Live Review: Roland Tings, Catlips

Howler provides the perfect setting for Roland Tings’ sold-out hometown show.

The angular wood and floating cubes pay perfect homage to his original album artwork and provide a teaser for the geometric acid trip to come. Catlips (aka Katie Campbell) punches through (house DJ) Jake Blood’s ambient intro with an impressive blend of funky, house-driven production. Manipulating her music in a mind-bending fashion, Catlips triggers percussion and bass lines among some gorgeous vocal samples and effects. The Perth producer puts a distinctively quirky edge on the house genre. 

Roland Tings enters soon after, flanked by acid rave smilies and molly caps that bounce about their projected geometric maze. A couple of pinger-zinger bros echo their movements, bouncing wildly off surrounding crowd members to Pala. A monotone, robotic-sounding vocal enters the sonic spectrum: “…It was a large room full of people, and they were all free, and they were all asking themselves the same question...” Is this an acid rave? Is Tings a contemporary godfather of acid-rave culture? What’s certain is that we are watching a visual acid trip and what we’re hearing is entirely next level. 

The musicianship of Roland Tings is forever at the forefront of his performance. He extends crowd favourite Floating On A Salt Lake to let it brood and grow, filtering the gods out of it and bringing in new live elements, playing with them and building the hype and excitement to breaking point. Then suddenly it drops perfectly into a clean, minimal snare and hi-hat percussive rhythm. Then Tings builds it up, again and again, forever celebrating musical integrity over a fat bass drop, which (to be honest) is what most of the crowd expects.

There is definitely a statement to be made here; one that wouldn’t have the same impact if the visuals were not so powerfully thought-provoking. You can’t help but feel like everything you’ve been expecting from a typical dance music performance has been reversed just to toy with your mind.