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There’s clubbers all over the country who are still reeling from Sasha’s club tour over the weekend, with everyone resting comfortably in the knowledge that it’s a mere matter of months before the progressive icon returns to play the Boiler Room at Australia’s most successful and enduring festival Big Day Out. But if we assumed we’d be getting a standard DJ set, we’d be wrong – because we’ll be seeing something on a much, much bigger scale.
Sasha confirmed with ITM this week that the Boiler Room 2009 will mark the debut of the audio/visual spectacle he’s hoping to tour across the festivals of Europe next year, with enough grunt behind it that could put it alongside live shows from acts like the Chemical Brothers, or other visual brainmelts we’ve seen in the country this year like The Cube and The Boombox. And he says it’s going to “blow people’s heads off.”
“What I’m gonna do at Big Day Out is a real production,” Sasha told ITM. “I’m working with the design company from Montreal who do the LED light installations for Cirque du Solei, really cutting edge stuff. I’ve worked with them before on a tour in America last year with John Digweed, and we did that on a really tight shoestring. And I went back to them and basically said, if I was to give you an unlimited budget, what could you come up with? And they presented me with this stage production which is just gonna blow people’s heads off, it really is. And the first time anyone is gonna get to see it is in Australia.”
Cryptically, Sasha says the setup looks like an “exploding Rubik’s Cube”. Just try and picture that for a second. “It’s constructed out of lots of tiny screens, and the visual content, I’ve seen some of the treatments for it and it already looks stunning. They’re custom building this whole stage in Montreal and then shipping it over. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while, but it’s just been a matter finding the budget to do it. But Big Day Out came to me with a budget, so I could invest that money back into the show, rather than just turning up and DJing.”
He says the project is a response to the fact that he’s often struggled with bringing his deeper sounds to a larger festival space. “I’ve always wanted to do something more, and do something different. I’m not the DJ who plays all the big anthem tunes …. What I want to do is have something that is separate from my club shows. So this festival set is gonna be an hour and a half long, the music is going to be linked to the visuals and it’s going to be a whole different experience.”
And you can expect massive, massive tunes. “You’ve gotta play a big sound if you’re playing to 30,000 people, you’ve gotta come in with a crash-bang-wallop right from the get go.”
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