Salmonella Dub, Pitch Black
Powerstation, Auckland
Review: Russell Baillie
Talk about magic moments in New Zealand music.
It's long gone midnight. The Powerstation has been sold out for hours and is still packed with a swinging, swaying, smiling, head-nodding throng, just some of the fans who have put headliners Salmonella Dub into the Top
10 in past weeks with album Killervision.
For the final song, the Dub's sound man Tiki Taane has delegated his mixing-desk tasks and headed up front. Strapping on an acoustic guitar, he takes the vocal on For The Love Of It, the band's reggaefied hit single, a natural choice of encore. It skanks along sweetly but stridently, sounding metres deeper and wider than the tune that wafts from the radio.
But as the band are leaving the stage to more appreciative cheers, here comes that song again, sort of. At their keyboards and consoles at the back of the dancefloor, electronic duo Pitch Black are already taking For The Love of It apart, turning it upside down, back to front and sonically reconstructing it.
A magic moment, definitely. Possibly even revolutionary.
The crowd swivels 180 degrees to watch PB's animated knob-twiddling and bask in the propulsive mix of dub beats and echoing electronic undulations which follow. And the place swings, sways and smiles on way into the wee small hours ...
That segue from the genuine article to the digital-dub reworking might sound novel after the fact, but live it is - and here's a term much abused lately in local musical circles - true bliss.
The rest of the evening has been, too, a celebration of all things dub'n'funky starting with sets by DJ Stinky Jim, Australians High Pass Filter and Auckland ambient groove one-man band Epsilon Blue.
But it's Salmonella Dub's night.
This second-to-last show on a national tour by the Christchurch quintet (four on stage, Taane the equal partner on sound) has an air of triumph about it. It's to do with just how good Killervision is and how good its tracks sound live - even when going through an instant remix.
Though the set is peppered with a few old songs it's the adventurous but hooky newer tracks that lift the Dub's game, especially effective on the sweetly languorous Drifting, the electro-pulsed big noise of Crazy 80s, or another sweet reggae lope (complete with Specials hand-me-down sax lines) of Johnny.
In the end, as Pitch Black electro-surge brilliantly onwards, it stimulates a thought: Salmonella Dub aren't just a cracking live band, they're already the real NZ music phenomenon of 1999.