Reviewed on Friday January 1 (photo by Ashley Mar)
Like many Field Day attendees, my festival partner and I arrived a little worse for wear after Lost Paradise the night before. The security guard at the entrance made tasteless remarks to the both of us. Between this and the constant I.D. checking at the various festival bars (three times at the same bar by the same marshal), and the larger than usual police presence, there was a feeling that the people who were there to keep an eye out were doing more harm than good. The news that a woman had been hospitalised after allegedly overdosing on pills was not particularly surprising, nor were Premier Mike Baird’s knee-jerk comments on the fate of music festivals in New South Wales.
The drama surrounding drugs and festivals aside, Field Day had some amazing offerings in the way of producers, DJs and rappers. The overall direction of the program was firmly in the realm of dance with slight deviations into the worlds of hip hop (Pusha T) and indie-pop (The Wombats and San Cisco). Pusha T was the best of these. He pulled a small crowd despite being Kanye’s main man, the modest turnout for his set having everything to do with the tastes of the average Field Day attendee.
As the day progressed, the most popular acts weren’t the producers delivering contemporary and groundbreaking sounds (such as Daniel Avery and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs), but rather the familiar and perhaps more middle-of-the-road sounds offered up by headliners Disclosure and homegrown artists such as Flight Facilities.
Having said that, the choices made on the fly by performers on every stage – including the last third of TEED’s Centre Stage set – mirrored the audience. Case in point: TEED segued from left-field house into nostalgic hits like ‘Starlight’ by The Superman Lovers and ‘Ignition’ by R. Kelly.
The Left Field Stage, meanwhile, had some of the festival’s best offerings with the likes of Avery, Seth Troxler and France’s The Avener. The latter’s set was a bass-driven funhouse, utilising the cosy nook among the trees that is the Left Field Stage to the same degree of success as Dusky did in 2015.
Golden Features’ main stage set was well executed, which is particularly pleasing considering how new he is to the world of commercial renown. He wasn’t the only act to go nuts with the pyrotechnics, but his production budget was all the more impressive in light of how new-found his stardom is.
The Red Bull Stage was deliberately nostalgic, divided into sets covering the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s – the best of which might have been Mo’Funk’s upbeat house and funk spot and Kato’s ’70s set.
Closing out the day were two polar opposites in Boys Noize banging out brutal hard techno and electro as Disclosure indulged the main stage crowd with their trademark earworm house-pop and guest spots from the likes of AlunaGeorge. It was a fitting conclusion to a day of eclectic crowd-pleasers that traversed grime, trap, house and accessible radio anthems.
