night,” Hede says. “We’ll always keep what originally motivated us in mind.”
***
“Top of Kangaroo Point cliffs. From 3:30 onwards. Special guest Kazu Kimura, starting at 4:30. Bring it on.” So commands the voicemail message – a homage to the methods of the UK’s illegal acid house party forefathers who Kana freely admit provide the inspiration for their vision – on the mobile phone number fans are instructed to call at 11am Saturday. The rain which has fallen almost constantly since the previous week’s Future Music Festival is still a factor, meaning the original parkland setting is abandoned for an empty covered space which will soon house tables and chairs in front of an as yet unopened café.
Opening DJ Adam Swain and entourage are already there when the Kana wagon rolls in at 2:30pm, everyone pitching in for the set-up at such pace that Swain rolls the first beat at 2:57 – appropriately layering the “I want you to get together” vocal a capella from St Germain’s ‘Rose Rouge’ like a call to arms. And slowly but surely people file in – many wearing shirts emblazoned with the Kana logo – ensuring a steady floor builds through the final third of Swain’s set thanks to tracks like Culoe De Song’s ‘The Bright Forest’ and Ben Watt’s ‘Just A Blip’. Then Arku of the White Rhino dubstep/techno crew steps up with a set perhaps not so straight-forward as Kana regulars are used to – not that this is a regulars-only affair.
“I think after the last party people had such a good time that word has got around,” Clarke says, surveying the scene. “I can see a resemblance with the core group of people, but a lot of people have brought their friends as well.”
Student Joey Cooney is one of many first-timers here today because of the post-event hype surrounding the previous party.
“A lot of club nights now are same-same – they try to bring that extra factor, but Kana’s got that down pat,” Cooney shares as Kimura rocks the 150-strong dancefloor behind him. “The thing that mainly hits you is the family vibe about it. You may not know everyone, but you know you can go up to someone and talk to them and they’ll be on the same wavelength because everyone is here for the same thing. That’s what you don’t usually get in clubs these days.”
The Kana vision of inclusiveness is all around, members of the local house, techno, d’n’b, breakbeat, dubstep and doof tribes rubbing shoulders with DJ heroes past nursing their young children while passers-by (including a bemused wedding party in the adjacent park) look on like this is something which belongs here. Urban Doof Productions have even turned up unannounced, requesting a powerpoint so they can mount a laser over the makeshift DJ booth.
But like any gathering this big there are problems – bottles are inadvertently smashed, empties litter the dancefloor surrounds, and some punters openly sprawl on the footpath with the sort of wide-eyed fervour which is usually best confined to the most secluded of nightclub booths.
When an impromptu back-to-back set of slamming prog/tech from Hede and Mike Redfern wraps up at 7:45, Clarke anxiously paces the party perimeter, senses the change in atmosphere, and declares “That’s it, it’s time to end it”. And right on 8pm he does just that, pulling the pin as Fuzion closes his truncated set with the piano house of Joris Voorn’s ‘Incident’.
Just 20 minutes after the generator is switched off, the transformation is stunning – the PA has been dismantled, gaffer tape lifted, rubbish disposed of, and the Kana crew are back at HQ for debriefing. The only sign of their dance music flash mob’s presence is a high concentration of cigarette butts and a lurking gaggle of satisfied customers, perhaps so lost in their own conversation they’re unaware the party is even over…
***
Two hours earlier the party’s secret headliner barely has a minute to soak up the atmosphere after his set, a car waiting to transport him to the airport for a Sydney club show and away from a scene even he hadn’t anticipated.
“The view is amazing and the crowd is so up for it,” gushes Kimura, a techno deity here given his role in shaping Brisbane club culture upon his 1993 arrival. “It’s so much different to anything else I’ve ever played at the clubs or the festivals or anything. For me, it’s the party of the year already.”
